UMass Amherst Libraries Awarded Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Grant for Black Voices, Black Media: Preserving the Black Mass Communications Project (BMCP)

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 the project, Black Voices, Black Media: Preserving the Black Mass Communications Project (BMCP). 

The Black Voices, Black Media: Preserving the Black Mass Communications Project (BMCP) project will digitize, describe, transcribe, and make freely available online approximately 195 reel to reel audiotape recordings produced by the Black Mass Communications Project between 1970-1980. This sonic record of the post-civil rights era will surface unique, historic documentation of Black and Latino life and culture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the state 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, the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center will select recordings that provide valuable insights into the social, intellectual, political, and cultural background of an important historic moment.  

The BMCP collection consists of approximately 540 reel to reel audiotapes created by members of BMCP, a registered student organization, between 1970 and 1984. 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 Caribbean, and many others are also represented in the collection.

The collection was donated to the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center 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 project lead and Moving Image and Sound Archivist, Jeremy Smith.  

The project will be complete by August of 2026.