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.

Latin@

Covers everything from challenging the legitimacy of the border with Mexico and farm-worker rights to the struggles of the diaspora from Central and Latin America.

Subcollections

Documents

West Virginia Coal Miner's Blues: Don Stover and the White Oak Mountain Boys West Virginia Coal Miner's Blues: Don Stover and the White Oak Mountain Boys
Date: 1/1/1973Call Number: Vin 077Format: VinylProducers: Old Homestead RecordsCollection: Chuy Varela Collection
Though not fully recognized in the bluegrass community, Don Stover's unique banjo picking style and lyrics about the tough life of a West Virginia coal miner are authentic representation of American bluegrass.
Brief speech of Cesar Chavez on march Brief speech of Cesar Chavez on march
Date: 7/3/1973Call Number: KP 042Producers: Emiliano EcheverriaProgram: KPFA general/La RazaCollection: Latin@
March with music and intro. Cesar Chavez speaks in both Spanish and English on United Farm Workers (UFW) campaign.