scout report

Established in 1949 by two African American social workers, Muriel S. and Otto P. Snowden, Freedom House was created to centralize community activism in Roxbury, MA, a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood. The hope of its founders was to link community members to existing services and to create new services in areas that were lacking by focusing on neighborhood improvement, good schools, and harmony among racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Eventually, archives from the Freedom House came to Northeastern University and were digitized creating the Northeastern University Libraries’ Freedom House Collection consisting of 2,265 photographs, negatives, and slides. These images document a variety of topics including the organization’s early activities to create an integrated Roxbury, to initiate citizen participation in the urban renewal of Roxbury, and the early oversight of Boston Public Schools desegregation.  The images also include representations of well-known figures like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator John F. Kennedy. More recently, on March 18, 2011, the The Scout Report listed NU Libraries’ Freedom House Collection as a featured research and education source. The article can be found here. The The Scout Report is a weekly publication that provides information on new or newly discovered online resources of interest to researchers and educators. To sign up to receive the The Scout Report in text or HTML format go to: http://scout.wisc.edu/About/subscribe.php To find out more about Northeastern University’s Digital Collections go to http://www.lib.neu.edu/archives/digital_collections/