More than 150 films and audio reels from Richmond Police Department surveillance records will be preserved and made publicly accessible by Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries as part of a new project documenting aspects of the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

The Surveillance Media Collection includes 156 films and 13 audio reels dated between 1961 and 1973. Footage includes Black Panther Party meetings and activities; anti-draft, anti-war and anti-busing protests; student protests at local universities; and marches related to the Poor People’s Campaign, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the trial of H. Rap Brown.

“In my experience, this Surveillance Media Collection is unique,” said Brian Daugherity, Ph.D., a Civil Rights Movement historian and professor in the Department of History in VCU’s College of Humanities and Sciences. “There are few archival collections – and none that I know of in the South – dealing with the Black Power movement, Black Panther Party and related individuals nationwide. The preservation and digitization of materials in this archive offers the possibility of investigating new aspects of the civil rights struggle in the South.”

The project is supported by a $24,585 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources as part of its “Recordings at Risk” program, which is made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation. CLIR is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.

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