The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA) received a METRO Equity in Action grant to support the digitization and curation of historical materials documenting three movements to make access to public higher education more equitable toward and inclusive of New York’s diverse residents.  

Based at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) since 2014, the CDHA, established in 2011, is a community curated digital public archive and portal that provides scholars, students and the broader public online access to archival materials related to the history of CUNY, the nation’s largest public university system.

Working under the direction of Professor Stephen Brier, the CDHA hired three doctoral students to select documents, create metadata, and add descriptive materials to make accessible collections related to:

1. The efforts in the late 1960s of African American residents in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood to push CUNY to found a new public college in their community.
2. The movement to found a Puerto Rican Studies Program at Brooklyn College in the early 1970s.
3. The activities of SLAM! (Student Liberation Action Movement), a group of CUNY student activists in the 1990s, that fought for increased public funding for CUNY. 

The new materials are accessible via the CDHA website (https://cdha.cuny.edu).

Watch a presentation about the process by the project team.