









































375

Sunday Sounds
Preserving the Radio Ministry of Brooklyn’s 
Bethany Baptist Church
Colleen Bradley-Sanders, Brooklyn College

ABSTR AC T Rev. Dr. William Augustus Jones, Jr. was pastor of Brook-
lyn’s Bethany Baptist Church for over forty years and a significant 
figure in the African-American community. In the mid-1970s New 
Jersey radio station WFME approached him with an offer to have 
his Sunday sermons broadcast as The Bethany Hour in the New York, 
New Jersey, and Connecticut markets. Brooklyn College Archives 
has the Jones collection, which contains cassette recordings of 
several hundred of these sermons, as well as video recordings from 
the program’s short time on broadcast television. With no playback 
equipment for patrons, and concerned about the physical integ-
rity of the recordings, the Archives decided to digitize the materi-
als. With a tight budget and no digitization expertise on staff, the 
Archives applied for and won a Council on Library and Informa-
tion Resources Recordings-at-Risk grant.  Despite some delays due 
to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project was made available to the 
public at the end of March 2021.

I’m going to tell you about how the Archives at Brooklyn College 
handled what was for us a large audio-visual collection, in a setting 
with limited capacity for patrons to watch or listen to such materi-
als.  First, a little background.

For the past fifty years, archivists have heeded the call of historian 
Howard Zinn, who challenged the profession to document the lives, 
needs, and desires of ordinary people, to look beyond the traditional 
and narrow focus on official records and “important” people.  Docu-
menting the lives of underrepresented groups such as religious and 
ethnic minorities became part of the focus in our overwhelmingly 
White profession, although African-Americans have been document-
ing their own history since before the Civil War.   

At Brooklyn College, we document diversity not only through 
collecting the records of our faculty and alumni, but also through 
acquiring the archives of people and organizations in the multicul-



376  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

tural borough of Brooklyn. One such collection is that of the Rev. Dr. 
William Augustus Jones, Jr.

A native of Kentucky, Rev. Jones became the pastor at Brooklyn’s 
Bethany Baptist Church in 1962 and remained there for 43 years 
until his retirement in 2005. He was a respected figure not only in 
his community, but around the world. He preached at St. Patrick’s 
Cathedral in New York City, the International Congress on Preach-
ing in Scotland, and at the first All-Asian Baptist Church Congress in 
India.  He taught pastoral courses at a number of seminaries, includ-
ing Colgate Rochester Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary 
in New York City, and Princeton Theological Seminary, among others.

A tireless champion for economic and social justice, Jones 
co-founded the Progressive National Baptist Convention with Dr. 
Martin Luther King, Jr., succeeded Rev. Jesse Jackson as chair of the 
Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbas-
ket, led local boycotts against businesses that discriminated against 
African Americans, and used his ministry as a platform to encourage 
his congregation to participate in political elections and the broader 
social movements in the country. A prominent figure who gave 
invited talks throughout the U.S. and the world, he was approached 
by New Jersey radio station WFME in 1975 with an offer to broad-
cast his weekly Sunday sermon. The sermons were recorded at the 
church, and the tapes were then taken to the station for broadcast-
ing the following week, under the name The Bethany Hour. While 
these transmissions were initially limited to audiences in the Tri-
state area (that’s New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut), Jones’s 
recorded sermons were soon distributed to stations in other parts 
of the country and heard by thousands of listeners throughout the 
nation. The program continued into the early 2000s.

Through a connection with Brooklyn College student Kojo Davis, 
a member of Rev. Jones’ congregation, the Brooklyn College Archives 
acquired the papers of Rev. Jones as a donation from his family. 
Davis was a student of Africana Studies professor Lynda Day, who 
contacted the archive after Jones’s death in 2006 about the possibil-
ity of us accepting his papers.  Jones’s family felt the Archives’ focus 
on Brooklyn history made it a good fit for this collection, since the 
reverend’s ministry had been centered in Brooklyn for over forty 
years. The collection contains records of Jones’s church and commu-
nity activities, and over 700 recordings of The Bethany Hour as well 
as a few other sermons by Jones. The recordings are on audiocas-



Listen and Learn Sessions  377

sette, quarter-inch audio tape, VHS, and Betamax videotape. None 
of them are masters.

The collection was acquired as part of a conscious effort to docu-
ment the lives of everyday individuals traditionally underrepre-
sented in mainstream archives, and in recognition of its historical 
and cultural value. There is a responsibility that goes along with 
accepting a collection – to not only provide access to it, but also 
to ensure its preservation. However, despite the Jones collection’s 
appropriateness for the Archives’ collecting mission, the staff’s 
limited experience working with audiovisual records, particu-
larly digitizing them, a limited budget, and concern about patrons 
using the original cassettes and videotapes posed challenges for the 
adequate care of, and patron access to, the recordings. 

Although the initial processing of the collection had some defi-
ciencies, it was opened to researchers in 2008, with the exception of 
the audio-visual materials. These deficiencies, including unnecessary 
retention of non-archival artifacts (such as Rev. Jones’ straw hat) and 
lack of any detailed information regarding the recordings, led to my 
decision to order reprocessing of the collection in 2018. Since assum-
ing my position at Brooklyn College in 2015, my main priorities have 
been to reduce the backlog of unprocessed collections and make 
materials more easily available to researchers. For certain collec-
tions, such as Jones’s, this meant digitizing some materials, which, 
given the Archives’ budget situation, meant securing outside funding. 

In order to write a successful grant application, I had to make a 
valid argument as to the research value of the collection, and part of 
developing that argument meant researching what collections of this 
type already existed.  The answer was surprisingly few.  There are 
countless entertainment or sports-related recordings, but everyday 
religious services are hard to find. 

We believe this collection offers opportunities for study not only 
to seminary students, but scholars in political science, history and 
other humanities disciplines examining the topics of the social gospel, 
the interplay of Christianity and social justice, the intersection of 
politics and religion, and the relationship between Evangelical faith 
and social action, to name a few. While there is considerable interest 
in the Christian right and White evangelicals, the history of Black 
evangelicals, often progressive and forward thinking, is not as well-
known and appreciated.



378  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

SECURING GRANT FUNDING

As I mentioned, the Bethany Hour recordings, none of which are 
master copies, date to 1975, and their storage media had reached or 
long exceeded their projected lifespans. Due to their age, we were 
concerned about playing the audio cassettes and VHS tapes, and 
we did not even have the capacity for playing the Betamax tapes or 
quarter-inch audio reels. 

Preserving them for future use was critical, so we applied for a 
CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) Recordings-
at-Risk grant because of the program’s focus on digitizing rare and 
unique audiovisual materials with strong research value. The grant 
limit of $50,000 was perfect for our project. While I developed my 
argument as to the significance of the materials, we also inventoried 
them to support future metadata creation and to identify duplicate 
recordings or recordings unrelated to The Bethany Hour or other 
sermons by Jones. 

Granting agencies want to know how you’re going to make 
potential users aware of the project they’re funding, so as I worked 
on the grant application, I contacted Christine Fruin at Atla. At 
first it was to see if Atla would be interested in linking to the digi-
tized materials, and then I sought advice on how to estimate the 
time needed for the various steps of digitizing, creating metadata, 
and uploading the files.  We planned to hire a Project Archivist 
and had to calculate the salary for the grant application. Christy 
Karpinski was very helpful with that aspect of our application. 
As we worked together, Christine suggested adding the collection 
information to the Atla Digital Library, which would point users 
back to Illumira.net, the site hosting the college’s digital audio and 
video content.  Atla would harvest the metadata from Illumira. To 
facilitate this Christy asked that we use the Qualified Dublin Core 
metadata schema.

I solicited digitization proposals from three vendors and ended 
up selecting Iron Mountain based on their ability to meet all 
requirements related to media formats and digital file specifica-
tions, their cost estimate, and their strong reputation. The digitiza-
tion and Project Archivist costs resulted in a grant request for just 
over $41,000. Letters of support came from two Brooklyn College 
professors who had used documents from the Jones collection, and 
the retired President of Colgate Rochester Crozier Divinity School. 



Listen and Learn Sessions  379

They wrote about Jones’s influence and helped define for the fund-
ing agency the importance of the collection and why digitization 
was required to provide complete access. We emphasized in the 
application that although the Archives do hold Jones’s papers, there 
are very few extant transcripts of the sermons, and therefore to 
know what this man said to his congregants requires one to listen 
to the recordings. Although we were limited to three letters of 
support, in my argument for the research value of the collection 
I did incorporate some thoughts from the then-President of the 
NY Theological Seminary, Dale Irvin, who said, quote “Rev. Jones 
is under-recognized in the wider scholarship of the history of the 
Civil Rights movement precisely because he is under-recognized 
for his preaching.” His sermons have been included in books on 
both preaching (Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of Afri-
can American Sermons, 1750 to the Present) and civil rights (Civil 
Rights Voice for the Oppressed: The Story of Rev. John L. Scott). Scott’s 
book opens with an acknowledgement of the impact Rev. Jones’ 
preaching had in advancing the Civil Rights movement. Dr. Irvin 
also noted that Jones’ preaching style was remarked upon more so 
than the content of his sermons. Our project to make Jones’ words 
accessible addresses that hole in the scholarship of both preaching 
and the Civil Rights movement.  

We did decide to digitize one non-sermon. It is a 1983 interview 
from the television show “Way to Go” with Rev. Jones and a Rev. 
Darryl George. The host, Dr. James P. Carse, interviews Jones and 
George about the connection between social and economic issues 
and the teachings of the church. They also discuss the history of 
Bethany Baptist Church as well as Jones’ history of activism includ-
ing Operation Breadbasket.

Our first grant application was denied in April 2019, but the 
reviewers felt the project was a worthwhile endeavor and encour-
aged us to reapply during the next funding cycle. The main areas of 
the application that needed strengthening were the technical details 
of the digitization, proving Brooklyn College had the right to put the 
sermons online (which was stated in the original application), and 
revising the original plan to discard the physical recordings once 
digitized. The plan to discard the originals was an error on my part, 
due to lack of familiarity with AV collections, and a desire to create 
some more space in a very crowded archive. We easily addressed the 
reviewers’ technical concerns and resubmitted the application. The 



380  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

technical concerns included questions about sampling frequency 
for the audio, the parameters for the video digitization, specifi-
cally the pixel dimensions, wrapper, and whether the digital files 
would retain the resolution of the source materials, and also if the 
specifications were adequate for long-term sustainability. We were 
awarded a grant in October 2019. Project work began in December 
2019 with the plan to digitize and make publicly accessible over 700 
sermons by October 2020. Given the kind of year 2020 turned out 
to be, it should not surprise anyone that the target completion date 
was later pushed back by six months after we requested an exten-
sion from CLIR. 

In some ways we were fortunate with the timing of the project. 
Preliminary work in capturing metadata and preparing the materi-
als for shipment was completed in January 2020, and the recordings 
were shipped to Iron Mountain well before Brooklyn College shut 
down in mid-March last year. 

We received digitized samples in February 2020 for quality 
control checks, found them to be good, and gave the go-ahead to 
finish the project.  We had expected to receive the completed files in 
early May, even with a handful requiring some remediation (repair 
of tapes snapped during playback or separated from the supply/take 
up reels in the cassette shell), but instead we found ourselves in a 
global pandemic that brought people’s work and personal lives to a 
near stand-still. 

March 12, 2020, was unexpectedly our last day at work on the 
BC campus. We had no idea that after leaving work on the twelfth 
the Archives staff would not be back on campus for nearly two 
years, with the exception of very few visits by myself and the Asso-
ciate Archivist. While there will be a limited staff presence in the 
fall of 2021, Brooklyn College is not expected to return to full staff-
ing until late January 2022. The Archives will only have one person 
on campus per day in the fall, and research appointments will be 
two days per week by appointment only, and restricted to Brooklyn 
College faculty, staff, and students.  Iron Mountain’s Pennsylvania 
location meant they were also affected by that state’s shutdown. 
However, despite the challenges of working remotely, the staff at 
Iron Mountain were able to complete the digitization work for us 
by late June 2020.



Listen and Learn Sessions  381

New York City was in terrible shape in the spring of 2020, and our 
Project Archivist took the opportunity to move to Georgia. We also 
employ her as a part-time staff member, so while she waited for the 
digital files from Iron Mountain, she worked on other projects for us.  
By the end of June, the Project Archivist was able to start work on 
uploading all the files to the Illumira site. There are approximately 
1,100 recordings, as Sides A and B of an audio cassette were digitized 
as individual files.  In addition to creating the metadata and upload-
ing the files, the Project Archivist continues to write short abstracts 
of each recording, to aid researchers in quickly understanding the 
general content of a sermon. Because most of the recordings are 
full Sunday services, the abstracts also note the starting time for the 
actual sermons.

IMPACTS OF THE PANDEMIC

The biggest impacts of the pandemic on the project were the nearly 
two-month delay in receiving the digital files and the complete lack 
of access to the Brooklyn College campus. The lack of access to the 
campus affected many aspects of the project, which slowed down and 
interrupted the workflow. The Project Archivist worked remotely, 
using a personal laptop computer rather than the computer in the 
Archives. The smaller screen and her desk and chair setup were less 
comfortable, which made a difference when doing a large amount 
of data entry. Her internet service was not as robust and reliable as 
that at the college, which increased the time needed to upload the 
video and audio files.

The inability to work onsite at the Archives also slowed down 
response times when the Project Archivist had questions. She was set 
to have a training session with the library staff member responsible 
for managing the library’s digital platform, but the College shutdown 
on March 13 prevented the training from taking place. Subsequently, 
the same staff member was extraordinarily busy assisting faculty 
during the spring and summer with the transition to remote teaching 
and putting course materials on Blackboard, and so was slower to 
respond to her inquiries about uploading files and using the platform. 
That situation continued until the end of the project in March 2020. 
Questions for the Archivist on project specifics had to be answered 
via email or phone, rather than a quick in-person office visit. 



382  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

Once the Project Archivist received the hard drive with the digi-
tized recordings, she checked the digital files against the list of physi-
cal recordings, and discovered a few missing, which the vendor took 
care of and sent to her. 

These delays prompted us to request a time extension from CLIR 
in August 2020. They gave us a standard six-month extension. One 
non-pandemic related slowdown was the need to put all the meta-
data into a CSV file in addition to entering it into our digital platform. 

In working with Atla to ensure she was capturing the metadata 
required for the Digital Library, the Project Archivist and Christy 
Karpinski tested whether the college’s platform would support OAI-
PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, a 
mechanism for repository interoperability) for the data harvesting, 
and unfortunately it does not which meant the creation of a spread-
sheet for the metadata. The Illumira platform also does not permit 
uploading of metadata by CSV; each field must be filled individually, 
by typing or copy and paste from a spreadsheet. Some reformatting 
of the CSV data was necessary to get it to conform to the require-
ments of Atla’s system, but the problems were quickly resolved in 
consultation with Atla.

The results of the project can be seen on the Illumira site, which hosts 
the Archives’ digital content: 
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/showcollection.php?pid=njcore:169222

The home page of the Brooklyn College Archives on the Illumira 
platform shows all of the Archives’ digital resources, not just the 
1,125 of the Jones Collection. One of the limitations of this platform 
is that we cannot separate different collections other than as can be 
seen on the right of the home page in the listing of “sub-collections.” 
The search function will find the search term in either a title or an 
abstract. For example, searching the term Martin pulls up three 
results, one of them a sermon titled No Greater Love. 

Search results:  
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/search.php?query=Martin&orgquery

=Martin&cname=njcore%3A168116

https://brooklyn.illumira.net/showcollection.php?pid=njcore:169222
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/search.php?query=Martin&orgquery=Martin&cname=njcore%3A168116
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/search.php?query=Martin&orgquery=Martin&cname=njcore%3A168116


Listen and Learn Sessions  383

“No Greater Love”  
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/show.php?pid=njcore:180838

The abstract shows this sermon is about the death and funeral of 
Martin Luther King, Jr. The episode is from Jan 27, 2002.  This one 
is a video. The bulk of the recordings are audio only, but in its later 
years The Bethany Hour moved from radio to television, so we have 
some video. 

Under the attachments tab is a link to a PDF transcript of the 
recording:
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/streamer.php?pid=njcore: 
180838&ds=SUPP-1

The transcripts are not part of the grant deliverables.  As we 
worked on the application, and communicated with the Jones family 
about the project, they offered to contribute some money to it. Since 
there are almost no paper copies of the sermons in Rev. Jones’ papers, 
I immediately thought of adding sermon transcripts to the collection 
to make it easier for researchers to study them. I told the family that 
as we got to the stage of the project where transcripts could be made, 
we could talk further about a donation.

When the college shut down last year, I wondered how in the 
world I’d keep my staff busy. Archival work is very hands-on, even 
when digitizing content. Well, among other projects, we figured out 
a way to have people work on sermon transcriptions from home. 
One staff member worked out the process for using YouTube to 
automatically generate a transcript of an uploaded file, and then 
how to transfer that transcript to a Word document for editing. She’s 
responsible for doing that for each sermon as it’s assigned to a staff 
member. Our Associate Archivist created a style sheet and coordi-
nates the assignment of transcripts, while the Project Archivist adds 
them to the related recording on Illumira. 

It seems odd to say this, but COVID-19 actually had a silver lining 
for our Archives. We’ve initiated projects that would either not have 
been started or been worked on at a much slower pace due to other 
demands on our time. As we started the different projects to keep our 
staff busy and employed, supervisors from other library units asked 
if we had any work their part-time staff (mostly students) could do.  

https://brooklyn.illumira.net/show.php?pid=njcore:180838
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/streamer.php?pid=njcore:180838&ds=SUPP-1
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/streamer.php?pid=njcore:180838&ds=SUPP-1


384  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

We have provided work for up to ten part-time staffers from other 
units during the past fifteen months, although the transcript project 
has only recently been assigned to them. It’s a large task that will be 
ongoing for quite a while. On the plus side for the project, the library 
staff will only be partially in person through mid-January 2022, so 
we have several more months of remote workers needing something 
to do from home. Transcript editing is perfectly suited for remote 
work. In addition, the Jones family has followed through with their 
promise of a donation to support the project, so we will be re-hiring 
the Project Archivist, who knows the collection best, to also work on 
the transcripts. 

One of Rev. Jones’ daughters, Jennifer Jones Austin, has recently 
republished a book of her father’s sermons, God in the Ghetto: A 
Prophetic Word Revisited, with essays from several notable leaders, 
including Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. William J. Barber II. For Mrs. 
Austin’s book launch events, we are providing her with clips from 
two of the digitized sermons, and she will promote the digital archive 
at the same time. 

Two of the clips requested by Mrs. Austin were from the sermon 
“The Flag and the Cross.” We do not have a date for this recording, but 
it is sometime during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.  In the sermon, 
Jones urges the church and all Christians to stop turning a blind eye 
to the sins of the state, and he mentions the need to pledge allegiance 
to the cross instead of the flag. 

The first clip is from 27:38-30:13 of this recording:
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/show.php?pid=njcore:179263

The second clip is from 13:18-16:20 of this recording:
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/show.php?pid=njcore:179258

In addition to the Illumira site and the Atla Digital Library (https://
dl.atla.com/), researchers can discover and access the sermons 
from the Archives’ website (https://libguides.brooklyn.cuny.edu/c.
php?g=1135687). This page has links to the Illumira page, an example 
of a sermon with a transcript, and also a link to the finding aid for 
the entire Jones collection (https://archives.brooklyn.cuny.edu/
repositories/2/resources/2). 

Once you click on the finding aid link, on the right you can see 
last sub-group of materials is called Digital Files. This subgroup 
divides the sermons into video or audio recordings, and clicking on 

https://brooklyn.illumira.net/show.php?pid=njcore:179263
https://brooklyn.illumira.net/show.php?pid=njcore:179258
https://dl.atla.com/
https://dl.atla.com/
https://libguides.brooklyn.cuny.edu/c.php?g=1135687
https://libguides.brooklyn.cuny.edu/c.php?g=1135687
https://archives.brooklyn.cuny.edu/repositories/2/resources/2
https://archives.brooklyn.cuny.edu/repositories/2/resources/2


Listen and Learn Sessions  385

a title will open the file.  Under Scope and Contents there is a link 
to the recording in Illumira. For example, click on “Keep the Fire 
Burning”: https://archives.brooklyn.cuny.edu/repositories/2/archi-
val_objects/12765

 The collection is cataloged in the CUNY catalog and is in WorldCat.
Although not one of the grant deliverables, we planned on having 

an exhibit and formal launch event for the collection. At present 
these will have to wait for the Brooklyn College Campus to fully 
reopen, hopefully in Spring 2022.

I hope you will share this new digital resource with your library 
patrons.

https://archives.brooklyn.cuny.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/12765
https://archives.brooklyn.cuny.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/12765

