Search Help

How does this work?
There are many ways to search the collections of the Freedom Archives. Below is a brief guide that will help you conduct effective searches. Note, anytime you search for anything in the Freedom Archives, the first results that appear will be our digitized items. Information for items that have yet to be scanned or yet to be digitized can still be viewed, but only by clicking on the show link that will display the hidden (non-digitized) items. If you are interested in accessing these non-digitized materials, please email info@freedomarchives.org.
Exploring the Collections without the Search Bar
Under the heading Browse By Collection, you’ll notice most of the Freedom Archives’ major collections. These collections have an image as well as a short description of what you’ll find in that collection. Click on that image to instantly explore that specific collection.
Basic Searching
You can always type what you’re looking for into the search bar. Certain searches may generate hundreds of results, so sometimes it will help to use quotation marks to help narrow down your results. For instance, searching for the phrase Black Liberation will generate all of our holdings that contain the words Black and Liberation, while searching for “Black Liberation” (in quotation marks) will only generate our records that have those two words next to each other.
Advanced Searching
The Freedom Archives search site also understands Boolean search logic. Click on this link for a brief tutorial on how to use Boolean search logic. Our search function also understands “fuzzy searches.” Fuzzy searches utilize the (*) and will find matches even when users misspell words or enter in only partial words for the search. For example, searching for liber* will produce results for liberation/liberate/liberates/etc.
Keyword Searches
You’ll notice that under the heading KEYWORDS, there are a number of words, phrases or names that describe content. Sometimes these are also called “tags.” Clicking on these words is essentially the same as conducting a basic search.

Geronimo Pratt

Geronimo Ji-Jaga, affectionately known as "G", was a major figure in the Black Liberation Struggle. Geronimo was a member of the Black Panther Party and spent 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Geronimo passed away in 2011.

Documents

Geronimo Pratt Interview Geronimo Pratt Interview
Call Number: PM 205AFormat: Cass AProducers: Lisa RudmanCollection: Geronimo Pratt
In this biography/interview of Pratt, Lisa Rudman gives insight on what it has been like for Geronimo Pratt and his last eighteen years in prison. Pratt had spent three years in Vietnam after high school where he discovered that the way soldiers treated people over in Vietnam was the same way police had treated people of the black community. Pratt was a victim of the cointellpro, where the FBI’s goals where to prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups and to prevent the rise of a masiah that would unify the militant black national movement. While over in Vietnam, Pratt was sprayed by a chemical that he still has side effects from and for some reason the prison refuses to treat him. In his case where Pratt was accused and convicted of killing a white women, Julio Butler who was the key witness in the case had committed perjury by saying that Pratt had admitted the murder to him when he was a paid informant that denied ever working with the police. Evidence to support this fact has surfaced since the conviction to prove that Pratt was framed and Pratt knows that he is being held for nothing other than his political beliefs. Pratt stated that “ they just don’t want strong black leaders in this country.”