Pan African Solidarity Committee Physical Archives

Description: The personal archives of Robert F. Van Lierop, an African American political activist and filmmaker. The archive documents his activities as a political activist on behalf of liberation movements in Southern Africa and East Timor, as an independent filmmaker and television producer, and as the Permanent Representative of Vanuatu at the United Nations. Robert Van Lierop began his professional career in 1967 as an Assistant Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the areas of civil rights and school desegregation. He founded the Mozambique Film Project and traveled to Africa in 1971 and produced his first film on the struggle for independence in Mozambique, A Luta Continua based on footage shot inside the liberated areas. A second film, O Povo Organizado, was completed in 1976 after Mozambique’s independence. As co-producer of "Like It Is," a weekly black television new and documentary program, he produced several documentaries, including an analysis of the United Nations and a conference on Southern Africa. He also conducted two delegations of African-American activists and professionals to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Cuba in 1978 and 1979. The collection consists, for the most part, of correspondence, reports, memoranda, draft articles and speeches, research materials and printed matter. Organizations represented in the collection include: the American Committee on Africa, the Pan-African Solidarity Committee, and the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, a group that opposed Polaroid's and other American corporate investments in South Africa. More recent files relate to East Timor and its struggle against Indonesian aggression, to Zimbabwe and Vanuatu, and to the tenth Pan-African Festival of Cinema, held in Burkina Faso in 1987. Photographs separated to Photographs and Prints Division see Robert Van Lierop photograph collection . Films have been separated: A Luta Continua, see <a data-cke-saved-href="http://nypl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/14046128052_a_luta_continua target=" href="http://nypl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/14046128052_a_luta_continua target=" _blank"=""> A Luta continua and O Povo Organizado (The People Organized) see O Povo Organizado (Source: Schomburg finding aid/catalog record and Robert F. Van Lierop.)