Join the NYC Department of Records & Information Services (DORIS) each month for their virtual Lunch & Learn Series – an intimate conversation with agency staff and special guests focusing on the collections of the Municipal Archives and Library and the history of New York City.

On Tuesday, June 9th, Dr. Peter D. Blackmer will examine the methods, uses, and impact of state repression using the Municipal Archives’ NYPD Bureau of Special Services & Investigation (BOSSI) Collection. The author of Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers, Dr. Blackmer, will also explore how archival records can help us understand, analyze, and write more complete and compelling histories of the Black Freedom Movement in New York and beyond.

Unleashing Black Power explores the local dynamics, national connections, and global context of the Black freedom movement in Harlem from 1954 to 1964, illuminating how activists, organizers, and ordinary people mounted their resistance to systemic racism in the Jim Crow North. Peter Blackmer argues that this decade of confrontations between Black communities and white state power caused Harlem residents and activists to seek “new means” for achieving freedom within a city, state, and nation determined to deny them access. Tracing the dual evolution of Black radicalism and white resistance, Unleashing Black Power offers a new framework for analyzing the epochal urban uprisings in the 1960s.