The papers of Anne Valk— a specialist in oral history, public history, and the social history of the 20th-century United States measure 3.75 linear feet and date from 1964 to 1997. The collection contains oral history interviews and documents acquired or created by Dr. Valk during her extensive research of key figures in D.C. community activism for her book, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington D.C. (University of Illinois Press, 2010).
Research files and ephemera from the following people, organizations, and publications are represented in the collection: Josephine Butler (DC Statehood Party; Adams Morgan Organization), Etta Horn (Southeast Neighborhood House's Band of Angels; National Welfare Rights Organization), Dorothy Burlage (Southeast Neighborhood House), Betty Garman (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Judy Richardson (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Bernice Reagon (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Marcia Sprinkle (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Juanita Weaver (Quest), LaValleJones (Rape Crisis Center), Loretta Ross (Rape Crisis Center, National Black United Front, National Organization of Women), Peggy Cleveland (The Bridge), Joan Biren (DC Women's Liberation Movement), Cathy Wilkerson (SDS, Weather Underground), Tina Smith (SNCC), Off Our Backs newspaper, and Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE),
among others.
Biographical / Historical:
Anne Valk (1964- ) is a specialist in oral history, public history, and the social history of the 20th-century United States. Dr. Valk received a M.A. from Mount Holyoke College and a PhD in history from Duke University in 1996. Professor Valk has written extensively in the areas of women's history, history of feminism, and oral history. She teaches public history at the Graduate Center at City University of New York (CUNY) and is the director of the Center for Media and Learning/American Social History Project.
Restrictions:
Use of the materials requires an appointment. Please contact the archivist at acmarchives@si.edu.
Rights:
The Anne Valk papers are the physical property of the Anacostia Community Museum. Literary and copyright belong to the author/creator or their legal heirs and assigns. For further information, and to obtain permission to publish or reproduce, contact the Museum Archives.
Recorded by Moses Moon (known at the time as Alan Ribback) and assisted by Norris McNamara during 1963 and 1964, the collection includes audio recordings of interviews with civil rights leaders and participants as well as free-style recordings of mass meetings, voter registration events, and other gatherings organized by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This collection provides a mostly unfiltered documentation of significant moments in the civil rights movement.
Scope and Contents:
This collection consists of 115 reel to reel audio recordings containing interviews, mass meetings, demonstrations, and conversations concerning the civil rights movement, and in particular the voter registration drives organized by SNCC in Alabama and Mississippi in 1963 and 1964. Mass meetings were recorded in Greenwood, Mississippi; Americus, Georgia; Selma, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Danville, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and Indianola, Mississippi. Major demonstrations recorded include the March on Washington in August of 1963, Freedom Day in Selma, Alabama in October of 1963, and Freedom Day in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in January of 1964. Interviews with SNCC workers include Julian Bond, John Lewis, James Forman, Bruce Gordon, Prathia Hall, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Bob Moses, Avery Williams, Willie Peacock, Bruce Boynton and his mother, as well as dozens of others involved in the movement, who are named in the collection inventory. Many of those interviewed were actively involved in strategizing and carrying out SNCC demonstrations and political actions, and many were victims of death threats, beatings, unlawful arrest, police brutality, and torture and abuse in prison. These interviews contain detailed eyewitness accounts and personal testimony regarding these experiences, as well as personal history and thoughts about the movement, the South, and the future.
It is clear from what we know of the dates and locations of these recordings, as well as from documentation of these events in other sources, that many of these recordings are unique documents of important events in American history, which may also contain the commentary of important political and cultural figures who were involved in the movement. For example, an article by Howard Zinn recounts how an unidentified man recorded James Baldwin on October 7, 1963, Freedom Day in Selma, on the steps of the courthouse. Baldwin was furious at the lack of support from nearby federal agents as state troopers advanced on peaceful demonstrators. One of the tapes dated October 7, 1963, originally labeled "courthouse interviews," appears to be this recoding, although Baldwin is not named. The same article (available in The Howard Zinn Reader) recounts the mass meetings which led up to that demonstration, at which actor Dick Gregory gave a rousing sermon as his wife sat in jail for demonstrating in Selma. The Moses Moon Collection may be the only existing audio recording of that sermon as well as many other sermons and speeches.
Moses Moon changed his name after these recordings were made. He is referred to in the finding aid as Alan Ribback because that name is used on the recordings.
Arrangement:
The collection is arranged in two series.Series 1 is in chronological order to the degree recording dates can be determined, and is based on the locations and dates provided by Moon in his description or gleaned from the recordings themselves and other secondary sources. Series 1 contains 17 groups of recordings.
Moon's original numbers are recorded in the column next to the descriptions. Following the first four Greenwood tapes, which are numbered sequentially, Moon's numbering system took the first two letters of the town in which the recordings were made, a one (1), a decimal, and then a tape number. Numbers preceding the town code refer to the recording day. "N" numbers were later assigned by Moon to the 7" reels only, after the original recordings were made, possibly during editing or when the tapes were made available to the Program in African American Culture.
Series 1, Original Tapes
1. Greenwood, Mississippi; Spring 1963; 4 7" reels
2. Chicago, Illinois; August 9, 12, 1963; 2 5" reels
16. Monroe County, Mississippi; August 1, 1964; 4 5" reels
17. Milton, Mississippi; August 16, 1964; 3 5" reels
Series 2, Preservation Masters consists of data DVDs for a portion of the collection.
Biographical / Historical:
Moses Moon was born Alan Ribback in 1928. During the 1950s until 1962, Ribback was the proprietor of the Gate of Horn, Chicago's premier folk music club, which featured performers including Bob Gibson, Odetta, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Jo Mapes, Peter, Paul and Mary, Lenny Bruce, and Shelley Berman. On December 5, 1962, Lenny Bruce was arrested during a performance at the Gate of Horn along with Ribback, George Carlin, and others. As a result of the arrest and Bruce's subsequent conviction for obscenity, the club was closed by the City of Chicago, and Ribback left Chicago with Norris McNamara, an audio technician, to record folk concerts taking place in the South as part of the growing civil rights movement. From the spring of 1963 until the summer of 1964, Ribback and McNamara recorded demonstrations and mass meetings and interviewed civil rights activists, primarily those involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Later, Ribback moved to New York and edited his recordings into an album called Movement Soul. Ribback married Delia Moon in 1971, took her last name and changed his first name to Moses. In 1979, Bernice Reagon Johnson, working with the Program on African American Culture at the Smithsonian, contacted Moon and borrowed the recordings of mass meetings for a 1980 program on the voices of the civil rights movement. In the late 1980s, Moon was stricken with a severe case of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which left him paralyzed. Moon donated the entire collection of original recordings shortly before his death in 1993.
Related Materials:
Materials at Other Organizations
The papers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee are held by the King Library and Archives in Atlanta, Georgia; archives@thekingcenter.org.
Provenance:
Donated by Moses and Delia Moon in 1995.
Restrictions:
Collection is open for research. Reference copies must be used. Tapes noted in the container list have digital reference copies in the Smithsonian Institution Digital Asset Management System (DAMS).
Rights:
Collection items available for reproduction, but copyright status unknown. Contact Archives Center staff for additional information. Archives Center cost-recovery and use fees may apply when requesting reproductions.
Topic:
African American civil rights workers. Search this
Moses Moon Civil Rights Movement Audio Collection, 1963-1964, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Sponsor:
Partial funding for preservation and duplication of the original audio tapes provided by a National Museum of American History Collections Committee Jackson Fund Preservation Grant.
National Museum of African American History and Culture Search this
Names:
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (U.S.) Search this
Extent:
36 Video recordings (Oral histories were recorded in 1920x1080 video)
Type:
Collection descriptions
Archival materials
Video recordings
Oral histories (document genres)
Date:
2016
Scope and Contents:
The NMAAHC Donor Oral History Project provides rich background interviews with 18 individuals who donoated collections to NMMAHC prior to the Museum opening in September 2016.
Arrangement:
Collection is arranged with each oral history being its own series.
There are 18 oral histories in this collection. Each oral history has two files - the unedited file and the edited file. The edited files trimmed silences from the beginning and end of the unedited file and added in NMAAHC logo and oral history information. Only the edited file is available for streaming.
Provenance:
Oral Histories were created by NMAAHC in 2016 and acquired into the Collection that same year.
Terry Williams is a New York City based author who has had his stories adapted into documetaries. Williams discusses his time in SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and why that pushed him to move from Mississippi to New York City. He explains the purpose of his books and why he writes them in the style that he does. Williams also delves into the effects of gentrification and the hardships minority youths face.
Collection Restrictions:
Use of the materials requires an appointment. Please contact the archivist to make an appointment: ACMarchives@si.edu.
Collection Rights:
Collection items available for reproduction, but the Archives makes no guarantees concerning copyright restrictions. Other intellectual property rights may apply. Archives cost-recovery and use fees may apply when requesting reproductions.
The collection documents the march of many Americans from Selma to Montgomery Alabama in 1965 during the Civil Rights March. It focuses mainly on photographs and an original book cover from Stephen Somerstein. There are twelve black and white images, 11" x 14", documenting the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March. Some of the photographs include Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Other images include John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, minister and civil rights leader Ralph D. Abernathy, and singer Joan Baez.
Arrangement:
This collection is arranged into two folders.
Folder 1: Photographs, 1965
A collection of 12 black and white images showcasing what life was like for the marchers headed to Montgomery to Selma.
Folder 2: Book Cover, 1965
An original book cover which served as the enclosure for the images.
Biographical / Historical:
Stephen Somerstein was born in 1941 in New York City, Somerstein is best known for his photographic work capturing the march from Selma to Montgomery. He began his passion for photography while studying at the City University of New York while pursuing a degree in physics. In college Stephen ultimately became the managing editor for the university newspaper entitled "Main Events". In 1965, with the rise in public consciousness in the importance of the civil rights movement and Dr. King's pursuit of equal opportunity and voting rights, Stephen decided to journey to Alabama to cover the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march for his collegiat newspapper. Stephen was 24 years old when he shot the iconic images of the march on Selma.
It was an historic occasion that greatly tested his ability to shape beautiful and meaningful images, while on a short film quota, with rapidly evolving photo-opportunities. The 1965 Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March (actually three separate marches) was the culmination of a multi-year protest against alleged discriminatory voting registration practices in Dallas County, Alabama. Images in the news media of violence that took place in response to the march shocked Americans and influenced civil rights legislation and enforcement. His body of work spans a continuous thread from the 1960's to the present, covering cultural, social and political subjects.
Provenance:
Stephen Somerstein
Restrictions:
Collection is open for research.
Rights:
Collection items available for reproduction, but the Archives Center makes no guarantees concerning copyright restrictions. Other intellectual property rights may apply. Archives Center cost-recovery and use fees may apply when requesting reproductions.
Citation:
Stephen Somerstein Selma to Montgomery March Photographs, 1965, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.
The Student voice, 1960-1965 : periodical of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee / compiled by the staff of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project ; sponsored by the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in association with Stanford University ; Clayborne Carson, senior editor and director
