Description
One of CIC's primary activities was to hold massive biweekly meetings called "community dialogues" to discuss broad issues
such as racism, police sensitivity, education, and employment discrimination within the city of San Diego. The number of attendees
at any given meeting was usually quite high—perhaps as many as 30 or more persons—representing an extremely wide variety of
backgrounds, including city officials, educators, administrators, religious leaders, law enforcement, journalists, and community
spokespersons. The meetings were moderated by CIC Executive Director Carroll Waymon, and his voice is often the first one
heard in the audio recordings of the meetings.
The collection's sound recordings represent nearly 2 years' worth of CIC community dialogue meetings, from August 1967 to
June 1969. They were digitized from the original reel-to-reel tapes, and total approximately 100 hours of footage. These recordings
provide insight into the workings of a major metropolitan city engaging in discussions of race relations on an unprecedented
scale. Of particular note is the meeting recorded the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Reel #12-1).
Several of the recordings include brief meeting minutes with the agenda, list of attendees, and some information regarding
the content of the meeting.
Background
Formed in 1963 because of increasing racial tension, the Citizens Interracial Committee (CIC) sought to create community dialogues to educate people about racial issues and concerns within city limits. In 1964, the CIC became an official non-profit organization
and received city funding. Initially, the CIC consisted of a director (Carroll Waymon), a secretary, a consultant and a clerk.
Over the next several years the city increased CIC funding, allowing the agency to expand to include other employees and services.
Restrictions
The copyright interests in some of these materials have been transferred to or belong to San Diego State University. The nature
of historical archival and manuscript collections means that copyright status may be difficult or even impossible to determine.
Copyright resides with the creators of materials contained in the collection or their heirs. Requests for permission to publish
must be submitted to the Head of Special Collections, San Diego State University, Library and Information Access. When granted,
permission is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical item and is not intended to include or imply
permission of the copyright holder(s), which must also be obtained in order to publish. Materials from our collections are
made available for use in research, teaching, and private study. The user must assume full responsibility for any use of the
materials, including but not limited to, infringement of copyright and publication rights of reproduced materials.
Availability
This collection is open for research.