GRIFFITH J. DAVIS PAPERS. 475 items
Films and photographs of Atlantan Griffith J. Davis, U.S. Technical Assistant to Liberia
and agent to the Liberian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Among the negatives,
films, and videotapes that form the core of this collection are images of Charlotte Hawkins
Brown and the Palmer Memorial Institute, a private junior and senior high school for blacks
in Sedalia, North Carolina. Also included are documentary and personal films shot in Liberia
in the 1950s; among them a birthday party for the daughter of a middle-class family, a film
on Liberian industry and life narrated by Sidney Poitier and funded by the U.S. Point IV
program, and shots of Liberian masquerades and stilt dancers. Collection also contains
Griffith's recording of William Tubman's presidential inaugural. Contact sheets feature
Liberian masks—many from the Dan—and stills of Liberian men and women.
(Complemented by the library's George Way Harley Papers and the Duke Museum of Art's Harley
collection of Liberian Art.)
