Archive

In October 1978 a group of clerical workers at Tufts united in an effort to organize their coworkers with Local 925, S.E.I.U. Isolated and scattered across campus, the clerical employees at the university greeted this call to unionize with support, hoping it would mean an improvement in salaries and in grievance procedures. By the summer of the following year, 60% of eligible employees signed authorization cards, more than required to vote on the issue, and an election early that fall was expected. Tufts administration, however, delayed the election by disputing the composition of the bargaining unit. Formal hearings took place from September through the end of the year, but instead of resolving the case, the Boston Labor Board referred it to Washington on January 25, 1980. Nine months later the election was finally held, but the results were not what were anticipated more than a year earlier. Rather than an easy victory to unionize, the majority of clerical staff at Tufts voted not to make Local 925 their exclusive bargaining representative. The administration’s anti-union campaign waged throughout 1979 and 1980 had a tremendous impact on the employees at the university, and a number of concessions made on wages, health insurance, and vacations further eroded support for organizing with Local 925.

The collection documents the efforts of Tufts clerical workers to unionize during 1978-1980. The group’s biweekly newsletter, Inside Tufts, written by the university’s employees and published by Local 925, offers an important behind-the-scenes look on two fronts: the issues and grievances of the clerical staff at Tufts and the reasons behind their decision to unionize. Materials relating to the efforts of other Boston-area institutions, in particular colleges and universities, are also included.

The town of Shutesbury was founded as “Roadtown” in 1735 and was incorporated as a town in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1761. The town celebrated its 250th Anniversary in 2011 and planned a year’s worth of events, lectures, and celebrations.

This collection comprises the flyers and notes for several of these events and includes commemorative albums and town histories. A perfect example of a small New England town, these materials are a snapshot of the history of Shutesbury and a celebration of the town’s legacy.

A member of the Post War World Council, an ardent pacifist, and anti-imperialist, Stephen Siteman was a long-time member of the Socialist Party of America, serving for seventeen years as secretary to the party’s leader Norman Thomas. In his late teens, Siteman was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II. Although he was later pardoned, his time as a prisoner led him into active involvement in prison reform and the peace movement.

During his long involvement in the Socialist Party, Siteman collected a large quantity of material relating to important socialist issues, including Socialist Reform, the peace movement, conscientious objection, and prison reform. The collection also includes a small selection of Siteman’s personal correspondence with Frank Zeidler, former Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, and the novelist Mark Harris.

View the printed items

Born in Detroit in 1930, Audrey Smedley was the oldest daughter of Ulysses and Mattie Smedley. After attending Detroit Public School, Smedley earned a B.A. in the history, letters, and law program (1954) and a M.A. in anthropology with a concentration in history (1957) from the University of Michigan. Smedley pursued her Ph.D. at the University of Manchester (1967) where she investigated the social and economic structure of the Birom in Northern Nigeria. Known for her research into the history of “race,” a concept she argued emerged in the Americas to justify slavery, Smedley published widely on the topic including her award-winning book Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (1993). She began her teaching career at Wayne State University and Oakland University, went on to teach at Binghampton University, retiring in 1995, before becoming a professor of anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she retired a second time in 2002. Smedley was the co-founder of the Museum of Afro-American History in Detroit and the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a fellow of the American Association of Science and winner of the Delta Award for Excellence in Afro-American History and Anthropology. Smedley died on October 14, 2020, in Beltsville, Maryland at the age of 90.

The Audrey Smedley Papers features an extensive collection of research materials and notes, drafts of articles and books, professional correspondence, and teaching files. Smedley’s filed notes related to her work in Birom are included as are drafts of her award-winning book, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview.

Born in Grinnell, Iowa on July 14, 1914, to Eva Craig and Lee Augustus Renfrow, Edith Renfrow Smith was the first African American woman to graduate from Grinnell College in 1937. She moved to Chicago after graduation where she worked first at the YMCA and later at the University of Chicago. In 1940, Edith married Henry T. Smith; the couple welcomed two daughters: Virginia and Alice. After earning her teaching license, she taught in the Chicago school system for twenty-one years before retiring in 1976. Smith continued to serve as a volunteer well into her nineties. She is the recipient of numerous honors highlighting her activities and contributions later in life, including admittance into the Chicago Senior Citizen Hall of Fame, selection as a “superager” in a Northwestern University study, induction into the Iowa African American Hall of Fame,  and several distinctions awarded by Grinnell College: an honorary degree, the naming of the Smith Gallery in Joe Rosenfield Campus Center, and the naming of a new residential hall building on campus.  An illustrated biography of her life, No One is Better than You: Edith Renfrow Smith and the Power of a Mother’s Words, was published in January 2024.

While the physical materials that comprise the Edith Renfrow Smith Papers are small in number, including an award, photographs, and a family tree, the collection is enhanced by nearly 150 digitized photographs scanned and posted online by Grinnell College.

A prominent local politician from West Springfield, Mass., Jonathan Smith was born July 31, 1757. Among other offices, he served as town moderator, state representative, selectman, and Justice of the Peace. Most famously, lame duck Governor Elbridge Gerry appointed Smith to become the first sheriff of Hampden County shortly before the county was officially incorporated. The partisan appointment was immediately contested and brief. Smith died in Boston on February 5, 1820.

This miscellaneous collection contains a variety of professional and personal records of Jonathan Smith and other members of his family, falling almost exclusively in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

Stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Born and raised in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, Keith Harmon Snow earned his Master’s in microwave engineering at UMass Amherst. He worked at General Electric Company but left the security of his job soon after receiving a promotion in order to pursue travel and a career in investigative journalism. As a photojournalist and war correspondent, Snow worked extensively in Central Africa. He served as a genocide investigator for Survivors Rights International, Genocide Watch, and the United Nations, documenting and exposing genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan and Ethiopia. Snow won three Project Censored awards, and in 2009, he was named the Regent’s Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work on war crimes. A champion for human rights and the rights of children around the world, Snow’s book, The Worst Interests of the Child: The Trafficking of Children and Parents Through U.S. Family Courts, was published in 2015. Snow died on December 8, 2024.

The papers of Keith Harmon Snow document his work as a photojournalist and war correspondent in Africa, featuring research materials, notebooks, published writings by and about Snow, and a vast array of his photographs, slides, and negatives. The collection includes publications, documents, and book drafts Snow accumulated during the investigative process of writing his book, The Worst Interests of the Child. Also chronicled, his multi-year struggle with the town of Williamsburg, Massachusetts to enforce zoning bylaws that regulate the use of firearms and explosives at a shooting range near his property.

Graduating from Harvard in the thick of the Great Depression, Arvo A. Solander worked as a civil and sanitary engineer for a variety of state and federal agencies, including the Civil Works Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. During the 1930s, as opportunity arose, he filled positions as a road engineer, in the design and construction of water and sewage plants, in pollution control, as a safety engineer in the shellfish industry, and in mosquito control, taking jobs throughout Massachusetts and as far away as Tennessee. After using his talents as an officer in the Sanitary Corps during the Second World War, based primarily in Arkansas, Solander returned home to Massachusetts and opened a private engineering office in South Hadley. He worked as a civil engineer and surveyor until his death in January 1976.
The Arvo Solander Papers consists of twenty-four bound volumes documenting thirty years of varied work as an engineer, including his contributions to the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir. Within the bound volumes are a wide range of reports, typescripts, sketches and diagrams, graphs, contracts and design specifications, photographs, and postcards.

Marshall Spriggs was an educational activist at UMass/Amherst while an undergraduate from 1969 through 1974. He eventually became the chair of the Academic Affairs Committee of the Undergraduate Student Senate , the voice of undergraduates in their institution’s educational policy. After leaving Amherst, he served as a reading teacher in New York City and as an Assistant Community Representative with the Massachusetts Office for Children. In the late 1970s, he became the Managing Editor of the Boston People’s Yellow Pages published by Vocations for Social Change in 1980. The PYP attempted to catalog all the groups doing progressive political work in the Boston area. In the 1980s and beyond, he served as the Publications Director for statewide legal services, a founder of an international environmental organization, and filled various posts at Harvard University and MIT.

The Marshall Spriggs Collection features social change publications including the People’s Yellow Pages, Black Bart Brigade: The Outlaw Mag, AFSC New England Regional Office printed material, and What’s Left in Boston as well as articles on educational reform, student power, and racism.

Established in 1921 in St. Louis Missouri, the Stanze Monument Company was family-owned and operated until it was sold in the mid-1980s. The company custom-cut gravestones for more than sixty years and was one of the last monument companies to cut gravestones by hand.

The collection consists of gravestone, monument, and mausoleum technical and architectural drawings. Most of the tracings and drawings of headstone patterns were used to make glass molds for sand-blasting granite headstones, while the rubbings represent reproductions of designs and font sizes and styles. Some of the architectural drawings depict conceptual plans for a typical forty-acre cemetery. The drawings were transferred from the Kibbe Hancock Heritage Museum in Illinois; a small portion of the materials were identified as being part of the “Gustafson Collection.”