Posted on behalf of Callum Carr, Head of Archives.
For Women’s History Month, I thought I’d revisit the story of Olive Beasley. You may remember that we featured her in an article last year for black history month. Olive Beasley (1903-1999) was a civil rights leader in Flint. She moved to Michigan from Chicago in 1947 to act as executive director of the Michigan Committee on Civil Rights. The committee’s goal was to pass state legislation regarding fair employment. The committee was successful in 1955 with the passage of the Fair Employment Practices Act. Beasley worked for the League of Women Voters and the NAACP in Detroit, to name a few of the organizations in which she was involved.
In 1966, Beasley moved to Flint to be the District Executive of the newly created Michigan Civil Rights Commission. She leaped into action and organized the ten-day sleep-in at City Hall in 1967 to support Floyd McCree and the Fair Housing Ordinance. In response to the sleep-in, which was joined by 4,000 Flintstones, the City Commission capitulated. Still, that decision was eventually challenged by a petition circulated by residents who did not support the ordinance and demanded a vote. In 1968, Flint became the first city in America to pass an open housing ordinance by popular vote by only 43 votes.
Beasley continued to fight for civil rights through the Michigan Civil Rights Commission until she retired in 1980. Following retirement from the Commission, she worked as acting Executive Director of the Flint Urban Coalition for almost two years. She also served on the Michigan Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission, the Michigan Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Legal Services of Eastern Michigan, the Flint Y.W.C.A., Flint Board of Education, and many others. In 1990, she retired completely, finally leaving public life. She died on May 13, 1999, in Flint and was buried in Sunset Hills Cemetery.
Recently, the footage of a videotaped interview with Olive Beasley resurfaced. The Genesee Historical Collections Center is working with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting to digitize the audio-visual collection. The collection is mainly from the University of Michigan-Flint’s defunct PBS station, WFUM. At its height, the channel was so popular that it captured almost a third of the Detroit Public Television audience. WFUM provided community cohesion and identity during some of the darkest days of Flint's economic downturn and population loss. The channel also offered hundreds of students experience in broadcasting arts.
Much of the original programming involved interviews with local and national politicians, artists, educators, and activists. While organizing the digitization project, I was contacted by local filmmaker and former WFUM director and producer Rodney Brown to look at some tapes he still had from his WFUM days. Among the recordings were three tapes with an interview of civil rights legend Olive Beasley. This is only one of two known video interviews; she passed away weeks after it was filmed in 1999. Though the tapes were in rough shape from improper storage and were in an obscure and hard-to-digitize format (Betacam SX), the vendor, Allied Vaughn in Livonia, was able to resurrect the footage.
Making this footage readily accessible is part of a larger and longer term project, so currently access is by request only.
University of Michigan-Flint
0 Comments.