The Civil Rights History Project: Survey of Collections and Repositories

WCVB-TV (Boston) news collection

Repository: Northeast Historic Film

Collection Description (CRHP): The bulk of the collection and the portion relevant to civil rights, dates from 1972 to 1979 and contains extensive coverage of school busing in Boston.

Collection Description (Extant): The collection contains approximately 4 million feet of film and 700 videotapes, a total of perhaps 2,000 hours of material dating from 1959 to 2000.

Access Copy Note: The film is contained in 3,500 large film cans, each containing up to twenty news stories. Most of the cans have the date the film was taken written on the outside (4-8-74 for example) but no other information. Fifteen percent of the cans, once opened, contain story lists of the items inside. As of Sept. 2010, access to items in the collection is limited, difficult, and expensive but if a researcher knows specific dates it is possible to uncover material.

Date(s): 1959-2000

Digital Status: No

Extent: circa 2,000 hours (4 million feet of film; 700 videotapes)

Language: English

Related Archival Items: See the separate database entry on civil rights footage in Maine for more information on archival holdings at Northeast Historic Film.

Rights (CRHP): Contact the repository which holds the collection for information on rights

Subjects:

African American students--Massachusetts
African Americans--Civil rights--Massachusetts
Boston (Mass.)
Busing for school integration--Massachusetts--Boston
Civil rights movements--Massachusetts
School integration--Massachusetts
Television broadcasting of news

Genres:

Interviews
Videorecordings