General Survey and Pilot Project--Lincoln University Audiotape Collection

FAIN: PG-50144-07

Lincoln University, Pennsylvania (Lincoln University, PA 19352-9141)
Susan Pevar (Project Director: May 2006 to August 2008)

A preservation survey of a collection of 200 audiotapes that document the Civil Rights Movement and other activities from the 1950s through the 1980s at Pennsylvania's only historically black university, founded in 1854.

This project will be the first step in preserving and broadening access to Lincoln University's collection of audiotapes of campus events housed in Special Collections of the Langston Hughes Memorial Library. Lincoln University of Pennsylvania was founded by whites in the mid-nineteenth century, before emancipation, to educate free black men. During its first century Lincoln University was the alma mater of poet Langston Hughes, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe, among others. It shifted to coeducational in the mid-twentieth century, in the wake of national desegregation. The audiotapes complement materials in the Lincoln University archives such as print publications and manuscripts.