"Frog in the Well" graphic by H.K. Yuen
Listen to the digitized recordings of the H.K. Yuen Social Movement Archive online!
History of the H.K. Yuen Social Movement Archive
The acquisition of the H.K. Yuen Social Movement Archive, ca. 1963-1982, stands as the largest single donation ever received by the Ethnic Studies Library and it is a shared collection with the Bancroft Library. The acquisition was made in close collaboration with H.K. Yuen's family including his wife, Betty Yuen, and son, Eddie Yuen, and with the support of Ethnic Studies and Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies Professor Ling-chi Wang. The estimated 30,000 hours of audio recordings and associated gray literature accompanying it is the most complete audio resource for social movement history in the San Francisco Bay area. The collection was named one of the Ten Treasures of the Ten Million when the UC Berkeley Library reached its ten millionth volume.
The Yuen audio archive preserves original audiotapes of San Francisco Bay Area broadcast history and ephemera from the vibrant social movements of the early 1960s through the early 1980s. A distinguishing feature of the Yuen collection is that an estimated 5-10% of the total recordings were of events, which were never broadcast. Yuen documented local events, many of which are in retrospect of historic importance, in multiple audio entries; he took the unique opportunity to record history as it happened. Consequently, the audio collection is a virtually untapped reservoir of the verbal documentation of many historic events, which took place in the Bay Area over several decades of the 20th century. Unfortunately, due to their inherent fragility and deterioration, many of the audiotapes, especially the early plastic based reel-to-reel tapes which constitute the earliest part of the collection, will not only remain untapped but also totally lost to researchers, scholars, and the public if they are not digitized.
Since 2015, The Ethnic Studies Library has worked consistently towards digitization and organization of the collection including nominating tapes from the H.K. Yuen Social Movement Archive to be digitized as part of the California Revealed (formerly the California Audiovisual Preservation Project). In 2017, The Ethnic Studies Library was awarded a CLIR Recordings at Risk grant to digitize an additional several hundred tapes. The H.K. Yuen Preservation Project prioritized digitization of unique content from multiple inventories, improving descriptive metadata of these materials, and making the digitized audio available through the Internet Archive. The project was completed in 2019 in partnership with RaineStudio and California Revealed. To date, over 450 recordings have been digitized and added to the Internet Archive. While it represents a small fraction of this vast collections, it makes these materials accessible for the first time to the public.
To preserve a collection of this magnitude, it is essential to employ a flexible approach to describe and preserve audio of enduring historical value and invest minimal time in the repetitive and mainstream news issues as opposed to local issues of national importance. To date, the tapes have been rehoused and transferred to SLF-N, an environmentally-controlled storage environment. Using a work-plan model employed by similar “audio projects” at the Bancroft and other repositories, the goals of the present project are:
- Assess research value within the audio files, identifying highest priority categories of materials for both enhance description and for digital preservation reformatting.
- Create finding aid, consisting of container lists for audiotapes, exported from the project database.
For more information about the history of the collection, visit the H.K. Yuen Social Movement Archive website created by Lincoln Cushing, former archivist at The Bancroft Library.
To support the continued work on this collection, please continue to donate to the Ethnic Studies Library!
Sine Hwang Jensen, Comparative Ethnic Studies Librarian
Nathaniel Moore, Archivist
Special Thanks to: The H.K. Yuen Family
- Pamela Vadakan - California Revealed
- John Raines RaineStudio
- John Barry - Former UCB Comparative Ethnic Studies Librarian
- Lincoln Cushing – Former UCB Archivist
- Joshua Bloom – Former UCB Graduate Researcher
- Erica Flener – Former UCB Graduate Researcher
- Tessa Ridgeway – Former UCB Undergraduate
- Garkay Wong – Former UCB Undergraduate
- Israel Mendoza – Former UCB Undergraduate
- Roxanne Bantay – Former UCB Undergraduate
- Carissa Purnell – Former SJSU/SLIS: Library Intern
- Jason Chang – Former UCB Graduate Researcher
- John Turok – Former UCB Graduate Researcher
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The sample audio files below have not been remastered and are provided here as examples of collection content; only audio levels have been adjusted. These are for Educational use only. Copyright is retained. University of California, Berkeley.
- Track 1: Third World Liberation Front Convocation. (0:57) “Power to the people”…an introduction by Jaime Solis, February, 1969.
- Track 2: Jim Nabors. (5:18) “The system is anti-you because you’re acting like a nigger” … a speech to students by a rank and file member of the Huey P. Newton Defense Committee, November, 1967. Rally Recorded Live.
- Track 3: Bobby Seale. (9:56) “We will not stoop to the level of the Klu Klux Klansman that hates and will murder a person because of the color of their skin”…a speech on anti-racism, the politics of the Black Panther Party, and the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, May, 1968. Rally recorded live.
- Track 4: Bob Avakian. (4:01) “They pretended that the thing that upset them about Black Power was that it was racist” … a speech on the repression of the Black Panther Party, May, 1968. Rally recorded Live.
- Track 6: Noam Chomsky. (2:38) “The only thing that can put an end to this butchery is a massive and unceasing outcry of protest” … speech on the need for political struggle against the Vietnam War, January, 1967. Rally recorded live.
- Track 7: Bettina Aptheker. (6:31) “It is very interesting going to jail being 6 months pregnant”… links Free Speech Movement and Anti-war protests, June, 1967. Rally recorded live.
- Track 8: Mario Savio. (1:37) “Castro loving communists” … a critique of Clark Kerr red baiting, February, 1967. Rally recorded live.
- Track 9: Peter Camejo. (5:51) “A CIA trained dog” … why the CIA should be barred from campus and why this is not a violation of free speech. November, 1967. Rally recorded live.
- Track 11: Barbara Arthur. (3:21) “No White man has ever been executed for raping a Black woman” … speech on lynching, Denzil Dowell, and the Black Panther Party, July, 1967. Rally recorded live.
- Track 12: James Farmer. (5:19) “Every company was looking for its highly qualified, highly skilled, educated, highly personable young Black man” … the Director of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) on Black Power and the limitations of Civil Rights, July, 1967. Rally recorded live.
- Track 13: Elaine Brown. (1:16) “Two slaves are both oppressed” … talk on race and women’s oppression on International Women’s Day, March, 1973. Symposium recorded live.
- Track 14: Cesar Chavez. (5:21) “We don’t want to be alienated from the poor” … defending his endorsement of Robert Kennedy for President, May, 1968. Rally recorded live.
- Track 16: H.K. Yuen. (1:53) “Third World Liberation Front strike recorded live and narrated by H.K. Yuen on the U.C. Berkeley campus, January, 1969. Recorded live.