Civil Rights Movement Archive
Annual Report for the Year 2023

January 1, 2024

Contents:

A Rising Threat
Milestones
Traffic
Finances
Content

A Rising Threat

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who prevent learning from history want to repeat it.

We have no doubt that 2024 will be a year of intense political action against resurgant white-supremacy, attacks on voting rights, and assaults against democracy itself. For us, an aspect of that struggle is building and preserving the CRMA as an online racial-justice archive, and promoting our inside-out and up-from-the-bottom understanding of our Freedom Movement history.

We know that the South, particularly Florida, is the epicenter of MAGA assaults against all those who stand for human rights.

"What we are witnessing in Florida is an intellectual reign of terror. There is a tremendous sense of dread right now, not just among faculty; it's tangible among students and staff as well. People are intellectually and physically scared. We are being named an enemy of the State." — Professor LeRoy Pernell, Florida A&M (FAMU), AAUP Report (PDF).

But the damaging effects of MAGA intimidation and retaliation are not restricted to that one state — they are widespread and nationwide. We've just completed an annual review/update of our online Civil Rights Movement Archives, Centers & Museums database. We had to delete several hundred links to oral histories, documents, and archives because those sites and pages no longer exist out on the web. No doubt some of these disappearances are due to normal internet churn as sites go out of existence or pages are removed for various reasons. But we suspect that some were taken down for political reasons.

And there's also a less well-known threat to preserving open access to our history. 'Content' corporations such as Cengage-Gale are monetizing culture and history — including ours. They buy archive collections from financially-stressed institutions, then slap a paywall in front of the material, charging significant subscription fees to libraries, schools, publishers, and others. To access the information that used to be freely available, you now must have a Login ID from a subscribing organization. That may not be a problem for faculty or students at elite universities, but many four-year and community colleges cannot afford such subscriptions. Nor can most public high schools or local libraries.

For example, we used to provide links to more than 175 oral-histories of Freedom Movement veterans that were contained in the Ralph Bunche Oral History Collection at Howard University. Now they are behind a Cengarn paywall.

Since we are committed to free, open access, we had to delete those links from our public database. This is a painful loss because the Bunche interviews were conducted in the late 1960s when interviewees were either still engaged in struggle or their memories were fresh. And some of the interviews now sequestered behind the Cengage paywall are the only ones we've been able to locate for those individuals.

We and our Sister Sites remain dedicated to the fight for freedom, justice, and equality that we joined more six decades ago — and continue to wage to this day. For us, MAGA political assaults and corporate monetization mean that once again we have to rely on ourselves and our communities to create and build independent, alternative information sources that are willing and able to defy political pressure and corporate monetization. Resources that are dedicated to preserving and promoting our history as an aspect of the generations-long struggle for human rights that we are so proud to be a part of.

2023 Milestones

Movement History Initiative. We are working with the SNCC Legacy Project (SLP), SNCC Digital Gateway (SDG), and Black Power Chronicles (BPC), to build a Movement History Initiative (MHI). The MHI will provide a central point of access and promotion for websites and platforms that view the generations-long struggle for human and civil rights from an Up-From-Below and Inside-Out perspective. To that end, the [Search] field on the SLP's website now allows users to perform searches across all Movement History Initiative (MHI) websites.
Artificial Intelligence (AI). Focusing on industry-leader OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.0 service, we investigated and discussed how we should respond to the exploding use of AI applications by students, researchers, authors, and documentarians. We understand and support the objections of content-creators who oppose their work being used without their permission or compensation. But our situation is different, we provide free, open-access to our CRMA materials and we want them to be used as widely as possible. Therefore, we removed from our site the block that had prevented OpenAI from accessing and incorporating our materials in their dataset. Whether they will do so, and if they do what influence that will have, remains to be seen. In 2024 we will look into and consider opening our archive to other AI applications.
Organizational Histories. We began a (very slow-moving) project to summarize the histories of the major Southern Freedom Movement organizations. Still a work in progress.
Featured Remembrances. We have gathered together and set up a collection of the richest, most powerful, and most moving tributes to and remembrances of beloved brothers and sisters whose presence no longer graces us.
Website Repairs and Upgrades. With assistance from the SLP and a $9000 grant from Duke University, this year in addition to our normal content expansion efforts we:
- Migrated from Google Analytics 3 to Analytics 4 as required by Google.
- Repaired and renovated the CRMA website for easier use.
- Annotated the WATS Report Table of Contents.
- Updated and correlated the Veterans Roll Call and In Memory list.
- Significantly expanded the Freedom Movement in Art collection.
- Culled out dead links and updated the Civil Rights Movement Web Links database.
- Culled out dead links and updated the Database of Archives, Centers, Museums & Monuments

Website Traffic

According to Google, there were 266,796 visits to our site in 2023 for an average of 731 per day. This represents a 4% decline from last year. We estimate that roughly 15% of our visitors came from nations other than the U.S.

It is difficult to precisely assess the causes of our traffic decline from last year:

We know that MAGA-Republican political assaults against teachers, schools, and race-related topics/concepts have resulted in some unknown number of grade schools and colleges watering down — or totally abandoning — some subjects and courses out of fear of political, economic or social retaliation. As just one example, some states and school districts have dropped AP African-American Studies courses even after the College Board agreed to alter or strip out some topics that Republicans object to. Since students make up roughly two-thirds of our users, we assume that political intimidation has had some effect on our traffic numbers, but we have no way to quantify how much of an effect.
The Covid pandemic that erupted in 2020 was still affecting education patterns in 2022 year and that may have affected between 2022 and 2023.
In the middle of 2023 we were required to switch from Google Analytics-3 to Google Analytics-4. But the GA4 definitions and statistical compilation processes may not be entirely comparable to those used by GA3.

Year
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023 Visits
328,000
332,529
348,990
419,716
355,153
446,227
355,015
300,187
253,677
263,244
412,607
331,709
279,103
266,796

As you can see, from 2010-2015 our number of visitors grew, but from 2016-2019 our growth stalled and traffic slumped. It may be that during the Trump regime educational institutions reacted to the resurgence of white-supremacy by cutting back on, or discouraging, study of racial-justice subjects.

2020 saw a peak, perhaps due to the massive George Floyd police-murder protests and/or the fiercely fought Biden v Trump election with its blatant Republican attack on voting rights and their attempt to overturn the the Biden victory. Since then, our numbers have again gone into decline, possibly due to the continued political intimidation and suppression of what MAGAites label "critical race theory," or deem to be "woke."

Month Visits

Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec 26509
38746
31708
28630
34066
15136
11428
12199
16073
19118
21883
12000

As you can see from our previous annual reports, it's normal for our website traffic to rise and fall with the school calendar as grade school and college students use us for homework, reports, research, etc. Our busiest months are usually January (MLK Day), February (Black History Month), and April-May (academic year and term papers due).

Preliminary 2023 Financial Summary

Our Civil Rights Movement Archive receivies almost no grants or funding from foundations, other institutions, or big-donor philanthropists. Almost all of the donations we receive are small amounts — averaging around $30 each — most of which are from Freedom Movement veterans themselves. We use those donations to pay for web services, transcriptions, original documents, technical enhancements, and data-entry help.

The financial summary below reports only our donation income and the total expenses paid from those donations, it does not include our volunteer-labor or the out-of-pocket and in-kind expenses that we cover ourselves.

INCOME $15,888

EXPENSES $14,296

NET $1,592

This preliminary financial summary not yet been reviewed, reconciled, or certified by the CRMA Treasurer.

Website Content

As of December 31st, 2023, our online archive contains 9693 searchable pages, documents, and images, plus 295 videos in our Vimeo video channel. Google reports that out on the global internet there are 18,987 backlinks to our CRMA site, sections, and pages by organizations and people using us as an information resource.

CRMA Video Channel

In 2023, Jackie Keith our video coordinator, searched out, obtained permissions for, and added 141 new videos to our online CRMA Video Channel bringing up the total number to 295. Our channel is hosted on the Vimeo platform. Since the Vimeo user-interface is clunky (at best), we provide a CRMA Film, Video & Audio Recordings page which is a more user-friendly Table of Contents with individual links.

The CRMA video channel is organized into 19 collections (AKA "Showcases" in Vimeo parlance):

Documentary Films Collection. Films about Freedom Movement events or individuals that reflect our "up-from-below" and "inside-out" view of the Civil Rights Movement.
Our Voices Collection. Individually created videos created by, or substantially featuring, Freedom Movement veterans.
Freedom Movement Stories We Always Wanted to Tell. Short videos from a 2010 Movement veterans story-telling session to an audience of other movement veterans and family members.
SNCC/SLP Conferences Collection. Videos from SNCC conferences and SLP events and small-group discussions.
Freedom Summer 50th Reunion & Anniversary Conference Collection. Recorded at Tougaloo College, Jackson, MS. June 2014.
Panels & Presentations. Movement veterans describe and discuss the Freedom Movement.
Julian Bond Video Collection. Interviews of Movement veterans by Gregg Ivers (American Univ).
Charles Bonner Collection. Videos created by a SNCC veteran.
Courtland Cox Collection. Short videos featuring SNCC and SLP leader.
James Farmer Collection. Videos from Farmer's Civil Rights Movement course, 1986.
Freedom Summer Interviews & Stories.
Library of Congress: Civil Rights History Project. Recordings of personal histories and testimonials of Movement veterans.
Movement Veterans Interviewed by Students. Interviews of Civil Rights Movement veterans conducted by high school students.
Questions From Teachers Collection. Movement veterans discuss questions posed by teachers about the Freedom Movement and how it is taught.
Sixth Floor Museum Oral History Collection, interviews by the museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas TX. A selection of interviews conducted with civil rights and social justice activists by the Sixth Floor Museum, Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.
St. Augustine Movement Collection. Interviews from the Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine, FL.
Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement Collection. Oral-history interviews produced by Owen Brooks, Tougaloo College MS.
Voices Across the Colorline, Atlanta History Center interviews by the Kenan Research Center.
Voices of Freedom ~ Virginia Commonwealth University. Interviews related to the Movement in Virginia.

Top-20 Sections, Landing & Reference Pages in 2023:

Top-20 Individual Pages & Documents

Civil Rights Movement History: 1960 (student sit-ins)
What were the failures of the Civil Rights Movement? (FAQ)
Louisiana Voter Application and Literacy Tests
Alabama Voter Literacy Test
Photo Album: The Sit-Ins—Off Campus and Into Movement (1960)
Civil Rights Movement History: 1961 (Freedom Rides, MS voter registration, Albany GA)
Civil Rights Movement History: 1963 Jan-June (Birmingham, Greenwod, Danville)
Photo Album: The Freedom Rides (1961)
Photo Album: Freedom Movement in Art
Photo Album: The Children's Crusade: Birmingham (1963)
Photo Album: Freedom Summer (1964)
Poems of Langston Hughes
Bigger Than a Hamburger, Ella Baker. Address: SNCC founding conference (1960)
Civil Rights Movement History: 1955 (Emmett Till, Montgomery Bus Boycott)
Voter Registration in Alabama Before the Voting Rights Act
CRM History: Mississippi Freedom Summer
CRM History: 1963 July-Dec (July-Dec (Mass Protests, March on Washington JFK assassination)
The Other America, Dr. Martin Luther King. (1967)
Poem: Ain't I A Woman?, Sojourner Truth
Ghettos, Segregation, & Poverty in the 1960s, Bruce Hartford (2015)

Submitted January 1, 2024
Bruce Hartford, CRMA webspinner

Civil Rights Movement Archive Annual Report for the Year 2023