About This Project
The Roz Payne Sixties Archive is a collaborative project between activist, photographer and filmmaker, Roz Payne, and historian, Dr. Patrick D. Jones. The project has been facilitated by and is housed at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In 2009, the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln hosted a “Blacks in Film” festival. Roz Payne was one of the feature speakers at the week-long event. She screened the three recently released-to-DVD Black Panther Party films produced by Newsreel Films in the late-Sixties and offered her thoughts about those films, Newsreel and alternative media in the Sixties, more generally. During that visit, Dr. Jones hosted Payne. As the two spent time together and got to talking, Payne explained her vast experience in the various movements of the Sixties, that she was an activist, photographer and filmmaker and that she had kept hundreds of items - from leaflets, pamphlets, broadsides, manifestos, underground press issues and small press publications; to buttons, posters and photographs; as well as other objects – from that era. Some of the materials had been organized in filing cabinets in Payne’s home office, while many items were simply a part of the ongoing lived environment of her house. Jones suggested the possibility of using digital technology to create a free, open archive of the materials to share with others. Payne liked the idea… and so a project was born. Over the next few years, Jones travelled to Burlington, Vermont, to visit Payne and digitize materials. The result is the Roz Payne Sixties Archive.
The archive provides a remarkably wide lens on the political activism of the 1960s, including materials from the student movement, anti-war activism, the counterculture, the civil rights and Black Power movements, women’s liberation, gay rights, the Chicano movement, Puerto Rican nationalism, the Cuban Revolution and third World liberation struggles, early environmentalism and more. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that the collection is not a comprehensive overview of Sixties movements, but rather a record of Payne’s activism and the things she believed worth keeping. As such, the archive, as a whole, needs to be “read” through her own experience in the Sixties and the choices she made about what materials were significant and worth collecting.
This project is for educational purposes and all materials are put forth under the fair use doctrine.