Description
This collection contains transcribed meetings and interviews with Civil Rights workers in
the South recorded by several Stanford students affiliated with the campus radio station
KZSU during the summer of 1965. The project was sponsored by the Institute of American
History at Stanford. The collection includes information relating to black history;
interviews of members of the Congress of Racial Equality, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party, the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee; transcripts of formal and informal remarks of persons working with
smaller, independent civil rights projects, of local blacks associated with the civil rights
movement, and other people, including Ku Klux Klansmen; transcribed action tapes of civil
rights workers canvassing voters, conducting freedom schools, or participating in
demonstration; speeches by and/or interviews with Ralph David Abernathy, Charles Evers,
James Farmer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hosea Williams; and a Ku Klux Klan meeting and
speech made by Robert Sheldon, its Imperial Wizard.
Background
During the summer of 1965, eight students from Stanford University spent ten weeks in the
southern states tape-recording information on the civil rights movement. The eight
interviewers -- Mary Kay Becker, Mark Dalrymple, Roger Dankert, Richard Gillam, James McRae,
Penny Niland, Jon Roise, and Julie Wells -- were sponsored by KZSU, Stanford's student radio
station, and their original intent was to gather material suitable for rebroadcasting in the
form of radio programs. Much attention was focused on white civil rights workers, although a
great deal of other documentation relevant to black history was also obtained: the
interviewers visited over fifty civil rights projects in six states (see appendix) and
secured three hundred and thirty hours of recordings, including over two hundred hours of
personal interviews. In addition to interviewing members of various, well-known civil rights
groups -- the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
(MFDP), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC or `Snick') -- the student interviewers also recorded the formal and the informal
remarks of those working with smaller, independent civil rights projects, of local blacks
associated with the civil rights movement, and of many others including Ku Klux Klansmen and
Southerners connected with the Sheriff's Department of Clay County, Mississippi. The
interviewers, in addition, spoke with many white volunteers who participated in Snick's
`Washington Lobby' (aimed at unseating the all-white Mississippi Congressional Delegation)
but who did not actually go south.
Restrictions
Property rights reside with the repository. Literary rights reside with the creators of the
documents or their heirs. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the
Public Services Librarian of the Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives.
Availability
The materials are open for research use.