[COMM-ORG] new African Activist Archive Project

[Discussion list for COMM-ORG]

[ed:  this site is now linked from the COMM-ORG History Archives and 
Readings page at http://comm-org.wisc.edu/readings.htm]

From: David Wiley <wiley at msu.edu>


Comm-Org members,

The African Studies Center with MATRIX digital humanities center at 
Michigan State University's announce the launch of the new African 
Activist Archive Project (http//africanactivist.msu.edu).

This project is preserving records and memories of activism in the 
United States that supported the struggles of African peoples against 
colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 
1990s.  This is one of the most significant modern American movements 
having defeated the foreign policy of a sitting President (Ronald 
Reagan), whose veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 was 
overturned by Congress, signaling the end of U.S. government support for 
the apartheid government.  And it was based in more than 100 local 
community, university, religious, NGO, and labor organizations as well 
as city, county, and state governments.

The project is assembling excellent materials for teaching about 
community mobilizations, including:

 * an online archive of historical materials - pamphlets, newsletters, 
leaflets, buttons, posters, T-shirts, photographs, and audio and 
videorecordings

* personal remembrances and interviews with activists

* a directory to the many archives of organizations and individuals 
deposited in libraries and historical societies that are available for 
further research

The earliest documents on the website are about the 1962 American Negro 
Leadership Conference on Africa which included Martin  Luther King, Jr. 
and other key civil rights leaders of that time.  The website also 
includes documents of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, the Polaroid 
Revolutionary Workers Movement, Winnie Mandela Solidarity Coalition, and 
the Pan-African Liberation Committee at Harvard University. Among the 
audio materials is Harry Belafonte welcoming African National Congress 
President Oliver Tambo to a 1987 reception in New York.

 The website now contains 1350 items of all types of media, including

* more than 800 documents

* 19 streaming videos and 11 streaming audio files

* a new T-shirt collection - with up to four images of each (with more 
T-shirts coming in the months ahead) and

* galleries of posters, photos, and buttons

 There is representation from many organizations from across the country 
- 74 US organizations, most of them local groups, in 21 states and the 
District of Columbia. We have newsletters from 18 organizations, brief 
descriptions of more than 100 US organizations, and information about 
many physical archives.

There are many ways to navigate around the site. You can start from 
Galleries (including Remembrances or types of media, e.g. photos, 
documents, video) or begin on the Browse page with the organization 
name, a U.S. state, or the African country that is the focus of 
organizing. The Advanced Search page allows you to search across all 
types of media. Also, from each page displaying an item (e.g. photo, 
document, video), you can link to other items of the same organization 
or of the same African country of focus.

We are eager to communicate with people who have activist materials that 
they might wish to have included in this online archive. The project 
would particularly like to document more solidarity work by African 
American organizations. Donations of physical archives also are possible 
to the MSU Library's expanding African Activist Archive Special 
Collections. If interested, please contact Project Director Richard 
Knight in New York (rknight1 at juno.com) or MSU director David Wiley 
(wiley at msu.edu).

 ****     *****     *****     *****     *****     *****     ****
 David Wiley, Professor of Sociology and African Studies
    Department of Sociology, 316 Berkey Hall
Phone: Soc 517-599-1858 - African Studies 517-353-1700
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI  48824-1111