See our special report on Bloody Monday.
More than 85 hours of audio recordings captured the trials that followed Danville’s civil rights movement of 1963 and the sentencing of almost 250 defendants, most of whom were Black.
While the audio has existed for decades, it has only recently become available online for anyone to hear.
For decades after the trials ended in 1973, the audio recordings and case files sat untouched in a storage area in the Danville courthouse. In the 1990s, they were rediscovered, organized and transferred from Dictabelts and paper onto CDs and microfilm reels.
Screening of “The Movement” at the Library of Virginia
The Library of Virginia will hold a free screening of “The Movement,” a documentary about Danville’s civil rights movement.
The event will be held at 5:30 p.m. June 6 at the library in Richmond.
In addition to the film screening, the evening will feature a panel discussion moderated by Karice Luck-Brimmer, a Danville historian and genealogist. Light refreshments will be served, and attendees can explore a collection of records related to the summer of 1963.
Attendance is free, but registration is required. As of Thursday evening, 54 seats were still available.
But before May 2024, if you wanted to learn more about a specific court case, you had to visit either the Danville Circuit Courthouse or the Library of Virginia in Richmond in person.
To listen to the audio of a trial, you had to use a finding guide to identify one of dozens of CDs with that specific case, pop the CD into a desktop computer and plug in headphones. To look at case documents, you had to know a string of numbers that identified the reel of microfilm, find it at the library, and use the microfilm machine.
“Microfilm served its purpose for preservation,” but it is not the most user-friendly or accessible type of media, said Vincent Brooks, local records program manager at the Library of Virginia.
Cardinal’s coverage of the 60th anniversary of Bloody Monday, the subsequent court trials and the segregationist judge that presided over them — alongside increased interest from the public around the movement’s anniversary — prompted the Library of Virginia to focus on improving the accessibility of the material, Brooks said.
During a yearlong project, the microfilm reels were converted into digital images, and audio files from CDs were digitized using a program called Rosetta, a digital management and preservation platform.
Now, there’s a page on the Library of Virginia’s website with digitized audio and case files, so that anyone can access them from any device. And an updated finding guide makes it easier to track down specific cases.
These materials will be on display during a June 6 event at the Library of Virginia, scheduled to coincide with the 61st anniversary of June 10, 1963 — a day that became known as “Bloody Monday” because of the police brutality that protesters encountered.
The library will screen a documentary about the protests, “The Movement,” which will be followed by a panel discussion with former protesters from Danville.
The Danville civil rights protests began on May 31, 1963. They were met with violence from police officers, who used fire hoses and nightsticks against the protesters.
By mid-July, more than 250 people — almost all of them Black — had been arrested on charges including contempt, trespassing, disorderly conduct, assault, parading without a permit and resisting arrest.
Most of these charges came under the umbrella of violating a city injunction that limited protests and public assemblies. On June 6, Judge Archibald Aiken issued this temporary injunction, which later became permanent.
The trials began June 17, and even though the arrests were made over a series of only months, the court proceedings lasted until 1973.
Aiken’s courtroom procedures drew national criticism from Martin Luther King Jr. and the U.S. Department of Justice, among others.
“He excluded virtually the entire public, kept a large force of armed police present, required all defendants to attend roll calls every day, subjected the defendants and their attorneys to daily searches for weapons, and banned discussion of the constitutionality of the injunction,” according to Encyclopedia Virginia.
The collection of court records and audio spans the 10 years from 1963 to 1973. It includes individual case files for the 254 people arrested and more than 85 hours of testimony. While the paper documents cover the entire decade of trials, the audio material only includes trials from 1966 and 1967.
The audio files were originally recorded onto Dictabelts by a Dictaphone machine, a recording device that was popular in courtrooms and offices in the 1960s.
A Dictaphone even ran in the judge’s chambers and captured arguments between Aiken and the attorneys about a variety of matters, like whether to consolidate cases.
Cases were consolidated to try dozens of defendants at a time, because so many people had been charged that individual trials would’ve been impossible.
In the past, this made it hard to look up a specific defendant, Brooks said. But the new finding guide is better organized and will make it easier for users to locate individual protesters.
Brooks has done this already for people who are interested in specific records, like former protesters who are looking for their own court cases or family members of protesters who have died.
“Some folks had mentioned trying to find the records and not having much luck,” Brooks said. “[One protester] had contacted me asking about her records and I was able to send her some direct links to the audio and the case files that we had for her.”
The digitization process took about a year. Brooks and Mary Ann Mason, local records archivist for the Library of Virginia, went through each file individually and reorganized files that were out of order.
If the court records hadn’t been found in the Danville courthouse and converted onto CDs and microfilm decades ago, this digitization project probably wouldn’t have happened, Brooks said.
“Had that not been done then, I don’t know that the records would have survived today, just given the fragile nature of those Dictabelts,” he said. “Even though they were not as accessible as they could be given the technology available today, they were at least preserved, which is sometimes half the battle.”
This was also a pilot project for the Library of Virginia, Brooks said, adding that the library plans to digitize some of its other collections, most of which are older than the Danville records.
“Even though [the Danville collection] is from the ’60s, we consider them more modern records.” Brooks said. “This was our first foray into some digital processing.”
The improved accessibility of this material will help the legacy of the protests live on, Brooks said, as will events like the screening of “The Movement.”
The documentary, which was produced by Pittsylvania County native Jonathan Parker, includes interviews with former protesters, former policemen and local historians about the summer of 1963.
So far, more than 300 people have registered to attend the screening, which is free and open to the public.
“That’s really way more than we expected,” Brooks said. “We were hoping to get maybe 100, and we’ve well surpassed that.”
After the documentary screening, former protesters from Danville will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Karice Luck-Brimmer, who was a historical consultant on the film.
Luck-Brimmer, a native of Danville, is also a local historian and genealogist who has deeply researched the city’s civil rights history.
Event attendees will be able to talk with the panelists after the screening and discussion, and explore a display of the library’s materials related to the movement.
Part of this exhibit will be a timeline, drawing throughlines across significant events in Danville’s history, much of which involves its Black population.
The display will include materials around the history of the tobacco industry in the city and the role of slave labor to make that a viable product, the rise and fall of the Readjuster Party after the Civil War, the 1963 civil rights movement, all the way up to more recent events like marches in Danville after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“We’ll also have some documents of the actual court cases, and we’re going to have the fullest listing of all the individuals [tried],” Brooks said.
Files don’t exist for every person who was arrested during the movement, he said, but the library has 200 pages of a Supreme Court of Virginia docket that lists hundreds of defendants, which will be on display.
“There are probably folks out there who heard stories from loved ones who are gone, parents or grandparents, and now they can actually look at this stuff and look up what their ancestors did,” Brooks said. “And I hope that it will be used as well by scholars who are studying the history of civil rights.”
It’s too early to say how many people have made use of the digitized material, as it was just announced this week, Brooks said. But if the attendance for the documentary screening is any indication, this resource will be very popular.
“I know that families of [former protesters] who are no longer with us are going to be here,” Brooks said. “We wanted people to have an opportunity to find their father or grandfather or uncle or aunt’s name on that list and know that they contributed to this effort.”
