Access Amplified

Abstract

This article focuses on a 1968 documentary radio series titled Seeds of Discontent and a recently established archival collection that centers on it. Created by Hartford Smith Jr., a Black social worker and professor in Detroit, and distributed by the National Educational Radio Network, Seeds of Discontent started with his concern over mass media’s coverage of riots and the social problems that caused them. Through interviews with college student activists, families living in poverty, teachers frustrated by the failings of the education system, middle-class workers, incarcerated youth, and many others, Smith used the series to explore the roots of social problems facing the United States, with frequent attention to the challenges and experiences of Black people living in Detroit, as well as possible solutions. By speaking to the people affected by social problems instead of the experts usually consulted in mass media, Smith’s ethos of access emphasizes the idea that the distance between media organizations and media professionals and the public whose circumstances and histories are being mediated is limiting, exacerbating the impact of the already-sown seeds of discontent at the core of societal structural issues. More than 50 years later, this commitment to access continued as Smith requested that the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) make his collection broadly accessible. This article outlines Smith’s approach in Seeds of Discontent and the story of the collection as a case study on the possibilities and challenges of access in contemporary archives.