Collecting area: Counterculture

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

Founded by attorney Keith Stroup in 1970, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is the nation’s oldest and most prominent organization advocating for an end to cannabis prohibition. A nonprofit public-interest advocacy group based in Washington, DC, NORML has lobbied at the state and federal levels for the elimination of penalties for the cultivation, possession, and responsible use of cannabis, and it has met with success in state-level efforts at decriminalization. Over the years, NORML has led a wide variety of educational initiatives and coordinated its activities with other organizations working for cannabis reform. More recently, NORML has become a significant voice in the struggle to legalize the therapeutic use of marijuana.

The records of NORML offer a perspective on more than forty years of grassroots advocacy in cause of drug policy legislation. Highly varied in nature, the records include organizational records, research files on marijuana and marijuana use, promotional materials prepared by NORML, and letters from persons incarcerated for possession. The collection is currently being received by SCUA with new additions expected in the near term.

The Maryland Chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) was formed at the University of Maryland in Dec. 1976.

This small collection contains an assortment of NORML-related ephemera, including bumper stickers, pins, fliers, and brochures, along with some organizational notes, memberships rosters, and a copy of their newsletter.

George Naughton was born in 1951 into an academically inclined family. His father, Thomas, was a writer and magazine editor and his mother a music teacher; his grandfather Julius Seelye Bixler was a college professor and president of Colby College (1942-1960); and his great-great-grandfather Julius Seelye served as the fifth president of Amherst College (1876-1890). Naughton grew up in the 1960s in Old Saybrook, Conn. He graduated from Mount Hermon School in 1969 and from New College in Sarasota, Fla., with a BA in General Studies, in 1973. For the next few years, Naughton lived, worked, and meditated in Cambridge, Mass., and California, then in March of 1978 moved to Amherst and took a job at UMass. From 1978 until his retirement in 2011, he worked in University Information Systems in Whitmore Administration Building. Now president of the Amherst Historical Society, Naughton is also active in the Pelham Historical Society and lives in Pelham with his wife, Cindy.

Naughton’s lifelong interests have included mathematics, science fiction, cultural alternatives, and books, and he accumulated a wide collection of print material on a variety of topics. The Naughton Collection is a reflection of many of those interests and comprises underground comics as well as pamphlets, periodicals, and ephemera on spirituality, new age thinking, counterculture, politics, the environment and sustainability, and intentional communities.

Karen Manners Smith (“Sister Meredith”) and Chris O’Carroll (“Brother Jerome”) were both members of the Process Church of the Final Judgement (Process Church) from 1969-1974. Following their departure from the Process Church, Manners Smith and O’Carroll (then “Charles C. Smith”) moved to Amherst, Massachusetts where O’Carroll worked for The Valley Advocate, the alternative newsweekly and the UMass Magazine in the late 1970s and 1980s. 

The Process Church was founded in 1966 by Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston, former members of Scientology. While it was initially based in the United Kingdom, the Process Church also spread to the United States, where it attracted over one hundred members. In 1972, American poet and singer Ed Sanders published The Family, a memoir accusing the Process Church of working with convicted murderer Charles Manson and the Manson Family. While no connection between the Manson Family and the Process Church was ever officially established during police investigations, the Process Church faced a public decline in reputation. In the late 1970s, the Process Church split, with members loyal to MacLean joining the newly established Foundation Faith of God (“The Foundation”) in 1980. In 1983, the organization rebranded to the Best Friends Animal Society, where it continues to operate in Kanab, Utah, and throughout the United States. 

The bulk of this collection is comprised of periodicals and marketing materials, collected by O’Carroll for his research on new religious movements during his time in Amherst, Northampton, and Pelham. Most of the material pertains to the Process Church (including the Foundation Faith of God), though there are also news clippings, magazines and pamphlets about other movements, mostly from new age magazines based in Western Mass as well as materials on Scientology, Ekankar, and Transcendental Meditation. The collection also contains small pamphlets and flyers from various Christian publishing houses, with topics ranging from the dangers of Rock n’ Roll to the Satanic Rules of the Earth. 

Cover of Avatar volume 1, number 4

Suzanne Petrucci (neé Karson / AKA Suzanne Beardsley) was the Distribution Secretary for the Boston underground newspaper, Avatar, which was published out of the Fort Hill Commune in Roxbury and led by Mel Lyman, the controversial folk musician, spiritual leader, and writer. The initial run of Avatar ran from 1967-1968 and published 24 issues until a split developed amongst the staff. The Avatar offices moved from Fort Hill to Rutland Street in the South End. A 25th issue was published and partially distributed before the remaining copies were stolen by the Fort Hill contingent. Shortly after this incident, an Avatar board member, David Wilson, of the music publication Broadside, and Charles Giuliano, a writer for the paper, resumed publication during the summer of 1968. Eventually, Lyman resumed publication of a new American Avatar which ran through 1969. A New York edition also ran simultaneously in 1968 and 1969. Petrucci donated a complete run of volume one of the newspaper in 2023.

The collection consists of an entire run of volume 1 of Avatar, consisting of issues 1-24 and the “lost” issue 25. Also included are a selection of issues from volume 2 as well as issues from the New York edition. Issues of the Los Angeles Free Press and Rolling Stone that contain stories about Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Commune are also included.

An historian of twentieth century social movements, Blake Slonecker received his doctorate at the University of North Carolina in 2009 and joined the history faculty at Waldorf College soon thereafter. In a dissertation examining the utopian impulses of the New Left (published in 2012 as A new dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the long sixties), Slonecker explored how the political and cultural activism of the 1960s helped reshape American political culture in the decade following.

In June 2008, Slonecker conducted oral historical interviews with four individuals who were part of the extended community centered on the Montague Farm and Packer Corners communes during the late 1960s: Tom Fels, Charles Light, Sam Lovejoy, and Richard Wizansky. In wide-ranging interviews, the former communards discuss topics ranging from the fraught politics of the era, political and cultural activism, gender roles and sexuality, and daily life on the communes.

The term social change is used in SCUA to refer to individuals and organizations who actively seek to better the world around them, as well as to individuals experiencing shifts in economic, cultural, and social life. Few movements for change exist in isolation. Following W.E.B. Du Bois, we recognize that seemingly disparate issues in social justice are often intrinsically and deeply interconnected, so that to create change in one area requires close attention to others. It is the flow of ideas, people, and organizations that constitutes the warp and weft of social change in the twentieth century.

Created to collocate small groups of manuscripts, documents, letters, and other unpublished materials relating to the history and experience of social change, the Social Change Collection is focused largely on movements of the 1960s and after. While entirely miscellaneous, the collection includes interesting material relating to the peace and antiwar movements during the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the conflict in Vietnam, antiimperialist movements in Central and South America, and a small number of items relating to sexuality, gender, and feminism.

Assembled to bring together short and broken runs of periodicals produced by activists and movements for social justice, the Social Change Periodicals Collection touches on a wide variety of topics. Much of the original collection came from subscriptions held by the Everywoman’s Center at UMass Amherst, however the collection has grown to include materials supplied by many other donors. The bulk of periodicals come from the period 1965-1990 and the subjects covered range from feminism to gay rights, and political radicalism, to peace, prison, labor, antiracism, and the counterculture more generally. The collection has been organized thematically into 19 series.

Mark Sommer, with Zetta, the first newborn goat at the Sommer homestead in northern CA, May 1985

Mark Sommer is an explorer, storyteller, and award-winning public radio and print journalist focused on advocacy and narratives of social, political, and environmental change and positive action. In Washington, D.C., Sommer found himself on hand for some of the 1960s pivotal moments, where he was involved with the Liberation News Service and the New Left think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. Sommer moved to California in 1969 to explore the counterculture, spending several years journeying – spiritually, psychedelically, and physically between communes, farms, and wilderness homesteads along the western coast – before he and his wife built a self-reliant organic homestead in the deep woods of northern CA, where they lived from the 1970s to the 1990s. The resilience of nature deeply impacted Sommer’s outlook and work as a writer and journalist, driving his interest in the human capacity for overcoming adversity. Sommer founded and directed the Mainstream Media Project, a nonprofit media placement service scheduling leading edge thinkers and social innovators for extensive radio interviews, and Sommer served as host and executive producer of the internationally syndicated and award winning, one-hour weekly radio program, A World of Possibilities. Sommer is the author of three books (Beyond the Bomb, The Conquest of War, and Living in Freedom), and hundreds of op-eds in major newspapers worldwide. Current projects include short and movie length videos crafted from his photographs, films, interviews, and experiences.

Chronicling over five decades of creative and journalistic output of a life-long explorer and progressive advocate, the Mark Sommer Papers are an extensive collection, covering Sommer’s entire career and personal life from the late 1960s to the present. Writings include personal and multiple travel journals (including a unique trip to North Vietnam in 1968), correspondence, student essays, op-eds, articles, project and grant plans, memoirs, and book manuscripts. Additional journals exist in audio format, along with radio interviews where Sommer served as a guest. Slides, photographs, and movies cover Sommer’s family and home life to his wide-ranging travels and interests. Some main topics of coverage include foreign policy and international politics, progressivism, peace and conflict studies, the anti-nuclear and disarmament movements, wilderness and back-to-the-land experiences, and later in life fatherhood. Materials from Mainstream Media Project have been separated into the Mainstream Media Project Records.

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.