But diligent work by some University of Georgia students has resulted in the Civil Rights Digital Library, featuring rare footage from Albany and other movements of one of the most pivotal times in our country’s history.
For years, raw footage submitted by Albany’s WALB and Atlanta’s WSB news stations sat dusty in the archives housed by UGA’s library system, rarely seen by anyone. But in December 2005, UGA professor Barbara McGaskill discovered the amazing moving image collection and assigned her multicultural literature class to look at the film, research it and create writings on the Web to support learning about the era all over the world, said Dr. Toby Graham, director of the Digital Library of Georgia and co-director of the Civil Rights Digital Library.
The hours of unedited film included Martin Luther King Jr.’s role in the Albany Movement and clips of the famous Little Rock Nine during the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Today, that film and additional digital material — including FBI files on Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael — are among the rare and archival gems recently made available online at the Civil Rights Digital Library (www.civilrightslibrary.org).
The online video archive features more than 30 hours of unedited historical news film chronicling the civil rights struggle in several Southern cities, including two-and-a-half hours on the Albany Movement, said Graham.
“The Albany Movement is represented better than any other area,” he said. “The Albany Movement for a time was in the national spotlight, so WSB covered a lot, as well as WALB,” he said, noting such events as mass meetings at Shiloh Baptist Church and Mount Zion, which today houses Albany’s Civil Rights Institute.
Too often the Albany story is left untold, Graham continued, especially that of those in the forefront such as William Anderson, Marion Page, C.B. King and Slater King, people who sang and marched and went to jail to change Albany and America. The footage also includes the 1962 arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany for protesting.
“It really does make the Albany Movement and other events of the civil rights movement come alive for viewers, especially those who are too young to remember,” said Graham.
Held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries, more than 450 raw news clips from WSB television in Atlanta and WALB-TV in Albany cover a broad range of key civil rights events as well as local and national figures. These include unaired and unedited footage of the Atlanta sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King Jr.’s reaction to President Kennedy’s assassination, his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and his funeral in 1968.
In addition to the digital videos, the CRDL aggregates original content from more than 85 libraries, public archives and museums from across the nation, including oral histories, letters, diaries, FBI files and photographs.
“This is truly a civil rights portal, providing a seamless virtual library on the movement,” McCaskill, who brought her students to Albany in 2006 to meet with former participants of the Albany Movement and visit some of the movement sites.
The easy-to-navigate site can be searched by key events, topics, educator resources, media type and places, using an interactive map powered by Google. From sound recordings to texts and photographs to editorial cartoons, CRDL’s rich video and multimedia content appeal to a broad audience-academics, special interest groups and even journalists looking to support their online stories.
“We continue to add content almost on a daily basis,” Graham said. “It’s a national portal that, in addition to news film, brings information from across the country and some 90 institutions that have contributed digital collections and educational material.”
A partnership with the Web-based New Georgia Encyclopedia is a key component to the Civil Rights Digital Library, providing authoritative textual support with articles on events and individuals to supplement the images and multimedia files.
Visit the Civil Rights Digital Library at www.civilrightslibrary.org.
K.K. Snyder is a freelance writer who resides in metro Albany.