Tag: Library of Congress

Rosa Parks Archive

Posted on by Bonnie Thornton

Source: By Jennifer Schuessler, ArtsBeat, New York Times, February 25, 2016 12:01 am

The Library of Congress has digitized the papers of Rosa Parks, enabling free online access to everything from her first-hand recollections of the Montgomery bus boycott and personal correspondence with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to family photographs, tax returns and a handwritten recipe for “featherlite pancakes.”

(To view entire article visit here: Library of Congress Puts Rosa Parks Archives Online.)

Rosa Parks Collection

Posted on by Bonnie Thornton

(Source: Todd Spangler, USA Today, September 10, 1014)

WASHINGTON — A collection of more than a thousand items that belonged to the late civil rights icon Rosa Parks — including her Presidential Medal of Freedom —  will be housed by the Library of Congress.

Librarian of Congress James Billington announced Tuesday that the collection would reside at the library on a decade-long loan from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which purchased the collection from Parks’ estate for $4.5 million in August.

Buffett is the son of billionaire financier Warren Buffett. The items had remained in warehouses for years since Parks’ 2005 death in her adopted home of Detroit at age 92 as her heirs wrangled over the assets.

Parks is best known for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955, sparking a bus boycott considered central to the civil rights movement and the end of government-sanctioned segregation.

She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in 1996.

Parks’ collection is made up of some 1,500 items including personal correspondence and photographs, autobiographical notes, letters from presidents, a Congressional Gold Medal awarded in 1999, clothing, furniture and 200 drawings by schoolchildren and hundreds of greeting cards from individuals thanking her for her inspirational role in the civil rights movement.

 Next spring, items from the collection will be incorporated into “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom,” a year-long exhibit opening today. Library staff will also digitize documents and visual materials and make them available through its website.
(The complete story is available at Library of Congress to house Rosa Parks collection ).

LC Gets Oral History Archive

Posted on by Bonnie Thornton

Library of Congress Gets African-American Oral History Archive

The iconic library has acquired The HistoryMakers archive of iconic interviews detailing African-American life, history and culture.

By: Breanna Edwards

 (Source: The Root, Posted: June 24 2014 4:07 PM)

The Library of Congress is now the home of The HistoryMakers collection, which details the black experience in America, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced on Tuesday.

“The HistoryMakers archive provides invaluable first-person accounts of both well-known and unsung African-Americans, detailing their hopes, dreams and accomplishments—often in the face of adversity,” Billington said in a press release. “This culturally important collection is a rich and diverse resource for scholars, teachers, students and documentarians seeking a more complete record of our nation’s history and its people.”

Consisting of thousands of hours of content and including 14,000 analog tapes, 3,000 DVDs, 6,000 “born-digital” files, 70,000 paper documents and digital files, and more than 3,000 digital photographs, The HistoryMakers is just about the largest project of its type, founder and Executive Director Julieanna Richardson noted.

“The HistoryMakers represents the single largest archival project of its kind since the Works Progress Administration’s initiative to document the experiences of former slaves in the 1930s,” Richardson explained. “This relationship with the Library of Congress represents a momentous occasion for our organization. With the Library of Congress serving as our permanent repository, we are assured of its preservation and safekeeping for generations to come.”

The library was given the digital files with all of the analog tapes, consisting of approximately 2,600 videotaped interviews with black Americans in 39 states.

“The collection is one of the most well-documented and organized audiovisual collections that the Library of Congress has ever acquired,” Mike Mashon, head of the library’s Moving Image Section, said in the release. “It is also one of the first born-digital collections accepted into our nation’s repository.”

The HistoryMakers was launched in the summer of 1999 as a nonprofit research and educational institution, set on creating an archival collection of oral histories. Richardson and her team have been to almost 300 U.S. cities and towns and have traveled as far as Norway in hopes of capturing the missing stories of American history.