The goals are:
1. To collect and archive CORE artifacts including documents, photos, film, posters, clothing, and other general paraphernalia. Part of this process includes creating oral histories using audio and/or video technology. All of this will be digitized as possible.

2. To formalize and make use of the CORE 'brain trust'. The surviving CORE members represent a collection of experts on the issues of race relations in America, education of non-Whites and activism in general, particularly non-violent direct action.

3. To encourage multi-media scholarship (i.e. historical research in the form of books, articles, documentaries, websites, music, etc.) so that the history of as many chapters as possible is told.

4. To create a support network for such scholarship, connect as much existing CORE scholarship as possible as well as scholarship already in the works.

The history of CORE includes both the civil rights and Black power aspects of CORE. It will stop at the attempt by James Farmer, Floyd McKissick and others to take back CORE from Roy Innis in the late 1970's, an effort which ended with the 1983 New York State Supreme Court decision which found that Innis was the legitimate head of CORE.

Board of Directors
Gordon Carey is the son of a Methodist minister who was a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and a chairman of a Michigan CORE chapter. Like many of the founding members of CORE, Gordon was a conscientious objector and served time for refusing to serve during the Korean War.
He went on to become the chairman of Pasadena CORE and then the national vice chairman. He also served as the program director for the national office in New York City and is credited with being the one to suggest doing the Freedom Rides in 1961. Along with Jim McCain and Marv Rich, he was part of the brain trust behind CORE's national director James Farmer.
He also worked closely with Farmer's successor, Floyd McKissick, as the general manager for McKissick's Soul City project.

Dr. Nishani Frazier received her B.A. from Spelman college and her PhD in history from Columbia University where was mentored by Prof. Manning Marable. She was an assistant to the noted historian John Hope Franklin, worked as an archivist and researcher for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Social Change and is currently an associate professor in the history department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Her mother worked on the Target City project and was a member of Cleveland CORE as were several members of her family who were in its Black Power group. Frazier also includes as members of her 'extended family' Ruth Turner (of the National Action Council), her husband Tony Perot (national program director) and national vice chairman and San Francisco CORE chairman Wilfred Ussery.

Frazier's research focuses on the history of Cleveland CORE:
- It is one of the first and oldest CORE chapters, founded and led by CORE founding member and first executive director George Houser.
- Houser was succeeded by Juanita Morrrow, who along with her husband Wally Nelson created the 'go limp' technique used in CORE demonstrations.
- Malcolm X delivered one of his most important and well known speeches, The Ballot or the Bullet, at a Cleveland CORE rally.
- The chapter played a central role in the election of Carl Stokes, the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city, an important moment in African-American history and a waypoint on the path to Obama.

L.E.J. Rachell is working to get a PhD in history, is the son of two members of Harlem CORE and neighbor to several others on the Lower East Side. His father specifically was in the Harlem CORE Black Power group with Roy Innis and later worked with Sonny Carson of Brooklyn CORE. Over the last few years, he has collected oral histories from and interviewed dozens of members of CORE including members of the national office and individual chapters throughout New York City. Examples of his video and other multi-media work can be seen
here.

contact - thecoreproject@yahoo.com


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