It was a busy Black History Month at ARCMTL!

You can bear witness to the rich cultural history of diverse Afro-Montreal communities by checking out some of what we’ve added to our websites and programming in 2024.

First of all, there is our collaboration with the Afromusée  for which can check out all sorts of photos, archives and transcripts of presentations held since 2022 on our new website Nights of Montreal. All of the transcriptions are available in both English and French. Highlights include Montreal soul and disco legend Pierre Perpall; legendary owner of the Black Bottom jazz club Charles Burke; early Montreal hip-hop pioneer Butcher T. and longtime CKUT radio host and Caribbean community figure Howard “Stretch” Carr. The website also features an interview with Montreal dance legend Ethel Bruneau, and its home page features an interactive map showing places important to the city’s nightlife and diverse Afro-cultures.

Also, every week ARCMTL hosts the  Montreal Sound Ark radio show on CKUT, 90.3 FM.

To help mark the 50^th anniversary of hip-hop, we hosted these special shows from January 12, January 19 and January 26 playing Montreal hip hop from the 1980s to 2000s. Going back a few decades, you can hear soul, rnb and funk legends from Montreal on this episode from February 9.

Lastly, ARCMTL ha besen busy working alongside the CIDIHCA (Le centre international de documentation et d’information haitienne, caribéenne et afro-canadienne) digitizing hundreds of rare archival materials, including many Montreal magazines and periodicals that can now be accessed in the ARCMTL collection on the Internet archive here. This is part of a collaboration between the CIDIHCA and ARCMTL made possible in part by Library and Archives Canada.