BCRI Oral History Project

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) is a museum, research, and teaching facility located in Birmingham, Alabama, USA.  The BCRI Oral History Project, launched in 1994, set out to record first-hand accounts of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham from veterans of, and witnesses to, the struggle.  Researchers from around the world visit BCRI annually to access transcripts and recordings.

Twenty years and 500 interviews later, we must digitize this collection of one-of-a-kind stories, an American treasure.  Why digitize oral histories? 

Preservation 

BCRI’s priceless interview recordings live on aging tapes
housed in the BCRI Archives.  We will ensure preservation of these
recordings by creating digital files for storage on multiple servers.

Visibility

Today patrons learn about the collection through friends, via the BCRI web site, or by spotting references in books and articles.  We will increase visibility and usage when the digitized collection is available via online libraries and catalogs worldwide.

Access

Now you access full recordings and transcripts only by visiting BCRI Archives in person. We will broaden access by (1) digitizing the videotaped interviews and (2) obtaining a Digital Access Management system for cataloguing and connection to digital libraries.

Our goal:  To save these stories by crowd-sourcing at least $10K of the overall $200K+ needed to do it.  We will point to the crowd-sourced seed fund to emphasize to major funders that the public believes that the BCRI Oral History Project collection is a treasure worth preserving and making available to a global audience.  No matter how much we raise, every penny will go toward the digitization project.

You can definitely be part of this campaign.

Give!  Your donation, from $10 to $10,000, will help us reach our $10K goal. 

Spread the word!  Perhaps you can’t contribute money.  Or perhaps you are thrilled to be part of a mass movement to preserve the stories of Civil Rights foot soldiers in Birmingham, Alabama.  Either way, you join our effort when you speard the word about our campaign.