A police officer’s perspective of social unrest from over a half-century ago is now available to the public through Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library.
The 112 Richmond Police Department surveillance films, compiled by Detective Ricky Duling and acquired by VCU in 2017, stretch from 1962 to 1973 (the same year Duling would first give back to the community as Sergeant Santa) and capture the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement in Richmond; Lynchburg; and Washington, D.C. Although often out of focus, shaky and dimly lit, the footage was likely meant to track political activists. Today, it offers rare glimpses of antiwar protests at Monroe Park, memorials for Martin Luther King Jr., and local rallies against busing and fair housing.
Police surveillance film of Charles McLeod speaking at the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in Monroe Park (Image courtesy James Branch Cabell Library)
Charles McLeod, a founder of VCU’s first Black student organization, who is seen speaking at the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in Monroe Park, says the films have “a strange and eerie kind of silence [that] speaks volumes for those whose voices were limited back then.”
He adds, “I’m certainly proud of what the young people did during those years. Now it’s time for this generation to take up its responsibility to address issues that need to be addressed. In other words, the old folk can’t do it for you.”
The recordings capture more than contentious political moments. Officers can be seen giving judo and dive team demonstrations during Richmond Police Week in 1962, and there’s a look at flooding caused by Hurricane Camille in 1969, as well as a 1970 aerial survey of the city.
While the video files are in the public domain, recordings of private residences and businesses in the collection are not included with the other footage, which is archived at scholars compass.vcu.edu/rpd_films. Restoration and digitization were done by The MediaPreserve in Pennsylvania and made possible by a 2024 Recordings at Risk grant of $24,585 from the Council on Library & Information Resources.
“It’s incredible to have full-color footage of these events that we often see in black-and-white photographs,” says Irina Rogova, a digital initiatives librarian at VCU who annotated the films with the help of newspaper archives. “[It’s] not just humanizing; it brings history much closer than it feels usually, especially with the idea that a lot of these folks are still around, especially the college students in the footage.”
