For Immediate Release
Date: May 1, 2017

The City of Savannah Research Library & Municipal Archives has received a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (www.clir.org) from their Recordings at Risk grant program (www.clir.org/recordings-at-risk) in the amount of $13,111 to preserve and reformat rare audio recordings from the W. W. Law Collection.

The audio included in this project includes speeches by NAACP leaders, Civil Rights events, recordings of regional musicians, and local history programs. They will be valuable to researchers from a broad array of disciplines, including local and national scholars of American, social or music history, local community members, biographers, and students, among others.

Westley Wallace "W. W." Law (1923-2002) was a prominent Civil Rights leader, local historian, historic preservationist and community leader in Savannah, Georgia. As president of the Savannah Branch NAACP from 1950-1976, his collection includes a variety of material related to the Civil Rights movement, not only in Savannah but throughout the United States. The City of Savannah received the W. W. Law Collection from the W. W. Law Foundation in 2014 and since then has worked to catalog and preserve the collection to ensure its accessibility to the public. To learn more about the collection visit www.savannahga.gov/wwlaw.