Moses Moon Civil Rights Movement Audio Collection
name: label: Creator
content: McNamara, Norris
label: Creator
content: Moon, Moses
label: Names
content: Freedom Singers (SNCC)
label: Names
content: Abernathy, Ralph, 1926-1990
label: Names
content: Anderson, Marian (1897-1993)
label: Names
content: Baez, Joan
label: Names
content: Baker, Ella, 1903-1986
label: Names
content: Baker, Josephine, 1906-1975
label: Names
content: Baldwin, James, 1924-1987
label: Names
content: Barry, Marion, 1936-
label: Names
content: Bikel, Theodore
label: Names
content: Carawan, Guy
label: Names
content: Conyers, John, 1929-
label: Names
content: Donaldson, Ivanhoe
label: Names
content: Dylan, Bob, 1941-
label: Names
content: Ferebee, Dorothy Boulding , 1898?-1980
label: Names
content: Forman, James, 1928-2005
label: Names
content: Gregory, Dick
label: Names
content: Guyot, Lawrence, 1939-
label: Names
content: Hamer, Fannie Lou
label: Names
content: Height ,  Dorothy I. (Dorothy Irene), 1912-2010
label: Names
content: Horne, Lena
label: Names
content: King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929-1968)
label: Names
content: Lewis, John
label: Names
content: Moses, Robert
label: Names
content: Moses, Robert Parris
label: Names
content: Odetta, 1930-2008
label: Names
content: Parks, Rosa, 1913-2005
label: Names
content: Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 1942-2024
label: Names
content: Reagon, Cordell
label: Names
content: Robinson ,  Amelia Boynton, 1911-2015
label: Names
content: Robinson, Jackie
label: Names
content: Rustin, Bayard, 1912-1987
label: Names
content: Seeger, Pete, 1919-2014
label: Names
content: Sherrod, Charles, 1937-
label: Names
content: Shuttlesworth, Fred L., 1922-2011
topic: label: Topic
content: African American civil rights workers.
label: Topic
content: African American preaching.
label: Topic
content: Mississippi Freedom Project
label: Topic
content: Civil rights movements
label: Topic
content: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (U.S.)
label: Topic
content: Civil rights
label: Topic
content: Voter registration
label: Topic
content: African Americans -- Civil rights
label: Topic
content: African American student movements.
label: Topic
content: Folk music
label: Topic
content: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington, D.C., 1963
label: Topic
content: Gospel music
acqinfo: label: Provenance
content: Donated by Moses and Delia Moon in 1995.
creator: label: Creator
content: McNamara, Norris
label: Creator
content: Moon, Moses
setName: label: See more items in
content: Moses Moon Civil Rights Movement Audio Collection
abstract: label: Summary
content: Recorded by Moses Moon (known at the time as Alan Ribback) and assisted by Norris McNamara during 1963 and 1964, the collection includes audio recordings of interviews with civil rights leaders and participants as well as free-style recordings of mass meetings, voter registration events, and other gatherings organized by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This collection provides a mostly unfiltered documentation of significant moments in the civil rights movement.
bioghist: label: Biographical / Historical
content: Moses Moon was born Alan Ribback in 1928.  During the 1950s until 1962, Ribback was the proprietor of the Gate of Horn, Chicago's premier folk music club, which featured performers including Bob Gibson, Odetta, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Jo Mapes, Peter, Paul and Mary, Lenny Bruce, and Shelley Berman.  On December 5, 1962, Lenny Bruce was arrested during a performance at the Gate of Horn along with Ribback, George Carlin, and others.  As a result of the arrest and Bruce's subsequent conviction for obscenity, the club was closed by the City of Chicago, and Ribback left Chicago with Norris McNamara, an audio technician, to record folk concerts taking place in the South as part of the growing civil rights movement. From the spring of 1963 until the summer of 1964, Ribback and McNamara recorded demonstrations and mass meetings and interviewed civil rights activists, primarily those involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  Later, Ribback moved to New York and edited his recordings into an album called Movement Soul.  Ribback married Delia Moon in 1971, took her last name and changed his first name to Moses.  In 1979, Bernice Reagon Johnson, working with the Program on African American Culture at the Smithsonian, contacted Moon and borrowed the recordings of mass meetings for a 1980 program on the voices of the civil rights movement.  In the late 1980s, Moon was stricken with a severe case of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which left him paralyzed.  Moon donated the entire collection of original recordings shortly before his death in 1993.
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 4 Cubic feet (18 boxes)
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1963-1964
custodhist: label: Custodial History
content: Reference tapes of the recordings of mass meetings (almost all tapes with "N" numbers) were made by the Program in African American Culture and transferred to the Archives Center in the 1980s as part of the Voices of the Civil Rights Movement recordings from the Program in African American Culture Collection.  In 1993, Moon donated his original tapes to Archives Center, including many tapes of demonstrations and interviews which were not previously available.  Prior to his donation, Moon may have made his tapes available to others, which would account for sequential gaps in his original numbering system.  Prior use of these recordings, apart from Moon's own production of the album Movement Soul, and their use for PAAC, is unknown.
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives Center, National Museum of American History
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NMAH.AC.0556
objectType: label: Type
content: Collection descriptions
label: Type
content: Archival materials
label: Type
content: Audiotapes
label: Type
content: Sound recordings
arrangement: label: Arrangement
content: The collection is arranged in two series.Series 1 is in chronological order to the degree recording dates can be determined, and is based on the locations and dates provided by Moon in his description or gleaned from the recordings themselves and other secondary sources. Series 1 contains 17 groups of recordings.  

Moon's original numbers are recorded in the column next to the descriptions.  Following the first four Greenwood tapes, which are numbered sequentially, Moon's numbering system took the first two letters of the town in which the recordings were made, a one (1), a decimal, and then a tape number.  Numbers preceding the town code refer to the recording day.  "N" numbers were later assigned by Moon to the 7" reels only, after the original recordings were made, possibly during editing or when the tapes were made available to the Program in African American Culture.  

Series 1, Original Tapes

1. Greenwood, Mississippi; Spring 1963; 4 7" reels

2. Chicago, Illinois; August 9, 12, 1963; 2 5" reels

3. Americus, Georgia; August 17, 1963; 5 5" reels, 1 7" reel

4. Atlanta, Georgia; August 21, 1963; 1 5" reel

5. Washington, D.C.; August 26-28, 1963; 6 5", 8 7" reels

6. Atlanta, Georgia; September 8, 1963; 4 5" reels

7. Selma, Alabama; September 29-October 7, 1963; 11 5" reels, 16 7" reels

8. Gadsden, Alabama; October 23, 1963; 2 5" reels

9. Jackson, Mississippi; Fall/Winter 1963; 11 7" reels

10. Greenwood, Mississippi; c. November 3, 1963; 3 5" reels, 4 7" reels

11. Danville, Virginia; 1963; 6 7" reels

12. Washington, D.C.; soon after November 22, 1963; 6 7" reels

13. Washington, D.C.; late 1963, or possibly during MOW; 10 7" reels

14. Hattiesburg, Mississippi; January 1964; 9 7" reels

15. Indianola, Mississippi; Summer 1964; 2 7" reels

16. Monroe County, Mississippi; August 1, 1964; 4 5" reels

17. Milton, Mississippi; August 16, 1964; 3 5" reels

Series 2, Preservation Masters consists of data DVDs for a portion of the collection.
processinfo: label: Processing Information
content: Many of the original recordings displayed evidence of mold contamination, both on the original cardboard boxes and on the tapes themselves. Safe Sound Archives remediated the mold contamination on the tapes and the affected tapes are stored in new acid-free archival boxes. 

 
When asked about the making of these recordings, Norris McNamara, Moon's audio technician, responded: "I doubt any such recordings were ever made with comparable quality. We lugged a generator, a huge Ampex PR-10, and four AKG C-60 condenser mics around to many Freedom Rallies (or Freedom Days or whatever.) The recordings are certainly unique…." (email correspondence with Megan McShea).  

From March to May 2004, Megan McShea evaluated and reviewed twenty-one of the audio reels, mostly 5" reels containing interviews and conversations with SNCC people.  Tapes were described in health reports, and most of those reviewed were leadered and labeled.  The tapes were then arranged in the order described above, and all original tapes were re-housed in acid-free archival boxes.  During re-housing, the original boxes were photocopied and discarded.  The photocopies were stapled to health reports prepared for each tape and hand-written notes from screening.  Re-housed tapes were numbered and titled using Moon's original numbers. McShea also conducted research including interviewing Norris McNamara and wrote the historical and scope and content notes.

In 2002, Danielle Snyder had copied, re-housed, and described a handful of tapes from this collection, and her descriptions have been integrated with the others.

The former National Museum of American History Program in African American Culture staff produced audio cassette reference tapes for most of the 7" reels. They also recorded general content descriptions at that time, although the names and subjects of speakers at mass meetings are often omitted.  These descriptions are in the collection folder, stapled to Moon's very general logs. Grant support from the NMAH Collections Committee Preservation fund supported preservation duplication of forty 5" reels. Digital preservation files are saved on archival-quality gold DVDs, and reference copies exist as .wav files on audio CDs. Hannah Rosen provided the descriptions for most of these tapes. A donation from Emilye Crosby supported digitization of 42 reels.

Processed by Megan McShea, intern, 2004, Hannah Rosen, intern, 2009, Danielle Snyder, intern, 2002 and Wendy Shay, archivist, 2011.
genre_format: label: Genre/Form
content: Audiotapes -- Open reel
label: Genre/Form
content: Sound recordings
label: Genre/Form
content: Audiotapes
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: This collection consists of 115 reel to reel audio recordings containing interviews, mass meetings, demonstrations, and conversations concerning the civil rights movement, and in particular the voter registration drives organized by SNCC in Alabama and Mississippi in 1963 and 1964.  Mass meetings were recorded in Greenwood, Mississippi; Americus, Georgia; Selma, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Danville, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and Indianola, Mississippi.  Major demonstrations recorded include the March on Washington in August of 1963, Freedom Day in Selma, Alabama in October of 1963, and Freedom Day in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in January of 1964.  Interviews with SNCC workers include Julian Bond, John Lewis, James Forman, Bruce Gordon, Prathia Hall, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Bob Moses, Avery Williams, Willie Peacock, Bruce Boynton and his mother, as well as dozens of others involved in the movement, who are named in the collection inventory.  Many of those interviewed were actively involved in strategizing and carrying out SNCC demonstrations and political actions, and many were victims of death threats, beatings, unlawful arrest, police brutality, and torture and abuse in prison.  These interviews contain detailed eyewitness accounts and personal testimony regarding these experiences, as well as personal history and thoughts about the movement, the South, and the future.

It is clear from what we know of the dates and locations of these recordings, as well as from documentation of these events in other sources, that many of these recordings are unique documents of important events in American history, which may also contain the commentary of important political and cultural figures who were involved in the movement.  For example, an article by Howard Zinn recounts how an unidentified man recorded James Baldwin on October 7, 1963, Freedom Day in Selma, on the steps of the courthouse.  Baldwin was furious at the lack of support from nearby federal agents as state troopers advanced on peaceful demonstrators.  One of the tapes dated October 7, 1963, originally labeled "courthouse interviews," appears to be this recoding, although Baldwin is not named.  The same article (available in The Howard Zinn Reader) recounts the mass meetings which led up to that demonstration, at which actor Dick Gregory gave a rousing sermon as his wife sat in jail for demonstrating in Selma.  The Moses Moon Collection may be the only existing audio recording of that sermon as well as many other sermons and speeches. 

Moses Moon changed his name after these recordings were made. He is referred to in the finding aid as Alan Ribback because that name is used on the recordings.
relatedmaterial: label: Related Materials
content: Materials at Other Organizations

The papers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee are held by the King Library and Archives in Atlanta, Georgia; archives@thekingcenter.org.