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• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 The Newsfilm Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights 4 image_header 2025-01-06T06:16:22+00:00

  
  by Joseph Clark

  Simon Fraser University
  Abstract

  Making Black America Visible
  The Film Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II
  A Filmed Record

  
  Making Black America Visible

  The newsfilm archive has played a particularly significant role in the Black documentary tradition since the 1930s, acting as a crucial record of African American life and history while making visible what white supremacy has sought to erase. From All-American News to the landmark civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize (1987), Black filmmakers have drawn on archival newsreel footage in order to write African Americans into US history—or rather, to prevent their being written out. At a time when the forces of white supremacy are once again mobilizing to erase African American history, the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection represents an invaluable record and, along with the Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), a vital resource for a new generation of filmmakers. By studying those documenting the civil rights movement and charting their use and reuse of archival footage, we can see how the on-screen visibility of the Black community was central to the cause. We can also see how the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection continues this tradition and represents an opportunity today to make Black history visible anew.
  
  When All-American News refreshed the opening titles to its newsreel in 1945, it added scenes of Black accomplishment, presumably drawn from its own archives, to illustrate its emphatic slogan—“All-American News: bringing you our people’s contribution to America and Freedom.” African American sailors, soldiers, and members of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps were shown marching on parade, followed by shots of Black athletes playing baseball, football, and tennis, boxing, and running track. Paired with patriotic music, the flag, and All-American’s logo of an eye with a globe as its pupil, these titles drove home the newsreel’s ambition to make African American achievement and sacrifice visible.
  
  At a time when the newsreels produced by the major Hollywood studios all but ignored Black news, All-American filled a crucial niche in the American moving picture industry. By documenting Black excellence along with African American contributions to the war effort, All-American held out a promise to Black viewers that their community would finally be represented and acknowledged on film. Nevertheless, in the 1940s, many in the Black community debated the value of All-American News to the cause of civil rights. While the company and its supporters pointed out that All-American finally represented African Americans on-screen, critics worried that the segregation of the news meant that white audiences would never see these stories. 

  The question of Black representation was especially important in the context of the “Double Victory” campaign during World War II, which urged African Americans to do all they could to defeat Nazism in order to fight racism at home. The Pittsburgh Courier introduced the notion of a Double Victory—or “Double V” for short—in February 1942. Adapting the “V Is for Victory” campaign slogan, the Courier suggested that African Americans should rally to support the war effort while pushing for civil rights on the home front, urging its readers to fight for democracy by waging: “a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us. WE HAVE A STAKE IN THIS FIGHT . . . WE ARE AMERICANS, TOO!”¹

  Key to the aims of the Double V campaign was making the wartime participation and sacrifices of African Americans visible to white America. As one reviewer wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier: “Now we can ‘see’ the news as we read it in The Pittsburgh Courier, [and] other publications of the Negro Press. . . . [The All-American newsreel] is another ‘Double V’ advancement!”² Many hoped that All-American, along with other documentary filmmakers focused on African American war efforts, would not only promote more such wartime contributions but ensure that the Black community was seen to be making these contributions and thus help secure the second half of the Double Victory. By providing visual evidence of the contributions African Americans were making to the war effort, All-American would lend undeniable moral weight to the cause of equality.

  The emphasis on being seen during the Double V campaign underlines the crucial role of newsfilm in the struggle for civil rights. As media scholars such as Sasha Torres and Aniko Bodroghkozy have shown, the civil rights movement as it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s relied significantly on the power of moving pictures and television to take its case to the American people.³ Images of racial violence and peaceful resistance were key to confronting Americans with the realities of racial injustice and shaming the nation into action on civil rights. The civil rights movement well understood the power of the image. But just as it did during World War II, the power of these images rested in their being seen—not just by Black audiences but by white ones as well. The Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection is both a product of this understanding and a record of it. Newsfilm made by and about African Americans during the civil rights era shows a movement self-consciously engaging the mass media in order to address the nation as a whole as well as the Black community itself.

  This paper examines the potency of the film archive in the struggle for civil rights, as both a record of the push for equality and a tool in that struggle. Since World War II, Black documentaries have drawn on the film archive in order to bolster the argument for equality. From 1944’s The Negro Soldier and All-American’s Negro America documentary series (1952) to epic civil rights documentaries like Eyes on the Prize (1987) and King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis (1970), archival film has played a crucial role in telling the story of civil rights. By making films like those of All-American News available to scholars, students, and documentarians, the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection continues this tradition. The Media Ecology Project's SAT makes this archive accessible and legible in exciting new ways. By adding detail and depth, SAT makes the content of All-American News and the other newsfilm in the collection searchable, allowing for a deeper understanding of individual films as well as making connections between films. In particular, SAT allows researchers to trace the use of footage over time to see how archival film is used and reused by news agencies, documentarians, and civil rights activists. As we shall see, such reuse was especially meaningful in documenting the civil rights movement.

  Although genealogical film research has been done where extensive production records already exist, such records are rare. The Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection and SAT open up exciting new opportunities for this kind of scholarly work. By tracing the afterlives of specific footage and the filmic lineage of compilation documentaries, we can make important connections across time, affirming the historical potency of the indexical image and recognizing the influence—sometimes posthumous—of Black filmmakers and civil rights activists. In the 1940s, All-American promised to show the world Black “people’s contributions to America and Freedom.” The Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection ensures that it can continue to do so.

  The Film Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II

  All-American News was launched in 1942 by Emmanuel Glucksman, a film producer and veteran of the motion picture and theatrical entertainment businesses.⁴ Glucksman was a so-called “white angel,” a white producer of “race movies”—films featuring mostly Black casts and marketed to African American audiences. Glucksman employed African American talent behind the camera as well as in front of it. Charles Wilson was the voice of All-American, providing commentary in most of the reel’s stories, and William Alexander—who went on to produce films for African American audiences, including a documentary series called By-Line Newsreel—worked as a cameraman, director, on-camera interviewer, and for a time, as All-American’s Washington bureau chief.⁵

  Glucksman also relied heavily on advice and support from Claude Barnett, the head of the Associated Negro Press, a wire service for Black newspapers and magazines modeled on the Associated Press. This combination of white money and Black talent was typical of the race movie market of the late 1930s and 1940s.⁶ As with other race movies of this era, the primary audience for All-American’s films—including its newsreel—was the Black theater circuit, which included the segregated theaters of the South and Black neighborhood houses in northern cities. In November 1943, Glucksman boasted to American Cinematographer that four million people saw All-American News each week. He claimed it was screened “regularly in 365 of the 452 civilian negro theatres” and the films were distributed to seventy military camps throughout the country.⁷

  A typical issue of the All-American newsreel featured prominent figures in the Black community, sports and lifestyle stories, and Signal Corps footage covering Black units in the war. For example, an issue from the summer of 1945 included W. E. B. Du Bois giving a speech in Denver about his experience at the United Nations Peace Conference in San Francisco, which he had attended as a delegate for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; a story on Mary McLeod Bethune and efforts to raise $55,000 for the National Council of Negro Women; a piece about Edward Washington, a successful pigeon fancier from Pittsburgh; and several war-related stories. 

  The war coverage included two items based on Signal Corps footage: Black GIs in Burma finally returning home on leave after thirty-five months in theater and a memorial service in Italy to honor the members of the all-Black 92nd Infantry that “gave their lives for liberty.” A third war story covered General Mark Clark and fifty GIs arriving in Chicago after their return from Europe. Along with dignitaries like Clark and Chicago’s Mayor Kelly, All-American focused on the four Black soldiers in the party, naming each of them as they appeared on screen: “Sergeant Chenny of Chicago,” “Lieutenants Jefferson and Levine,” and “Sergeant Love.” Other shots captured African Americans among the mostly white crowd greeting the soldiers, while Clark was described as having “paid a special tribute to the negro men in his command.”
  
  While this issue’s focus on the war was typical of All-American’s news coverage, so was its attention to regular members of the Black community. Placing a profile of a mail carrier and pigeon breeder from Pittsburgh alongside stories featuring prominent civil rights leaders like Du Bois and Bethune might seem jarring, but it spoke to All-American’s emphasis on the everyday accomplishments of African Americans. Naming the four soldiers returning from Europe and showing each of them on-screen honored their individual contributions to the war effort while allowing the broader community a sense of shared racial pride. Such gestures were an important feature of the newsreel’s coverage and crucial to accomplishing the stated goal of bringing audiences Black “people’s contribution to America and Freedom.”

  All-American’s efforts to document these contributions were part of a wider wave of documentaries aimed at meeting demand for African American coverage of the war in the early 1940s. The beginning of World War II had made newsreels and other documentary films more popular than ever before. Across the United States, dedicated newsreel cinemas opened in busy downtown areas and near transit hubs in order to provide audiences with a steady supply of news. The Hollywood studio newsreels these theaters showed, however, largely excluded African Americans from the screen. Race movie producers stepped in to fill this gap. In addition to Glucksman, several other companies began to invest in nonfiction films targeted at the African American market. In October 1942, Toddy Pictures announced plans for a Negro Newsreel of Victory that would “go down in history as one of the most effective means of enlightening the public of today and posterity of the major and minor roles played by the Negro during these perilous times.”⁸ The series never materialized, but Toddy did produce Fighting Americans, a “documentary showing scenes of air cadet activities at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama and Black WACs at Fort Devens in Massachusetts.”⁹ Negro Marches On Inc., a company owned by brothers Jack and Bert Goldberg, produced a documentary called We’ve Come a Long, Long Way about Negro contributions to America’s various wars. The film, narrated by Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux, a prominent Black preacher and syndicated radio evangelist, was marketed to African American audiences as a “picture to make you proud, to make you cheer.”¹⁰

  While these independent production companies competed to satisfy African American demand for documentary accounts of Black military service, it was the US government that made the best known and most widely seen film dedicated to the African American war effort. Produced for the War Department as part of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, The Negro Soldier was a landmark in government-sponsored motion pictures and a success with critics and audiences. It was the first film by the War Department to address Black morale and a rare opportunity for African American audiences to see themselves represented on-screen in a well-financed, Hollywood-style production. 

  Given the near-total omission of African Americans from Hollywood studio newsreels at the time, the film was welcomed by the Black press. Even though it avoided discussion of segregation or racial tensions within the military, reviewers saw the film as “brave, powerful and hopeful.”¹¹ Poet Langston Hughes went so far as to call the film “the most remarkable Negro film ever flashed on an American screen.”¹² More importantly, the film’s high quality and professionalism held out the possibility of it being shown to white Americans. Indeed, reviewer Ernest E. Johnson argued, “the picture will have been made in vain if it does not appear before white audiences.”¹³ For these reviewers, The Negro Soldier represented exactly the kind of visibility necessary to achieve the goals of the Double V campaign.

  The Negro Soldier largely lived up to these expectations. As film historians Thomas Cripps and David Culbert detail, although the film was initially planned for use in the basic orientation of Black troops, “millions of white soldiers viewed it as part of the Information and Education Division’s standard orientation program.”¹⁴ It was also distributed commercially and for noncommercial civilian screenings in the United States. The film reportedly showed in three hundred cinemas in New York alone, including “capacity audiences” at screenings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in July 1944.¹⁵ It was even requested by thousands of exhibitors in the South.¹⁶ The film was seen by military personnel and civilians, Black audiences, and—crucially for the Double V campaign—white ones too. 

  The Negro Soldier’s favorable reception, especially in the Black community, can be credited to Carlton Moss, a Black writer who played a key role in creating the film’s final script. Framed around a sermon given in a Black church and told through a series of flashbacks, Moss’s script details the contributions of African American soldiers to past war efforts before turning to the conditions and contributions of Black soldiers in World War II. The film did this using archival material. Drawings, paintings, and monuments were used along with dramatic reenactments to give visual evidence of the African American presence in the fight for American Independence, the War of 1812, and the Spanish-American War, while archival footage attested to African American contributions since World War I. 

  Moss’s script made clear what was at stake in representing African American contributions to American history. He understood that for the African American community, the respect and recognition that could be achieved by a film like The Negro Soldier would, in itself, have a profound effect on Black morale, and despite its fairly conservative politics, the film could still contribute to the Double V goals. He told Time he had “assured white friends who were discouraged by its mildness that the picture would mean more to Negroes than most white men could imagine.”¹⁷ In an interview with Phyllis Klotman, Moss discussed the film’s aims to make visible both the reality of Black participation in the current war and the role African Americans had played in America’s military past:

  What we determined ourselves was to record two things: the first was the fact that black citizens were participating in every branch of the service. No one had any record of that. The other thing which had immediate importance was to let the parents know something of what the routine was like and how it physically appeared. Then we said let’s handle this other stuff. Let’s say that not only have we been in this war, we’ve been in all wars.¹⁸

  Moss’s intention was to not only make a visual record of his present but also invoke African American service in the past. In this sense, the film archive itself became a tool in the struggle for respect and Black civil rights.

  The Negro Soldier culminated in footage of the Nazi destruction of a French monument built to honor African American soldiers who fought in World War I. After showing the plaque inscribed with a dedication “to the negro troops who fought and died here,” the film cuts to German soldiers marching and then to the monument being blown apart by explosives. The preacher tells his congregation and the film audience, “Yes, the Nazis destroyed our monument in France, but our monuments at home stand and will always stand,” before showing footage of prominent African Americans in fields like science, education, and law. Crucially, in this sequence Black achievement and the filmed record of those achievements are framed as monuments in themselves. As such, the preservation of these achievements—and by extension the preservation of the film archive documenting them—is at stake in the fight against Nazism. The Nazis are figured as a threat to freedom and America as well as the very possibility of remembrance and the recognition so crucial to the Double Victory. By destroying the monument in France, the Nazis threatened to erase the collective memory that the film worked hard to make visible. Insofar as this visibility was key to the achievement of civil rights in the future, African Americans had a duty to their race as well as their country to join the fight. 

  While The Negro Soldier made clear exactly what was at stake in All-American News’s attempts to document Black “people’s contribution to America and Freedom,” its success simultaneously raised questions about All-American’s ability to represent these contributions to white Americans. While All-American succeeded on the race circuit, unlike The Negro Soldier, the newsreel largely failed to reach white viewers. Indeed, critics from within the Black community worried that All-American was having the opposite effect—it prevented white Americans from seeing such contributions. 

  Truman K. Gibson Jr., assistant civilian aide to the secretary of war and a member of Roosevelt’s so-called Black cabinet, wrote a letter to Barnett expressing his concern about All-American’s use of the Signal Corps footage. He felt that All-American’s access to material dealing with African American subjects was exclusive and thus prevented footage from being used by the other newsreels. “You will see,” he wrote, “the maliciousness of the All-American when you realize that it means a total exclusion of Negro material to white audiences.”¹⁹

  Shortly after this letter, Harry McAlpin of the Chicago Defender repeated these allegations, citing a source in the War Department. “The membership of the All-American News Reel in the major pool,” he wrote, “includes an arrangement whereby all Negro news subjects are the exclusive prerogative of All-American. The other major newsreel companies are forbidden by the arrangement to touch any such subjects.”²⁰ For McAlpin and Gibson, All-American’s deal with the War Department ensured newsreel coverage of the war remained segregated. 

  Whether or not All-American’s arrangement was a deliberate attempt to keep Black contributions to the war effort from the wider American public, Barnett and Glucksman understood the value—both political and financial—in reaching white audiences. After the end of the Second World War, Glucksman looked for ways to distribute the newsreel even more widely. One idea was to distribute a version to television stations around the country. This plan held out the promise that white audiences as well as Black might see the newsreel. In a letter to Barnett, Glucksman stressed the importance of television in reaching audiences beyond the race theater circuit:

  As you no doubt know, it is very difficult for us to put the accomplishments of the Negro race before the white theatre goers but, with television reaching the most influential class of people of all races, we feel a subject [devoted to African American achievement] would be one of the most potent presentations put into the American parlor. . . . 

  You, who are so very much interested in visual education, will realize what a presentation of this kind once a week would mean nationally. I am sure you are aware as much as I am how little people know about the accomplishments and achievements of the American Negro and what a program of this kind would do while a family is sitting around the television set relaxed in their own home.²¹

  Although Glucksman’s plan to produce a weekly All-American newsreel for television did not materialize, he did partner with Barnett to produce a series of documentaries sponsored by Liggett and Myers, the makers of Chesterfield cigarettes. Released in 1952, the six-part Negro America series featured episodes on “The Negro in” education, sports, entertainment, science, industry, and national affairs.²² The series aimed to highlight Black achievement in various areas of American life. Having secured sponsorship for the films, Glucksman also made prints available at low cost to “interested social and fraternal organizations, trade unions, colleges and educational groups.”²³

  The Negro America series featured new interviews and documentary footage, but it also made use of All-American’s existing archive of newsfilm. Although only a small portion of the All-American newsreel’s extensive archive is extant, the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection allows us to trace some of these instances of reuse. For example, a story on singer Todd Duncan and his preparations for a new tour in this 1945 issue of All-American News provided footage for use in “The Negro in Entertainment” (1952). SAT allows scholars to locate and note such genealogical relationships.
  
  Connections like this one are not trivial. They point to the ways in which the film archive functions as a resource for the civil rights movement. By reusing newsreel footage in this way, All-American obviously saved on the costs of producing its documentaries, but it also demonstrated that, despite the limited reach of the newsreel itself, its film record of Black achievement might still have a role to play in the struggle for recognition and racial equality. 

  As The Negro Soldier emphatically showed, the film archive had the potential to work as a monument to African American commitment to the nation. While All-American News never quite succeeded in its lofty goal of bringing Black “people’s contributions to America and Freedom” to white audiences during its theatrical run, it did create a significant visual archive. In the Negro America series, it drew on this archive to document African American achievement in all aspects of life. Now that some of All-American News is available to a broader public through the Library of Congress and the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection, this archive might finally be able to live up to the newsreel’s aspirations for visibility. As the Duncan example illustrates, SAT enables new kinds of connections across the archive. As the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection becomes more thoroughly annotated, the names and contributions of hundreds of historical figures, activists, celebrities, and regular people will become searchable and known to a new generation of viewers. 

  A Filmed Record

  If The Negro Soldier demonstrated the relevance of the film archive in the struggle for equality during World War II, the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s fully realized the potency of the film record. As the movement grew, the politics of recognition embodied in the Double V campaign and All-American’s rhetoric of visibility were left behind. At the height of the civil rights movement, newsfilm did not simply record Black achievement, it documented inequality and injustice, as well as a movement that bravely stood against such injustices and the violence that movement faced from the racist forces of the status quo. 

  Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the movement understood the power of the mass media to move white public opinion and put pressure on federal politicians. The sit-in movement, Freedom Rides, and the marches from Selma to Montgomery were all conceived and executed with newsfilm cameras in mind.²⁴ Thus, while its politics were decidedly different, the relevance of the film record was undiminished. It is the centrality of the film archive in the civil rights movement itself that makes the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection so important. The collection offers unprecedented access to this archive and new possibilities for thinking about its relevance to both the civil rights movement and the public memory of its history. The dense content of the newsfilm archive offers scholars and documentarians exciting opportunities to tell new stories and reconsider existing narratives.

  Given the central role that newsfilm played in the movement, it is no surprise that archival documentary has been likewise central in the ways the movement has been remembered. Henry Hampton’s monumental Eyes on the Prize is perhaps the quintessential visual account of the civil rights movement. The six-part series, which first aired on public television in 1987, incorporated both historical footage and extensive interviews. Much of this material is available in the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection, including complete versions of the many interviews conducted for the series. 

  Hampton’s series was a deliberate attempt to widen the public memory of the civil rights movement beyond a pantheon of iconic leaders. His focus on the foot soldiers of the movement challenged histories that focused almost exclusively on King and a few other prominent leaders.²⁵ Eyes on the Prize countered these narratives by supplementing the archive with a collection of corrective interviews that change the way we understand the civil rights movement. But the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection and SAT offer additional tools for students, scholars, and filmmakers looking to complicate traditional narratives of the movement. By tracing the footage used in documentary films on the civil rights movement and annotating this material, scholars can recontextualize these images and document the participation of a wide variety of civil rights leaders, foot soldiers, and allies. 

  Ely Landau and Richard Kaplan’s 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis was the first feature-length film dedicated to the life of King. Made in the aftermath of his death, the film drew on the huge volume of newsreel and television footage of King and his movement over the thirteen years between his rise to national attention with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and his assassination in Memphis in 1968. The three-hour film told the story of King’s public life almost exclusively through archival footage, without narration. In doing so, Landau and Kaplan’s film forces viewers to confront the violence and repression of the civil rights movement anew. By drawing on this material without further comment, Landau and Kaplan did not just tell the story of the movement and King but allowed their audience to feel the power of the moment again and better understand its significance. As Reverend Andrew Young, the executive vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said of the film:

  Most of us don’t really remember, because we’ve never sat down and watched this whole period from 1955 to 1968 put together in one lump where we can see and sense the social significance of what took place there . . . this is the first time in the history of any nation that a period of such dramatic change has been so thoroughly documented by the news media and now packaged and produced by the motion picture industry.²⁶

  Young’s comment points to the role of the film archive—not just to document but to reproduce the movement in a way that allows the audience to “sense the social significance of what took place.” This is the power of the film archive at work.

  But for all its power, the film helped establish a narrative that centered King almost to the exclusion of all others in the civil rights movement. Without a narrator, the principal voice in the film is King’s. The viewer watches and listens to him give impassioned speeches, talk to journalists, and interact with individual members of the civil rights movement. King’s voice—and his eloquence—dominates the film. There is no mistaking this film for a document of a broader movement—this is the story of one man.

  Although King: A Filmed Record focused exclusively on King himself, the newsfilm record is replete with foot soldiers, activists, and other participants in the civil rights movement. SAT offers the opportunity to identify and document these people and, with the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection, potentially restore them to public memory. One way to do this is to perform the same kind of genealogical film research we did with All-American News by locating and annotating archival footage that has been reused in subsequent documentary films. An example of footage that was reused by Landau and Kaplan in King: A Filmed Record can be seen in a Universal newsreel from March 1965. At about the two-minute mark in a long item dedicated to what Universal calls “The Selma Story,” a medium close-up shows King marching with Ralph Abernathy to his right and Fred Shuttlesworth to his left. This shot was used—reversed—in King: A Filmed Record in a section dedicated to the second Selma march, which culminated in a confrontation between the marchers and Alabama state police. 
  

  By locating and annotating footage like this, researchers can enrich the newsfilm archive, adding names, places, and other details that might be subsequently searched by others. Scholars and even family members might identify others in the crowd in addition to Abernathy and Shuttlesworth. This annotation can help counter the monolithic narrative that raises King above the wider movement.

  The potential of this kind of genealogical research in the newsfilm archive is exciting. Not only can we trace connections between archival documentaries and the newsfilm that acted as source material, we can begin to broaden and deepen our knowledge of this footage. Scholars and students can bring the archive back to life, enabling a new generation of documentarians and writers to tell new stories and reinvigorate the public memory of the civil rights movement. Just as SAT might allow one scholar to recognize and document the presence of Shuttlesworth at the Selma march, it might offer another historian the opportunity to tell the story of Sergeants Chenny and Love and Lieutenants Jefferson and Levine, who were filmed by All-American after returning from Europe with General Clark. By annotating the newsfilm archive and making these names searchable, the Accessible Civil Rights Newsfilm Collection makes their stories knowable. It also demonstrates the lasting potency of the film archive for African Americans. Over seventy-five years later, this collection offers the possibility that these men’s “contributions to America and Freedom” might finally be recognized.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.²⁷
  
  Joseph Clark teaches film studies in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. His research and teaching focus on archival and non-theatrical media, including newsreels, home movies, and sponsored film. He is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and is currently working on a book on extraction cinema and the role of moving pictures in the forestry industry of the Pacific Northwest. His previous work appears in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Moving Image, Media+Environment, Useful Cinema: Expanding Film Contexts (Duke), Allied Communication during the Second World War: National and Transnational Networks (Bloomsbury), Rediscovering US Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (Routledge) and Getting the Picture: The History & Visual Culture of the News (Bloomsbury).
  
  Title Image: All-American News [1945-07, no. 3].
  
  The Newsfilm Archive and the Struggle for Civil Rights © 2025 by Joseph Clark is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.