African American Studies in Library Special Collections

Actress and singer Diahann Carroll has been involved in a number of stage, motion picture, and television projects as well a business and philanthropic activities. The bulk of the collection includes musical arrangements, clippings, and photographs documenting assorted stage, motion picture, and television projects.

The interviews in this series document significant African American artists and others in the Los Angeles metropolitan area who have worked to expand exhibition opportunities and public support for African American visual culture.

The interviews in this series document the work of selected African American architects who have enhanced the built environment, principally in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Influenced by earlier pioneers such as Paul R. Williams, these individuals overcame bias and discrimination to create structures which have become emblematic of the uniqueness of local architecture.

Robert A. Kennard (1920-1995) was an African American architect in Los Angeles. He designed over 40 residences and later focused on public works, including Carson City Hall and Community Center and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Headquarters. The collection contains administrative records about his firm, Kennard Design Group (KDG); site plans, planning reports, and studies; photographs, negatives, and slides of completed projects; and documentation about Kennard's work in the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) and mentorship to architects of color.

Billie Beasley Jenkins is a pioneer for professional working women and African Americans in the entertainment industry. The collection consists of material related to Jenkins involvement with Women In Film and her public service activities with organizations and institutions such as The American Film Institute Gary Hendler Minority Filmmaker Program, the City of Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission and the Boy Scouts of America Women of Excellence committee, among others.

George Perry Johnson (1885-1977) was a writer, producer, and distributor for the Lincoln Motion Picture Company (1916-23). After the company closed, he established and ran the Pacific Coast News Bureau for the dissemination of Negro news of national importance (1923-27). He started the Negro in film collection about the time he started working for Lincoln. The collection consists of newspaper clippings, photographs, publicity material, posters, correspondence, and business records related to early Black film companies, Black films, films with Black casts, and Black musicians, sports figures and entertainers.

Howard Morehead was a photographer (Jet, Ebony, Los Angeles Sentinel), broadcast news cameraman, and impresario who founded the Miss Bronze California beauty pageant as a reaction to the systematic discrimination faced by African American women. The collection consists predominantly of photographs of musicians and venues documenting the Los Angeles jazz scene from the mid-1950s through the 1990s.

As part of an effort to desegregate the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television in the late 1960s, a group of African and African-American students enrolled as part of an Ethno-Communications program. Here, these students gained access to the equipment and instruction needed in order to tell their stories. For approximately two decades, these students created a new type of cinema that would later be known as the L.A. Rebellion. These filmmakers represent an early effort to create a new and alternative practice of Black Cinema in the United States. Processed materials consist of the papers of L.A. Rebellion filmmakers Larry Clark and Julie Dash.

A significant portion of the work produced by this esteemed group of filmmakers, including UCLA student films, independent shorts, theatrically-released motion pictures and television projects—as well as select interviews—is available for on-site research viewing by appointment at the Archive Research and Study Center, located in Powell Library on the UCLA campus.

Jay Riley was an African American actor who started his career in 1932. He appeared in Broadway productions and also found roles in motion pictures and television. The collection consists of script material, photographs and a small amount of biographical information, press clippings, ephemera, books, and audiovisual materials related to Riley's career.

This collection documents the history and administration of the League of Allied Arts, one of the oldest existing Black women's non-profit arts organizations in Los Angeles.

These interviews with African American musicians provide details about the narrators' background, training, influences, and musical choices and discuss their contributions, and connections to the music of black Los Angeles.

Interviews in this series preserve the spoken memories of individuals, mainly musicians, who were raised near and/or performed on Los Angeles's Central Avenue from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s.

Interviews in this series extend the UCLA Oral History Program's "Central Avenue Sounds" series and preserve the spoken memories of musicians who were active in the jazz music scene in Los Angeles from the 1950s to the 1970s. This series includes a broad range of interviewees, some of whom are well known and others who may be less known, who were chosen to document their specific point of view, contribution, role, or experience. Particular areas of focus include the African American musicians' community and the development and emergence of the so-called jazz avant-garde in Los Angeles.

The collection consists of sound recordings, musical compositions and arrangements of Horace Tapscott and other composers, and the performances of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension.

Jacqueline C. DjeDje joined the UCLA faculty in 1979. She was Chair of the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology and Director of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive. DjeDje specialized in African and African American music, West African fiddle music, gospel music, and music historiography. The collection consists of professional and teaching materials, musical event materials, and sheet music.

This project is designed to document the lives of Negro League baseball players whose careers spanned the heyday of the league (1920s-1950s) and who grew up in Southern California, who played in the West Coast Professional Baseball League or the California Winter League, or who eventually migrated here. The series aims for a better understanding of the important role that Southern California played in the racial politics of baseball and that baseball played for African Americans in Los Angeles.

In his memoir Days of Grace, Arthur Ashe stated, "I don't want to be remembered for my tennis accomplishments.” Although this series provides a comprehensive account of Ashe’s considerable accomplishments as a tennis player, it also offers a substantial number of first-person accounts of historical moments and stories beyond the scope of tennis. Ashe’s ascent in the tennis world coincided with many important developments in the sport: the onset of the Open Era, the shift from a mostly “country club” sport to the public arena, the commercialization of tennis, and the rise of the celebrity athlete. But his life also intersected with a number of significant milestone in the second half of the twentieth century, including the civil rights and women’s movements, the Vietnam War, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, and the AIDS/HIV crisis. In their reflections on Ashe’s work and activism, participants in this series share stories of his engagement with these crucial moments in U.S. history. Finally, the series also contains information about segregation; student life at UCLA in the 1960s; ROTC; West Point; Black life in Richmond, Virginia and St. Louis, Missouri; the work of TransAfrica and Artists and Athletes against Apartheid; and the relatively unknown histories of the American Tennis Association and Dr. Robert Walter Johnson’s Summer Tennis Camp. Interviewees were sought across the country and internationally, reflecting Ashe’s broad swath of associates and his status as a prominent athlete and a respected public intellectual. Although the series reflects his entire life, special attention was given to locating childhood friends, military associates, and fellow students in St. Louis and at UCLA. Participants who could speak of his devotion to support youth in the sport and his activism were also included in this series. The series commenced months before the COVID-19 pandemic, so many of the initial interviews align with traditional oral history methodology in being conducted in person. After stay-at-home orders were initiated across the country in March of 2020, interviews were conducted via the Zoom video conferencing platform. Many of these sessions were preserved on video recordings as well as audio recordings.

This project is designed to document the lives of Negro League baseball players whose careers spanned the heyday of the league (1920s-1950s) and who grew up in Southern California, who played in the West Coast Professional Baseball League or the California Winter League, or who eventually migrated here. The series aims for a better understanding of the important role that Southern California played in the racial politics of baseball and that baseball played for African Americans in Los Angeles.