Rediscovering, Revisiting and Remembering: AV Materials and Black History Month

AV documents of the Civil Rights movement in the United States vividly illustrate the significance of saving, storing and preserving audiovisual records, and in particular, what is and can become the historical, cultural, social and political significance of a body of broadcast news and video footage.

February is Black History Month in the United States and Canada, an observance,  celebration and focused period of teaching about the African diaspora. As such, many production houses and TV channels produce and source interesting, important and educational segments, programmes and films covering a diverse and rich range of historical moments, perspectives, persons, experiences, topics, contributions and culture.

With the use of developing video technology and increase in on the ground TV news covereage, the Civil Rights Movements and Black Power Movements in the United States between the mid fifties to early 70s can re-tell their stories from that time through audiovisual materials, digging into the archive to reveal the feelings, frustrations and fight of the day.

These captured and preserved moments illustrate an immensely significant fight and turning point in terms of equality in the United States. Here we can recover, rediscover and remember important people, perspectives, instances and experiences that has lead to a changing social, cultural and political landscape.

While newsroom money-saving routines for that era largely called for used news videotapes to be recorded over, during this period, some had foresight to save the AV records of what was transpiring. A Huffington Post article published last December announced the Feb 12th  release of the Smithsonian Channel’s Martin Luther King Jr., documentary called MLK: The Assassination Tapes.

As the article states:  “Some forward-looking college professors enabled television's Smithsonian Channel to offer a look at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. from the time in which it occurred. The network […] will air a documentary in February culled primarily from local news footage in Memphis, Tenn., where the civil rights leader was murdered on April 4, 1968. Most of the footage hasn't been seen on television since it originally aired. Many such moments are lost since local television stations usually taped over old broadcasts or threw away film reels, said David Royle, executive producer at the Smithsonian Channel. But some University of Memphis professors sensed in March 1968 that civil rights history was happening with a strike of local sanitation workers, the event that drew King to Memphis, and they collected footage of the events through King's murder and its aftermath. What they were doing was absolutely visionary – and very unusual," Royle said. It enabled the production of a documentary with a vivid, "you-are-there" feel and the uncovering of some fascinating moments.”

The doc offers a look into events through chronologically  ordering recently rediscovered news footage around the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

You can see a sneak peek of the doc here.
 

Image is a still from Visit of Rev. Martin Luther King by Polygoon-Profilti (producer) / Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (curator), is licensed under Creative Commons – Attribution-Share Alike.
 

Share: