The director of the African American Studies program will lecture Wednesday at the Tarble Arts Center about how the black community was impacted Coles County over the last 100 years.

The lecture is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.

“I see this as an attempt to build a bridge between the university and the community,” director Oniawu Wilson Ogbomo said.

Ogbomo is the curator of the “Photographic Images of African Americans in Coles County” exhibit featured at Tarble as part of the African American Heritage Month events on campus. The exhibit is a collection of photographs of African Americans from Coles County from the last century.

Ogbomo mentioned that he will present a slide demonstration while he speaks about the creation of this project.

He will also speak about the origins of the photos, his research experiences and the history of some of the black community from around Charleston.

The photographs are from family photo albums, university archives and the Coles County Historical Society, Ogbomo said. As a result of photos being from family albums some of the photos show the growth of the families, such as the Nortons.

“I wanted to try and retrieve the history, and the photos show the history in a way books could not,” Ogbomo said.

The black community has changed the social and economic history of Coles County, thanks to families such as the Derricksons and the Nortons, who Ogbomo will lecture about, he said.

Ogbomo, who is a originally from Nigeria and has been teaching at Eastern for two years, said he has been working on this project for nearly a year.