Rare Historic Footage Discovered in Home Movies: University of Georgia Libraries Preserves Film of Augusta’s African American Community

From the University of Georgia:

Even in black and white with no audio, a home movie of families gathering and men playing trombones and marching to the beat of bass drums through the streets of Augusta, Georgia, present a vivid picture of a community often underrepresented in archival and historical materials.

Discovered in a decades-old film can, the home movie, which features a convention parade of an African American fraternal order known as the Black Elks, as well as a glimpse of life in the Laney Walker area of the city during the Jim Crow era, has been restored, digitized and preserved in the Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, the only archives in Georgia devoted to preserving the state’s moving image heritage. The footage is freely available online through the Brown Media Archives website.

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The Brown Media Archives, one of three special collections units at the UGA Libraries, preserves more than 300,000 items in film, audiotape and other recording formats, including home movies and news film spanning the past 100 years, as well as 200,000 digital files. The Black Elks footage is unique among the holdings and augments other collections that portray the lives of Georgians.

Learn More About the Film in the Complete Article

View the Digitized Footage

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