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African American Studies Resources in Archives and Special Collections

Archives & Special Collections preserves a wealth of information on African American history in Muncie and Delaware County. Included in these holdings are published and unpublished materials, manuscript collections, audiovisual materials, and photographs.

Photograph Collections

  • Black Churches in Delaware County (PSC 65)
  • Other Side of Middletown Photographs (EF 2) Scanned photographs from an exhibit on the history of African-Americans in Muncie. This collection is available online through the Digital Media Repository.
  • Photographs of African-Americans can be found in a number of photograph collections in the Archives. A couple of examples merit special mention here. Photographs of Muncie Housing Authority are located in the Spurgeon-Greene Collection. Photographs of Ku Klux Klan activities in East Central Indiana in the 1920s are located in the W. A. Swift Collection.

Audio-Visual Collections

  • Black Women's Program Forum (R 5)
  • Black Middletown Project Records, 1980 (R 21) Transcripts of taped interviews conducted by researchers from the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University in 1981-82. Digitized audio and transcripts are available online in the Middletown Digital Oral History Collection of the Digital Media Repository (https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/MidOrHis). Also see Black Middletown survey forms.
  • Civil Rights protest at appearance of Presidential candidate George Wallace in Muncie, April 1964 (V 14)
  • Conversation with Vivian Conley, "Spoken from the Heart", 1994 (V 21)
  • Panel of African-American Members of Muncie Fire Department, 1994 (V 22)
  • Narrative History of the First Blacks on the Muncie Fire Department, 5/15/1996 (R 48)
  • Preserve Our Middletown Heritage: An African-American Perspective, 1993 (R 27; V 16)
  • Gregory Williams on Dateline NBC, 2/21/1995 (V 28) 
  • Whitely Neighborhood Story Tellers, 2012/10/23 (UAV 714)

  • Middletown Redux: Making The Other Side of Middletown (V 215)