Law Library Introduces Black Freedom Struggle Collection.
From the webpage:

The Law Library, Davis Library and the Sonja Haynes Stone Center have just purchased rich digital collections of NAACP, federal government and other organization documents. The collections illuminate the African American struggle to attain equal rights after Reconstruction. Collections span the 1870s to the 1980s. The collections are:
- Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records
- Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers
They supplement current UNC collections of NAACP documents and complement another new collection documenting earlier struggles, Slavery & the Law, and the existing Southern Life and African American History, 1715-1915, Plantation Records. Slavery and the Law features petitions on race, slavery, and free blacks that were submitted to state legislatures and county courthouses between 1775 and 1867.
The collections are in ProQuest’s History Vault Collection. For more information, contact a law librarian at 919-962-1194.
ProQuest sales brochure for Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records and Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers.
I rather doubt that the UNC Law Library has purchased these collections but rather has secured access to members of its faculty and student body to these materials. Hence the access via the ProQuest History Vault Collection.
Like any good massa, ProQuest is going to make a return on its investment, even if that excludes black Americans, indeed, all Americans, from learning the history of race in American from primary sources. Or at least those members of the population who don’t have institutional access to the Proquest History Vault Collection.
What makes this particularly galling in this case is that the materials represent a history of struggling for freedom, a story that should be widely told. A story that is being suppressed as it were in the name of our current IP model in the United States.
If we are confined to the artifices of commercial exploitation currently in place, why doesn’t Congress, which has wasted $billions on aircraft that exhibit spontaneous combustion (long rumored about people but confirmed in the F-35), site license this resource for everyone in the United States?
That would eliminate the paperwork for every institution that wants to access this material, eliminate the paperwork for all those contracts for ProQuest, make the original sources of our racial history available to every person located in the United States, so where is the downside?
While we work on changing the pernicious and exploitative IP regime of the present day, let’s change the rules on site licensing and let the greed of ProQuest lead it into doing the right thing. I care nothing for their motives, so long as universal access is the result.