North Park Archivists to Digitize Civil Rights Era Sermons via $3K Grant

Archivists in North Park University's F. M. Johnson Archives and Special Collections will preserve history this fall by digitizing 63 sermons by Rev. Douglas Cedarleaf, a Covenant pastor known for addressing racism and other issues of his era.

A $3,100 grant from the Illinois State Historical Records Advisory Board will fund the project led by Digital Processing Archivist Sarah Hawkinson.

Cedarleaf, who died in 2000, was a prominent Covenant pastor active from the 1940s to the 1980s known for supporting the civil rights movement and issues of acceptance and diversity. The idea for the project came about when Hawkinson and Director of Archives Andy Meyer were sorting through materials.

"We had these audio recordings in our backlog, and we'd always been interested in taking the next step in preserving them," Hawkinson said. When the grant became available, "we decided this would be the perfect marriage of that aspiration with bringing more attention to this historical person."

Hawkinson said a Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sermon is in the files. However, whether it's an original recording or a copy cannot be confirmed until the metadata is analyzed.

When Hawkinson and Meyer finish the work by the end of this year, the sermon will be available on North Park's archives website.