The University of California, Los Angeles has unveiled a digital archive of 365 speeches that were given at the university between 1962 and 1973. The recordings, which were on old reel-to-reel tapes and found last fall in a storage room in an academic building, have been digitized and are now available to the public. To see the playlist, click here.
The period when the recordings were made includes the height of the civil rights movement. Among the tapes that were discovered are recordings of speeches made by Stokely Carmichael,, Eldrige Cleaver, Alex Haley, Carl Stokes, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), C. Eric Lincoln, Roy Wilkins, Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Jim Brown, James Earl Jones, Dick Gregory, James Meredith, Ralph Bunche, Julian Bond, James Farmer, and Charles Evers.