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Temple University Public Radio, it's 9 o'clock, the FM News Journal Hour. Good evening, I'm Audrey Fowles. You're tuned into a special edition of the FM News Journal Hour. Tonight you will join thousands of listeners, including those who've gathered here at our studios, for the premiere of

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a jazz FM documentary. It's a story of a man who's made African American history his life's work. Stay tuned for Keeper of the Voice, the story of Ray Trent. Each year during African American History Month, the Jazz FM news staff look for people in our listening

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area who've made significant contributions to their community. Well, this year we found a New Jersey man who single-handedly chronicled the African American experience. Now it's my pleasure to present a Jazz FM documentary about that man. This is Keeper of the Voice, The Story of Ray Trent.

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Taping, I think, is really my life's work and trying to document the African American experience on audio cassette. Nothing other than death would stop me from completing this task. Don't give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being

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being first. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That is what I want you to do. He just doesn't have any sense that what he's doing is unusual or deserves unusual credit, and yet, his

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passion for this collection building in this project is highly unusual. Dead VC, Turner, Gabriel, dead Malcolm, Marcus, Martin Kane. They fought too hard. They loved too well. My crime is that I lived to tell. You're in the University of Pennsylvania's Biddle Law Library, hardly a place

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for passion, but behind the copy machines and stacks of old unintelligible books, through a door and down a narrow hall, past an office round a corner, and you enter the workspace of a man possessed by his first love. Ray Trent is a collector. I think I

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have a good representation of not only material in the African American experience, but in different areas such as Sorry Wrong Number, a Lobo and Silverspot, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the plays of Shakespeare, etc. etc. It really runs the

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gamut in terms of my overall interest in sound. Some people have interests, but with over 2000 recordings and a collection he is feverishly expanding, Ray Trent has an audio infatuation. The majority of his tapes are filled with the voices of African Americans. Plays, news reports, documentaries,

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and songs of an overlooked history. This oral anthology is a library in itself, and Ray is that library's owner and controller. In Biddle Law Library, though, Ray is a senior clerk in charge of bookbinding. Library director Elizabeth Kelly. Lots of people end up in jobs

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that they do and they do well and they do to support their families, and yet they have a serious avocation on the side. It's my impression that Ray puts a great deal of his own time and his own resources into the collections that

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he builds, and I think that puts him in an unusual category of collector. See, I saved my quarters. And I saved my dime. And when I get enough to buy a pack of cassette, I can buy a pack of 5 90s. Ray is married to

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Gwendolyn Trent. He'll go out and buy tape before he buys clothes. It's awful, you know, his shoes, his heels will go run down and it's, but it's tape. He loves taping. That's his main thing. And some people are just like that. You'll find

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collectors like that and their first love is whatever they have to collect. So that's what he does. He'll run out and he'll buy the tape first. And then I'm caught running out getting whatever he needs, a pair of socks, you know, I have to

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thorn them up sometimes for him. What changes a casual interest into a passion which overshadows basic needs? Ray says he doesn't know how his obsession for recording developed, and yet he speaks of his childhood in terms of sound. I grew up with the radio and it

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was really a great experience because at that time I used to serve newspapers and when I would finish serving newspapers I would rush home to listen to my favorite stories like Jack Armstrong, All American Boy, Captain Midnight, etc. etc. Ray grew up in the 40s, a

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decade when the radio was a family's companion and television just a fascinating contraption in store windows. The Trent family lived in Darby, Pennsylvania, a small town close enough to Philadelphia to catch strains of the city's jazz. Ray listened to musicians like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and

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Dizzy Gillespie. When the radio was off, Ray would explore his neighborhood with the other kids. They found a treasure down on the corner. There was a man we called Chief, and he would tell us stories about the African American experience and we were basically

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spellbound because we'd never heard of material like this because basically you weren't getting it in high school. You were taught that you were a slave and there were only 3 blacks of note that you were taught about. That was Frederick Douglass, Booker T.

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Washington, and George Washington Carver. That was it. I think it's high time that the Negroes and other people in this country who believe in rights, say you either pass civil rights legislation or all right, let's slow the country down. Lessons in black history were fast becoming

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an everyday occurrence for Ray. His generation listened as leaders like NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall called for changes in the way the US government treated African Americans. Ray was a freshman at Cheyney State College the day Marshall won his greatest victory. I do remember May 17th

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1954, the Brown versus the Board of Education decision and one of the professors went running up and down the campus talking about this decision about Brown v. Board of Education and separate but equal declared unconstitutional in education, etc. etc. and I

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guess I didn't pay much attention to it. Ray says he wasn't active in the civil rights movement because he had a one-track mind focused on a two-track web core tape recorder. Basically I would record a little bit of everything. Things from radio, television, music,

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drama. I would dub material from records, etc. etc. even tried to read poetry. I used to write verse when I was in college and I would get a little background and read my poetry onto tape and listen to it. As

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I gaze across the college campus, I cannot help being captivated by the variegated splendor that engulfs the lovely blanket of green grass. I see the robins with their lovely red breasts and the beautiful trees with their colored leaves and outstretched limbs. This setting I feel could

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be likened unto God as He saunters in His heavenly flower garden in a feeble attempt to capture the depth of my impression. I feel that I have been permitted to scratch the surface of nature's wondrous enchantment. For this benignity, I shall be eternally grateful. Ray graduated

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from Cheyney in 1958 with an elementary education degree. He tried teaching, but his heart wasn't in it. A 20-year-old Philadelphian named Gwendolyn discovered Ray and his real love at the same time. Our first date, believe it or not, was at Sam Goody's. Uh, that was our

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first date. He took me in. He took me downtown and he wanted to show me Sam Goody's. So that's what we looked at. He would show me different things or different equipment. Different tapes, different records at that time. They had hoards of records and since I'm

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into classical music myself, that was all right to go in, but I'm not an addict like he is, not to stay in a store like that. I wouldn't say it was so romantic. He was so wound up and involved in the story, he almost

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forgot I was there. Ray began helping Gwendolyn build her classical music collection. Two years later they were married. Now I don't mean to say my dear I must I have money to the extreme just give me a lot of love and care for and I won't ask more for you. It's gotta be that way. There have been others in Ray's generation who've dedicated their lives to gathering and

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preserving African American history. One is Charles Blockson. His collection housed at Temple University includes over 40,000 documents. I admit, and I know my mission because I realized early, whereas most people perhaps would say what will I do in life? Will I go to college?

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Will I go to the service? Will I become this and all that? I learned from an early age, so it was always a part of me, whereas with Ray, it sort of snuck up upon him. Only when I got to the university here in 1966 did

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I really discover the importance of collecting material and really documenting it. And discovering how important it was because you were around all these great collections. Ray's haphazard taping changed dramatically when he began work as a library clerk at the University of Pennsylvania. He started typing out

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labels for his reels, cataloging his cassettes, and slowly a focus emerged. Ray decided to become a curator of the African American spoken word. His first recording in this new collection was a 1974 play by the Sudanese author Khalid Al Mubarak Mustafa. Do I have to remind

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you that his father was killed in a mutiny against the British armies of occupation? That was a quarter of a century ago. Many a sand dune has shifted places then. Many a sand dune. There is no army of occupation now. We have a flag, a national

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anthem, and a seat in the United Nations. That doesn't alter the fact that my son is deserting his own country and settling in the land of the people who killed his own father. Every day, every night, Ray ran his tape recorder. He was there to capture

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the voice of a tennis star in 1976, Arthur Ashe. I think logically it's up to each athlete to decide whether he indeed wants to involve himself in any political overtures, but I've chosen to do that and my area of interest is almost strictly South Africa. Ray taped as Phil Donahue interviewed a

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young preacher from Chicago in 1977, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. You know, as well as good as you are, as good a communicator as you are, bet you would have one heck of a time getting the attention of 40 sophomores in high school today in any neighborhood.

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Well, many people do get the attention of more than 40, and sometimes people get the attention of thousands, but what method do they use to get it? Basically now it's radio and television. And inasmuch as that art form has so much power, it must accept responsibility.

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Ray didn't limit his collection to contemporary programming. He scoured secondhand record stores for rare speeches, music, and performance art. He found Maya Angelou reading her poetry on a 1969 recording. He went to being called a colored man after answering to, Hey ***, now that's a big

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jump any way you figure. Hey baby, watch my smoke. *** *** shouldn't be scared of evolution because nothing would change. And all *** do is change. The white man destroyed your life. Destroyed our knowledge of our culture and by having destroyed it, now we don't know we have any achievement, any accomplishments, and as long as

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you can be convinced that you never did anything, you can never do anything. Ray's anthology had grown to include thousands of voices. Malcolm X and Dr. King lived secretly on tapes in Ray's New Jersey apartment. In 1978, Ray felt it was time for other people to hear them, so he approached

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Howard University's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. They enthusiastically agreed to house a collection in Ray's name, the Trent Collection. For the next 6 years, Ray sent his life's work to the institute. My wife said, whatever you do, don't send the originals. Send dubs. Maybe my

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wife saw something that I didn't see. But I listened to her. In the mid-eighties, Ray took a trip down to Washington to see his work at the Institute. But once on Howard University's campus, he was told the Institute no longer existed. No one knew anything

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about the Trent collection. He went home devastated. For him, he was just so hurt the bottom had dropped. That he put a lot of work in that. He would just send boxes and boxes. He would get together things. He sent things up there that

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he can't get back again. And I don't think he ever got over up there. Collector Charles Blockson. He was depressed and disillusioned. Almost a broken man at that moment when it occurred back in the early 80s, but I told him that he must continue.

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I didn't want to see anything at all involving the African-American experience because somehow I felt as though someone should have told me what was going on and I just found that it was almost too much to take. Ray spent a long time

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recovering from that blow. His enthusiasm for collecting cooled, and he resigned himself to daily work at Biddle Law Library. It was too late for him to hide though. The law students were on to Ray's expertise. Cassandra Jones Havard was one of the students then. There are

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not a lot of Black law library professionals there, so he stands out for that reason, and then he was a person who was always scurrying around with his books under his arms, so you're kind of curious about who is this person. I don't know

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if you, you know how he looks, but he looks real studious with his horn-rimmed glasses and all, so, but I noticed that there was a steady amount of traffic of young, mostly Black law students beating a path to his door. Library director Elizabeth Kelly. He

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seemed to be more than usual in his dedication to helping minority law students find material relevant for projects they had. Researching really any aspect of Afro-Americans and the law. Kelly questioned Ray about his proficiency when she discovered his passion for collecting, she decided to try it

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out in Biddle. The offer she made was enough to inspire Ray back into action. And so he began the Raymond F. Trent Collection on the Black Lawyer in America. Tonight On Target examines the discrimination inherent in the United States judicial system as we take a close

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look at how the law itself contributed to inflicting injustice on millions of Americans solely on the basis of their color. The passion was back. Ray was even ready to once again give away his personal collection. He turned to his friend Charles Blockson. He said, I want

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to donate some of my tape recordings to your collection. I said well it would be an honor for me, you know, I would like to reciprocate and name the Raymond Trent Oral History Collection which is a part of the Blockson in honor of

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you. So he was, he was pleased. So this is how it has continued. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind, but I

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just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say. If I can help somebody. The people I happen to help, started passing the word around. If you're looking for something, you'll have to see this Trent fellow and he'll

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help you. And just like the little sign up there says, I shall pass this way, but once therefore any good that I can do or any kindness that I can show, let me do it now, for I shall not pass this way again. And

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that's pretty much really my philosophy of life. If you tell him you're interested we'll say in knitting, it's something simple, and he may go out and buy you a lot of yarn and different. He'll buy, he's not going to buy you just black, blue, and green.

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He's going to buy you the whole gamut, yellow and fuchsia and magenta and white and then he's going to buy you different size knitting needles and that's the way he is and then he'll come back well how is your knitting coming along, you know, so

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he's that's the way he goes about helping people. My name is Lynn Washington Junior. I'm the executive editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, which is the oldest continuously publishing Black owned newspaper in America, and I just am thankful that. Ray Trent is available to a person

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like me. I'm glad that he's there at the university and I can pick up the phone and dial the number and say, Yo, Ray, I need something. When can you get it to me? And I get it. Better than Federal Express. He's not only extremely

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knowledgeable in this area, but he's kind of a remarkable human being as well, and he wouldn't like to hear us talking about him like that. But in fact, the way he treats other people, the way he does his work, the way he shares his

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knowledge with people who are interested and his very unassuming manner are something I think we can all learn from. It's a lesson in passion how one man's love for a tape recorder became the nation's treasury of the African American spoken word. Now Ray Trent has become

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a part of that history. This evening he will record a program about himself.