Collecting area: Photographs

Founded in 1974, the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association was among the first American organizations devoted to fostering people-to-people diplomacy between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. The vision of veteran civil rights activist Unita Blackwell, the USCPFA sponsored speakers, seminars, and cultural exchanges, and in the 1970s, was among the first groups to organize tours from the United States to the People’s Republic.

The 449 color slides (35 mm.) that comprise the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association collection document one of the group’s early tours, undertaken at the height of the agitation over the Gang of Four. Beyond simple touristic scenes, the collection depicts a state-sponsored version of everyday life in China during the early post-Mao era.

Foresty and lumbering have been substantial sectors of the Massachusetts economy for more than 300 years. This collection includes photographs of forests throughout New England and New York, lumbering and related occupations, tools of forestry, and distinguished foresters. Together these images capture the history and traditions of forestry and lumbering in Massachusetts from mill work to Christmas trees.

Attached to the 20th Air Base Group in 1941, Athol-native Bill Freeman was a first-hand witness to the beginnings of the war in the Pacific. Enlisting in the Army Air Corps in 1940, Freeman was stationed at Nichols Field in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded, and after taken as prisoner or war, he was forced on the Bataan Death March. Freeman died of malaria in Cabanatuan Prison Camp in July 1942.

The Freeman scrapbook and photograph album that Bill Freeman kept offer a visually-intensive perspective on the brief life of an American serviceman in the Second World War. Kept during and immediately after high school, the scrapbook includes notices of his musical performances and other activities; the extensive photograph album documents his service in the Army Air Corps from the start of deployment through his travels in Hawaii and Guam to the early months of his service in the Philippines. The collection also includes a letter written from the Philippines during the summer 1941.

A noted figure in the alternative press and a former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, Clif Garboden was a long-time editor and writer for the Boston Phoenix. Arriving as a student at Boston University in 1966, Garboden was drawn into a close-knit, creative community on the BU News staff that included Raymond Mungo, Peter Simon, and Joe Pilati, filling a versatile role that entailed work as writer, editor, and photographer. After graduating in 1970, Garboden moved immediately to the Phoenix where he applied his signature wit and occasional snark to a wide range of topics. Apart from a six year period when he worked for the Boston Globe, Garboden was an indispensable part of the Phoenix editorial team until he was laid off in cost cutting moves in 2009. After a lengthy struggle with cancer, Garboden died of pneumonia on Feb. 10, 2011. He is survived by his wife, Susannah (Price), and children Molly and Phil.

The Garbdoen collection consists of hundreds of photographic prints, including work for both the Boston University News and the Phoenix and many personal images of family and friends.

Tom Gardner, 1966

Born in New Orleans in 1946, Tom Gardner began his involvement in social and political causes as a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1964. He joined the burgeoning civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and eventually dropped out of school to become a full time activist. During this time, he was the chairman of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), an organization based in the south which opposed the Vietnam War, fought for civil rights for black Americans, and supported the rights of women and workers. He returned to UVA in 1969 and completed his bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1971.

Following UVA, Gardner worked as a staff member at the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) as an organizer. Concurrently, he joined the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and became a board member. SCEF was active in numerous causes in the south, dedicated in particular to civil rights and electoral reform.

Beginning in the 1970s, Gardner began work on prison issues, working with a number of politically and unfairly convicted prisoners, and advocating for an end to the death penalty. Gardner, and the groups he worked with, challenged the institutional racism of a southern justice system that had existed since the days of Jim Crow. The most prominent of these cases was that of Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris, who was originally sentenced to five life terms for 4 small robberies and an alleged rape in 1970 and eventually given the death penalty under Alabama’s capital offenses law due to an inadequate defense by his court appointed lawyers.

Concurrent to his work as an activist, Gardner has worked as a journalist and photographer, writing articles for a number of commercial publications as well as some independent work. While working for the Montgomery Advertiser, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and others, he covered local, college, and political news. Gardner has also used journalism to bolster his activism, writing for left-wing publications such as Workers World and The Great Speckled Bird. He used his talents in photography by taking photos of protests and events he attended for use in articles by him and others.

Gardner returned to school several times after originally graduating from UVA in 1971. He received a masters degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia in 1982, a masters in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1985, and later a Ph.D. in Communication from UMASS Amherst in 2005. Throughout his PhD program and since its completion, Gardner has been a professor of Communication at Westfield State University, using his experience from a life full of activism to continue educating a new generation of students and activists.

This Gardner collection illustrates much of Gardner’s activism and journalism work throughout his life. It contains correspondence, articles, press releases, meeting minutes, photographs, pamphlets, newsletters, publications, notes, and newspapers. The collection documents the full scope of Gardner’s life; from his time as a student activist at the University of Virginia to his more recent achievements as a professor at Westfield State University.

The collection also contains a large amount of material written by Gardner himself, as well as publications, newspapers, and articles that either relate to causes he was directly involved in or the political issues of the day.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

In the early 1970s, the documentary filmmaker Bruce Geisler dropped out of Pomona College one semester short of graduation, drove across country, and joined the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune, then the largest commune in the eastern United States. During his four years living with the Brotherhood, later renamed the Renaissance Community, Geisler learned the craft of filmmaking, before returning west to earn an MFA at the film school of the University of Southern California. Geisler has received a number of awards as a screenwriter and filmmaker including the Grand Prize for Best Screenplay from Worldfest Houston and the Dominique Dunne Memorial Prize for Filmmaking, and, in 2007, he released his feature-length documentary, Free Spirits, about the Brotherhood of the Spirit/Renaissance Community and its ill-fated founder, Michael Metelica Rapunzel. Geisler is currently a Senior Lecturer in the UMass Amherst Department of Communication.

Documenting everyday life in a Massachusetts commune and performances by the commune bands (Spirit in Flesh and Rapunzel), the Geisler collection was assembled in conjunction with the making of the film Free Spirits. In addition to many hours of both raw and edited film footage taken by members of the Brotherhood of the Brotherhood of the Spirit and Renaissance Community, the collection includes a rich assemblage of still photographs, ephemera, and newspaper clippings relating to the commune.

Photographs from the 1930s and 1940s featuring both major government officials such as Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, and lower ranking officials such as regional party leaders. Photographs of German soldiers with their various weapons, some possibly fighting, are also depicted. Includes film stills from the Allied invasion of Normandy and German Communist refugees in the Soviet Union.

Born in East Pepperell, Mass., on May 1, 1916, the son of Edward and Angela Glow, Lewis Lyman Glow studied chemistry at Massachusetts State College during the latter years of the Great Depression. Graduating with the class of 1939, Glow continued his studies at Norwich University before serving aboard the USS New Jersey during the Second World War and Korean conflict. Glow died in East Pepperell on Sept. 23, 1986.

A well-labeled, thorough, and thoroughly personal photograph album, this documents the four years spent at Mass. State College. In addition to numerous images of Glow’s classmates and friends, his rooms at the Colonial Inn, beer parties and student highjinks such as the annual rope pull and horticultural show, the album includes numerous images of the cattle barn fire of September 1937 and the extensive damage to the MSC campus and surrounding town from the Hurricane of 1938.

An environmental chemist, Ted Goldfarb was a founder of the Science for the People chapter at SUNY Stony Brook and an organizer of the group’s second trip to the People’s Republic of China in June 1978. The twelve delegates from SftP went with the intention of studying the organization of science and technology in China with respect to how it met people’s needs, and they were toured through a succession of factories, production facilities, farms, schools, and institutes in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Changsha, and Beijing, among other locations.

The nearly 400 slides in this collection were taken by Ted Goldfarb (and handful by his colleague Judith Weinstein) when they were members of the second Science for the People delegation to the People’s Republic of China in June 1978. Reflecting their interests in science and technology, the slides document a succession of factories, production facilities, schools, and institutes they visited, but include shots of typical street scenes, markets, artisans and factory workers, and tourist sites such as the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, and Forbidden City. In addition to the images of China, a handful were taken during a stopover in Delhi and Agra, India, on the way back to the United States.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

The economic geographer Julie Graham (1945-2010) and her colleague Katherine Gibson have been influential in envisioning alternatives to capitalist economics and economic development. After studying at Smith College (BA, 1965) and Clark University (PhD, 1984), Graham joined the faculty at UMass Amherst where she helped shape the new graduate program in geography. From early in her career, she worked so closely with her Australian colleague Gibson that they often published jointly under the pen name J.K. Gibson-Graham, and Graham developed close working relationships across several departments at UMass. A prolific author and inspiring mentor for students, Graham’s academic work drew upon an innovative mix of political economy, poststructuralist theory, feminism, and community-based research. Among her more significant publications are the now-classic The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996), on representations of capitalism and their political effect, A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), which explores alternatives to capitalism, and two edited volumes, Class and Its Others (2000) and Re/Presenting Class (2001). Graham died in Nashville on April 4, 2010.

The Graham Papers offer a detailed perspective on the radical geographer Julie Graham. The collections documents Graham’s life and career beginning in her undergraduate years and extending through her last research projects in community economies. Through correspondence and writings, photographs, and research — closely intertwined with her colleague Katherine Gibson — the collection gives shape of Graham’s radical challenge to human geography tinged with an optimistic economic and social possibility. The collection also includes letters, photographs, and genealogical matter relating to Graham’s family, extending back to the time of the First World War.