SURVEILLANCE TAPES FROM THE ALABAMA CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT presented by Barry Kernfeld

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections presents the following program from its 2013 ARSC Annual Conference at Marriott Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri on Friday May 17, 2013:

SURVEILLANCE TAPES FROM THE ALABAMA CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT presented by Barry Kernfeld, The Pennsylvania State University

In 2005, the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State University received The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists. Included were a number of reel-to-reel tapes that Rabin somehow acquired from the Subversive Unit of the Investigative and Identification Division of the Alabama Department of Public Safety while he was teaching public administration in Montgomery during the 1970s. (Rabin later taught at Penn State; hence the connection.)

These police surveillance tapes held speeches given at the conclusion of the Selma-to-Montgomery march on March 25, 1965 and during the Poor People’s Campaign a few weeks prior to Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

In this presentation, which includes excerpts from previously unknown speeches given by King and by Ralph Abernathy at a mass meeting in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1968, I briefly describe the process of transferring these tapes into a digital format and raise some nagging unsolved audio questions that may be of particular interest to the audience.

Videographers: Michael and Leah Biel
Editor: Nathan Georgitis