(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Welcome back to the Something Uncommon blog with another #WyattWalkerWednesday post! This week, I want to let you all know about progress happening on some non-manuscript materials within the collection.

Some of the audio cassettes donated as part of the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection.

Now, if you’ve been keeping up with the posts concerning the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, you may recall that I said we would be focusing first on the manuscript materials and turning attention towards the A/V (audiovisual) material later. This is partially to ensure that we can open the manuscript portion of the collection to researchers as quickly as possible, as processing manuscript materials can be done much faster than A/V materials. Let me talk about what A/V materials are – and why they’re so much harder to process – before telling you all the great news!

So A/V material, or audiovisual material, is a term used to refer to a whole host of different types of materials. These typically include audio recordings, video recordings, and still images. Each of these categories can take multiple forms, of course. Audio cassettes, vinyl recordings, even wax cylinders – these are all audio recordings, so they fall into the A/V material category. Similarly, video recordings can be on DVD, VHS, or film reels – the Walker Collection includes some 16mm film reels and a couple 8mm film reels as well. Photographs and other still images are perhaps the mostly widely varied – you have photographs, tin types, cyanotypes, various slides, photograph negatives, daguerreotypes, and so forth. There are archivists who specialize specifically in different types of A/V materials, because each format has its own preservation requirements, including what it should be housed in, what temperature the room should be kept at, and even if it can be viewed under different kinds of light.

The Walker Collection has a lot of different formats for A/V material. As I mentioned above, we have different formats of video recordings, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned before the 10,000 or so slides and countless photographs. Since I’m more of a generalist/digital archivist, I don’t have the level of expertise with A/V materials that would let me process these materials as quickly as manuscript material, so I’ve been working through the manuscript items first to let researchers have access faster. However, one thing that most archivists know immediately about A/V material is that it is almost never as stable as manuscript material.

Another format we have plenty of is audio cassettes. In fact, our current inventory lists 780 audio cassettes, some dating from as early as the 1960s. While my predecessor and I have been processing the manuscript material for the collection, some of the student workers here at Boatwright Library created an inventory of the audio cassette tapes for us. This has allowed us to get quotes from various digitization vendors to move forward with this important work: the “life expectancy” (how long the recording will be accessible) for cassette tapes sits somewhere around 10-30 years, according to most estimates. This means that, in the case of the earliest of these recordings, we may already be too late – but we have to try. As such, we’ve begun moving forward on a digitization project with a large portion of the A/V materials, with the 700+ cassette tapes taking center stage.

All of this is very exciting, especially for the cassettes, film reels, and single reel-to-reel audio recording we have in the collection. Details on the project – and the eventual end result, digitized copies accessible to researchers who’d like to hear the sermons and speeches of Dr. Walker – will be forthcoming. The project is still in its early stages, but I’ll keep you all updated on this – as well as my progress processing the manuscript materials – as progress happens. So keep an eye on this space!

(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) Hello, and welcome to another #WyattWalkerWednesday post! I’ve been busy processing the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, and I’m still in the middle of Dr. Walker’s SCLC records. One of the interesting finds I came upon this week was a group of folders all labeled “LEGAL” that seem to touch on a variety of topics.

Original folders labeled “LEGAL” in the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection.

As you can see in the above photo, the folders aren’t labeled just LEGAL (except for a few that are). Most of them have clarifying details, which are where things get really interesting. Perhaps most notable for researchers is the folder labeled “LEGAL FREEDOM RIDE.” And while these documents will certainly be interesting, my interest was particularly focused on the back folder. Perhaps not visible enough to be legible in the photo, that folder’s label reads “LEGAL Petersburg VA.”

We have very little material from Dr. Walker’s time in Petersburg. The collection was donated beginning in 2015, and by then Dr. and Mrs. Walker had been away from Petersburg for over 50 years, so it makes sense that the amount of material they had kept from that time would be less than from more recent work, especially their work in Harlem. Nonetheless, anytime material connected to Dr. Walker’s time in Petersburg and Richmond comes up, I’m especially excited!

The Petersburg legal folder contained three documents, each stapled. These appear to be copies of lawsuits and supplementary information filed with the suits, all of them in the East District or Richmond District of Virginia. The suits appear to be focused on the integration of bus stop lunch counters in Petersburg, which was the first civil rights work that Dr. Walker worked on – just before his work on integrating the public library in Petersburg. We have some records pertaining to his work on the library, but so far had found nothing about the bus stop lunch counters. This materials in this folder, then, play an exciting role in filling a hole in the collection’s historical record, documenting some of the first civil rights work Dr. Walker did during his time in Petersburg.

It’s important to note that the folders pictured above will not be making it into the collection, even though the material held inside them will be. A major part of processing a collection is rehousing the materials in archival quality folders and boxes. This helps preserve the material, extending its lifespan to ensure its availability for generations to come. Once the collection opens, the materials themselves will still be accessible, so don’t worry!

(Note: This post was authored by Taylor McNeilly, Processing & Reference Archivist.) While the vast majority of the material in the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker collection naturally focuses on Dr. and Mrs. Walker and the work they have done throughout their lives, an interesting chunk of material appears to have come directly from the administrative files of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference while Dr. Walker was full-time director, namely 1960-1964. For this week’s #WyattWalkerWednesday post, I wanted to talk about some of the material that I’ve come across processing these administrative files recently.

Public statement by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressing the situation in Greenwood, MS. Click to enlarge.

If you’re looking for the big reveal, you might overlook administrative files. After all, they’re primarily official, internal documents of an organization – chances are you aren’t going to get any secrets scribbled in the margins. But if you’re a researcher who wants to know more about the SCLC or Dr. Walker’s work during his four-year tenure as executive director, these are a goldmine.

We have proofs of the public newsletters that SCLC published (as well as published copies) that will help highlight many of the activities the organization was involved in. Most of these would probably have been glossed over in the national narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, so this level of detailed information can be invaluable. We also have several years’ worth of correspondence with the organization, many of which are addressed to Dr. King – but handwritten notes indicate that “WTW” dealt with much of this instead. Some correspondence is also addressed to Dr. Walker, including a telegram from JFK inviting him to take part in a civil rights summit at the White House in the summer of 1963.

Most recently, I’ve come across several folders labeled “MLK” within these documents. This label is a little too generalized to be helpful, considering that MLK was the president of SCLC and played an important role in its operations. So naturally, I get to dig a little deeper into their contents in order to more appropriately organize and describe them. And this digging into these folders yielded some unique and interesting documents.

One of these folders held correspondence to SCLC, but specifically written requests for “hi-fidelity” recordings of “The American Dream,” a speech of Dr. King’s published by SCLC on vinyl sometime in late 1962. These letters date from November of 1962 into December of 1963, and include continued correspondence from some writers whose orders were delivered broken. While not intellectually scintillating, this material is still interesting in gauging the SCLC’s national prominence.

Another folder contained public statements made by Dr. King during 1963. This includes interviews conducted by various television news programs, as well as press releases put out by SCLC. Perhaps most interesting is an undated document addressed to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. This document, focusing on the police brutality occurring in retaliation to black citizens attempting to register to vote in Greenwood, Mississippi, is a powerful piece decrying the use of police dogs and other violent means of stopping nonviolent protests and civic engagement. Such a document can be a vivid reminder in a time when the general public may not have a detailed understanding of the time.

As always, the material archivists find during processing can carry a strong emotional impact. I’ll keep sharing these sorts of discoveries as I move through the collection – there’s a lot left to go through! Keep an eye out here and on our other social media accounts for updates.