Vida “Sister” Prince was born in 1933 to Vida Tucker (1906-1981) and Myron S. Goldman (1905-1936). She graduated from John Burroughs High School in St. Louis and earned an Associate of Arts degree from Centenary Junior College (New Jersey). Prince augmented her education at Fontbonne College, University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Webster University. She married Ronald S. Prince (1931-2016) and the couple had three children.

Prince began her career with oral history in 1979 when she answered an advertisement for volunteers at the Holocaust Museum & Learning Center. She interviewed over 100 people in St. Louis touched by the holocaust. In 1986, Sister Prince began working with the Missouri Historical Society in several capacities. She taught programs in how to conduct oral history interviews, did research for exhibits, and conducted oral history projects relating to several museum exhibitions, most notably I, Too Sing America: Black St. Louisans in the 1940s, A Strong Seed Planted: The Civil Rights Movement in St. Louis, 1954-1968, and Golden Gateway: Asian Immigration to St. Louis.

In 1993, Prince embarked upon an independent oral history project in which she explored how race affected people of color in their daily lives in St. Louis. The Missouri Historical Society offered limited support: advice and feedback, some transcribing, and a place to conduct interviews if needed. It was also understood that the tapes and transcripts would eventually be deposited with the Society’s Library and Research Center. In “That’s The Way It Was”, an article for Gateway Heritage (spring 1997), she described her project as:

"…an oral history project about how race affected people of color as they went about their daily lives. I wanted to know how people learned about themselves: how they became aware that there were people whose skin was a different color than their own, and that it made a difference, and where in the St. Louis landscape their memories took place.”

Sister Prince ultimately interviewed 40 people for her project, both African-American and Caucasian. Some interviews included relatives or spouses, but most were with a single individual. Interviewees ranged in age from thirty to over ninety.

In addition to the themes of family, urban life and neighborhoods, and social class, Prince’s interviews also included discussions of the East St. Louis race riot of 1917, segregation and sit ins by the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) at downtown department stores, education, politics, and union activity. She spoke with people from diverse careers, from a railroad porter who discussed segregation on the rails to the president of the construction company that built the Pruit-Igoe housing project. Many of the people that Prince interviewed lived in Mill Creek before it was demolished in 1959.

Interviews from the “Race and Memory” project became the basis for Prince’s book, That’s the Way It Was (MHS Library StL/305.8/G619t).