The Pacific Northwest Black Community Festival is pleased to announce the PNBCF Archive Project which seeks to preserve for history the record of activities of the Pacific Northwest Black Community Festival and individuals that supported the Festival during it's embryo stages, and had a significant collective impact on this organization.  Pacific Northwest Black Community Festival has been one of the significant Northwest representations of our community in second half of the twentieth century, it included national and local musicians and entertainment, community activists, students and interns, faculty, churches, unions, city and county councils, state governments, educational Institutions, and others.  This organization was and is still unprecedented and it is important that the vision that was started some 50 years ago be documented for the benefit of future generations to bring forth the unity within our community.

This project will focus mainly (but not exclusively) on smaller local and regional organizations that supported this undertaking from its infancy and still supports the organization to this day. Their advocacy reached a peak in the late 80’s, and early 90’s when the organization was at its height.  They were involved in community outreach, scholarships, and the overall enhancement of this unified venue. These organizations produced newsletters, pamphlets, leaflets, policy papers, meeting minutes, strategy papers, correspondence and visual material such as posters, buttons, photos, slideshows and videos. Many were ad hoc in nature and no longer exist, but individuals associated with those groups preserved vital records.

The project will locate material produced by these organizations and individuals; preserve that material by placing it in archives at depository institutions, and produce a database directory of the organizations and material. The project will arrange to have selected digitalized onto CD-ROM and placed on the web in order to make the material available to the Pacific Northwest Community, and the U.S.

Please fill out the form below. Indicating if you were you involved? Do you or people you know have documents such as newsletters, fliers, correspondence, posters, photographs, and other paraphernalia? If so, we want to hear from you.

The success of this project will depend on people who were involved and the community at large in helping us to locate the material produced by hundreds of individual’s and organizations that existed in the Pacific Northwest, and across the U.S.   

We can help place material in an appropriate depository institution that will provide long-term preservation. Even if you do not have a comprehensive collection, it is important to preserve what remains. We want to hear from you even if your material is already in an archive because we want to produce a comprehensive directory of all collections.

Even if you have a small amount of material we want to hear from you. For example, you may only have material from the years you were in college. But it is important to preserve as much as possible and several people from the same school can help make a more complete collection.

As you proceed with the form below, please contact us by email.