In 2001, HistoryMakers, a national nonprofit headquartered in Chicago that conducts video oral histories of African Americans, interviewed a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama.

The nonprofit updated its archives when he became a U.S. senator and then 44th president of the United States.

Now, for the first time in its 19-year history, the organization has come to Obama’s birthplace to interview Hawaii residents of African-American descent.

“We’re exceedingly pleased to be here,” said Julieanna Richardson, founder and president, who will be speaking at 6:30 tonight at a reception for the Hawaii HistoryMakers at the Honolulu Country Club.

The goal of her visit, Richardson said, was to launch “a history of blacks in Hawaii,” which will be the 37th state in the organization’s national archive housed permanently in the Library of Congress. Its digital archives are also in libraries and 70 colleges.

“It’s important that we are able to show the world the diversity, the extensive reach of the African-American experience, not just the New Yorks, Birminghams, Detroits and Chicagos,” Richardson said.

Hawaii interviewees include the Sandra Simms, the first African-American judge in Hawaii since statehood; civil rights attorney Daphne Barbee-Wooten; professor of law and political science Charles Lawrence III; poet and retired professor Kathryn Takara; public health advocate Bettye Jo Harris; retired professor Miles Jackson, a chronicler of black history in Hawaii; inspirational speaker Helen Stewart; and Wally Amos of Famous Amos Cookies.

“I loved it (being) a public defender in 1980s Honolulu — the clients, the judiciary, it was very diverse,” reminisced Barbee-Wooten, who lived on Kauai until age 9, then grew up in segregated Milwaukee, Wis., and attended a “predominantly white male” law school in Seattle.

She and Simms, a graduate of De Paul University law school in Chicago who frequently heard domestic violence cases as a state circuit judge, decried sexism as well as racism.

In 2004, Simms said, she was among “a number of women whose terms as judges were up who were asked to withdraw their request to reappoint.” She was asked but refused, and was not reappointed.

Praising HistoryMakers’ work, Takara said her doctoral thesis sought to revive interest in Frank Marshall Davis, an African-American labor activist, journalist and poet who moved from Chicago to Hawaii. “He was a mentor of Barack and lived here until he died, in 1987.”

At this time, “when society is questioning who’s American and who isn’t, who has value and who hasn’t,” Richardson said she hopes that, by preserving documentary evidence of minority contributions in Hawaii and elsewhere, HistoryMakers can support “a movement to rescue other lost American stories.”

Richardson had meetings planned with the University of Hawaii and the African-American Diversity Cultural Center Hawaii, and said she hoped to find other educational partners here.

For more information, go to thehistorymakers.org.