The Soul of Baltimore

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the WJZ-TV and WMAR-TV Collections at the Langsdale Library hold approximately three hundred 2-inch Quad reels that are in need of digitization to preserve their unique audiovisual content. One of these reels was digitized recently and uploaded to the Internet Archive. It read on its original label ,“Master: SOUL OF BALTIMORE 27:51”. The term “master” indicates that this is the highest quality version of this content. 

After researching historical newspaper databases, this title was found to potentially be a 1968 WMAR-produced special entitled, “The Soul of Baltimore”. This seemed like a great candidate to digitize as it was about the history of Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue, the center of the city's African American community in the first half of the twentieth century. The special is also narrated by Walter P. Carter, civil rights activist and chairman of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). After digitization, the content on the video reel was found to match the content on the label, as well as having ten minutes at the end of the reel that had not been recorded over or erased. These “extras” included 1960s era broadcast footage of two other WMAR-produced shows, a few commercials, and a few minutes of a nationally syndicated show, “Truth or Consequences”.

"The Soul of Baltimore" is especially powerful to watch in light of the recent uprising and protests surrounding the death of Sandtown-Winchester resident Freddie Gray, as many of these events transpired on or near Pennsylvania Avenue. You can watch the entirety of "The Soul of Baltimore" below.

Archives of Social Protest and Social Change

Image adapted from photo by Arash Azizzada

Although many archives across the country contain selected materials related to social protest and social change, some institutions have highly specialized collections devoted to documenting the history of protests, riots, uprisings, and social movements. Generations of librarians, archivists, historians, and curators have worked to assemble primary source documentation focused on social protest.

Archival luminary, Jerry Ham, challenged archivists to take a more active and creative role in documenting a broader range of culture in 1975. By the 1980s, the prevailing national political climate had chilled earlier archival enthusiasm for protest collections. Sarah Cooper's 1987 essay examines the ebbs and flows in the American effort to document social protest and social change. Despite these fluctuations in popularity, significant collections of these materials remain at institutions committed to following their collecting missions.

I've selected a handful of collections devoted to social protest and social change. Meant as a starting point, this list identifies long-standing archives, along with several newer collections and digital aggregations of archival material.

• The Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan
• The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University
• The Social Protest Collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkley
• The Social Action Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society
• The Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia
• Swarthmore College Peace Collection
• The Southern California Library, Los Angeles, California
• Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• The Social Change Collection, Georgia State University Library 
• The Civil Rights Digital Library, University of Georgia
• Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, University of Southern Mississippi