UMass Amherst Libraries Awarded Grant for ‘Black Voices, Black Media: Preserving the Black Mass Communications Project’

The UMass Amherst Libraries Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) received a $14,808.75 Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to support "Black Voices, Black Media: Preserving the Black Mass Communications Project."

The project will digitize, describe, transcribe and make freely available online approximately 195 reel to reel audiotape recordings produced by the Black Mass Communications Project (BMCP) between 1970-80. This sonic record of the post-civil rights era will surface unique, historic documentation of Black and Latino life and culture at UMass Amherst, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the continental United States, and countries throughout the African and Latino/a diaspora during a tumultuous time in global history. Considering both depth of coverage and national historical significance, SCUA will select recordings that provide valuable insights into the social, intellectual, political, and cultural background of an important historic moment. The project will be completed by August of 2026.

The BMCP collection consists of approximately 540 reel to reel audiotapes created by members of BMCP, a registered student organization, between 1970-84. Significant national figures such as Shirley Chisholm, Kwame Touré, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Muhammad Ali, Huey Newton, Archie Shepp, Sonia Sanchez and others are documented through recordings of press conferences, interviews and recorded speeches. Contemporary events such as the Attica rebellion, the legacy of Malcolm X, the Black Arts Movement, Black studies programs, the trial of Angela Davis, apartheid in South Africa, decolonization in Africa and the Carribean, and many others are also represented in the collection.

The collection was donated to SCUA in 2013 by John Bracey, an esteemed faculty member in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, and advisor to BMCP. The grant will digitize a subset of those recordings (approximately 195) that are historically important, both locally and internationally.

"BMCP, which still exists today, played a critical role in surfacing the experiences of Black and Latino/a students at UMass while simultaneously providing technical training in radio broadcasting and documenting the cultural, social and political revolution taking place in Black America throughout the 1970s," says Jeremy Smith, SCUA moving image and sound archivist and the project's lead.

More information about the BMCP can be found on the SCUA website.