VCU news

VCU Libraries’ Voices of Freedom and Virginia Student Civil Rights Committee Oral History collections are now included in the Civil Rights Movement Archive. 

Civil Rights Movement Archive (CRMA) is the largest and most comprehensive online collection of primary-source documents, images, stories, biographies, transcripts and discussions of the 1950s-1960s Southern Freedom Movement. The archive’s goal is to increase public access to these important histories, told through activists in the movement.

Voices of Freedom was produced by the Virginia Civil Rights Movement Video Initiative, a nonprofit organization incorporated in 2002 to produce videotaped oral histories of civil rights leaders in Virginia. Voices of Freedom focuses on statewide activities from the 1950s through the early 1970s and includes stories about the Jim Crow segregation laws that prevailed up until the mid-1960s, stories about the struggles to change the laws and to change public attitudes, and advice from these civil rights veterans to future generations of Virginia. Among the interviewees are regional giants in the struggle for equal rights including Ray Boone, founder and editor of the Richmond Free Press; Oliver Hill, the attorney who argued for the Virginia plaintiffs in what became Brown v. Board of Education; and Henry Marsh, civil rights attorney, state senator, and the first Black mayor of Richmond. 

Virginia Student Civil Rights Committee (VSCRC) Oral History collection includes videotaped oral histories with former members of the VSCRC at their 50th Reunion. The interviews, conducted in 2016, focus on their work with the organization and the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The VSCRC concentrated efforts on six Southside counties to empower local Black residents to agitate for change. They demanded better services from their local governments, advocated for the desegregation of businesses and community groups, and helped residents register to vote.

“On behalf of those who worked to record and prepare these oral history interviews related to student activism during the Civil Rights Movement, I am honored that the Civil Rights Movement Archive has chosen to add these interviews to its growing online database of the Southern Freedom Movement,” said Brian J. Daugherity, Ph.D., professor of history at VCU. Daugherity was one of the project leaders who documented the stories of the VSCRC.

Daugherity went on to laud that The CRMA is a free, noncommercial, 501c3 tax-exempt educational organization that charges no fees or subscriptions, has no login ID requirement, has no commercial advertising, and does not individually track users.

“Its 25,000-45,000 monthly users will benefit from the addition of materials related to the civil rights in Virginia, which contain a wealth of information related to voter education, registration and political activism; school desegregation; inequities in policing and the criminal justice system; and health care disparities, among other topics,” he said. “Moreover, freedom movement veterans who appear in the interviews will have their memories as well as their activism preserved in the archive of materials created by, and saved for posterity by, their movement friends, peers and colleagues. This partnership represents a win-win situation for those involved.”