Collecting area: Social change

Committee to Defend Johnny Imani Harris pamphlet

Administrative records of the Atmore-Holman Brothers Defense Committee and the Committee to Defend Johnny Imani Harris and Stop the Death Penalty, which supported efforts to free Imani (aka Johnny Harris) from death row in Alabama in the late 1970s early 1980s. Originally sentenced to five life terms for 4 small robberies and an alleged rape in 1970, Imani was eventually given the death penalty under Alabama’s capital offenses law due to an inadequate defense by his court appointed lawyers. Harris was put in the brutal Atmore Prison, where he experienced extreme racism, poor medical care, overcrowding, and slave wages. In 1972 the inmates organized a group called Inmates for Action (IFA) and led a work stoppage of over 1,200 prisoners. The prisoners were beaten by guards and the strike leaders were placed in isolation. Two years later, in 1974 an IFA member was beaten to death by guards. The prisoners reacted by capturing a cellblock and taking two guards hostage. In the ensuing take-back by the prison, a guard and IFA leader were killed. Harris and others were charged with the guard’s death. Imani was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death.

The Committee worked throughout the 1970’s and 1980s for Harris’ freedom through endorsements, fundraising, and networking to national and international groups. Thanks to the participation of Amnesty International and other groups, Harris’s murder conviction was dismissed in 1987 after a new trial and he was given parole.

This collection, donated by Tom Gardner, represents the efforts of both the Atmore-Holman Brothers Defense Committee and the Committee to Defend Johnny Imani Harris and Stop the Death Penalty. It contains correspondence, legal filings, press releases, contact lists, fliers, financial documents, and material representing efforts by the Committee to raise awareness and generate financial and name support. There is both mainstream and left wing media coverage of the cases represented in clippings, magazines, and newspapers. Gardner wrote several articles on the case, which are represented in their final printed form and in hand and typewritten drafts. Gardner also took copious notes about the Committee’s work on legal pads. The collection also documents Gardner’s parallel involvement in the larger left-wing movement and its attempts to link labor struggles and racism through pamphlets, correspondence, publications, booklets, and newsletters. The collection offers a unique window into the political atmosphere of the post-civil rights era in Alabama and the South more generally, and how struggles for equal treatment under the law for Black Americans were not over.

Co-owned by Dorothy Johnson and Doris Abramson, the Common Reader Bookshop in New Salem, Massachusetts, specialized in women’s studies materials, or in their words, “books by, for, and about women.” A couple for almost 40 years and married in 2004, Johnson and Abramson opened the store in 1977 and as they grew, relocated to the town’s old Center School building across the street in 1983. The shop closed for business in 2000.

Comprised of two scrapbooks and folder of ephemera, the collection highlights the Common Reader Bookshop not only as a place for buying antiquarian books, but also for the community it fostered.

A branch of the Communist Party of the United States of America, the Communist Party of Massachusetts enjoyed strong popularity during the 1930s and 1940s, organizing the textile and other manufacturing industries.

This small collection is comprised of a miscellaneous assemblage of fliers, broadsides, and ephemera issued by the Communist Party of Massachusetts and its affiliates from the mid-1930s through the repression of the McCarthy era. Originating mostly from Boston, the items in the collection center on significant themes in Communist thought, including opposition to Fascism and militarism, labor solidarity against capital, and elections. A small number of items relate to Party-approved cultural productions, including plays and gatherings to celebrate Lenin or the Russian Revolution. Many items are associated with Otis A. Hood, a perpetual candidate for public office on the Communist Party ticket who became a target for McCarthy-era repression in the mid-1950s.

The US Department of Agriculture was already actively engaged in water control and management issues prior to the enactment of the Flood Control Acts of 1936 and 1944. Pursuant to the 1936 Act, and the extensive flooding of 1936 and 1938, the USDA conducted an extensive survey of the Connecticut River Watershed.

Issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1950 in compliance with the Flood Control Act of 1936, these flood reports present the results of a survey and the outline of a program of land use and management developed to alleviate flood and sediment problems in Connecticut River Watershed. The collection includes both a preliminary draft (in typescript) and completed report and appendix of the survey, with the final reports marked “Confidential. For Departmental review only.”

Fluoride Action Network bumper sticker

In 1996, Paul Connett was persuaded by his wife Ellen to investigate the controversial practice of water fluoridation. In 2000, he was one of the founders of the Fluoride Action Network which he directed for 15 years (2000-2015). In 2003, Paul gave an invited presentation to a panel appointed by the US National Research Council, which published a landmark review of fluoride’s toxicity in 2006.

In 2010, with two other authors, James Beck, MD, PhD and Spedding Micklem, DPhil (Oxon), Connett published The Case Against Fluoride (Chelsea Green 2010).

Paul Connett is recognized as one of the most important anti-fluoride activist of the early 21st century. The collection consists of material generated during his work with the Fluoride Action Network, which includes the contributions of his wife Ellen and their son Michael. Michael is now a lawyer who has brought a case against the EPA over fluoride.

The collection contains newsletters, correspondence, scientific papers, legal documents, clippings, publications, photographs, audio and video recordings, and a collection of 3/4″ videotaped oral histories with leaders of the anti-fluoridation movement. Also contains material from Paul and Ellen’s involvement with Work on Waste, USA, the environmental group opposed to municipal solid waste incineration (see MS 767, Work on Waste USA, Inc. Records).

Little is known about Connie Jean, a gender non-conforming woman assigned male at birth, other than that she was living in Lansdowne, in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, in the late 1970s and 1980s. For at least a decade, she was involved with, and lived with, another transgender woman, “Dick,” who had a wife and children before the two met. In her late 30s or early 40s in 1976, Connie Jean began venturing into public dressed as a woman, and after being stopped by police in April 1976, wrote “now they have my name and all the information on me knowing that I am a TV and cannot stop from doing it because I love it.” She later wrote that she wished Dick “was all female and not part woman when he has on all the clothes” adding that “it would be nice if he had all the equipment that a real woman has.” Both she and Dick apparently considered gender reassignment surgery in the early 1980s.

The two diaries (Feb.-July 1976 and July 1979 through Aug. 1983) and photographs in this small collection offer insight into the lives of a gender non-conforming woman and her partner in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The earliest entries consist of cryptic indications of whether she was staying at home on a given day or venturing into numbered “areas” marked on a map (not present), but by April 1976, the entries become much richer. The diaries make frequent reference to Connie Jean’s desire for dressing as a woman, her struggle to appear in public, and her support for Dick’s transition.

A conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst on November 7-9, 1986, that examined the impact of the Constitution on politics and government, foreign policy, race relations, and the economy, and also discussed the impact on the constitution of popular struggles and the emergence of “rights consciousness.” Includes papers presented at the conference that were to be subsequently published in a special bicentennial issue of the Journal of American History.

In May 1985, a group of activists in Western Massachusetts opposed to the interventionist U.S. foreign policy of the Reagan era formed a construction brigade to assist with basic human needs and express solidarity with the people of Central America. Modeled on the Venceremos Brigade, Construyamos Juntos, Building Peace of Nicaragua, raised over $20,000 for construction supplies in addition to funds for individual travel. Between January and March 1986, the 17 activists joined a smaller brigade from West Virginia in constructing the Carlos Armin Gonzales elementary school in San Pedro de Lovago. During their first month in Nicaragua, they witnessed a Contra assault on the town that left one assailant dead and two residents of the town wounded.

This exhibit includes 55 mounted images and 99 35mm slides taken during the brigade’s time in Nicaragua, documenting the brigade’s construction work and providing a valuable visual record of life in Nicaragua during the Contra war. Used in public talks about Contruyamos Juntos, the collection includes exhibit labels that explain the purpose and activity of the brigade, the history of Nicaragua, and the Contra attack in January 1986.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Massachusetts State Senator for the Berkshire District, 1950-1958, and representative for Massachusetts’s First District in the United States Congress for 17 terms, 1959-1991, where he made significant contributions in the areas of health and human services, the environment, education, energy, transportation, and small business.

Spanning four decades and eight presidents, the papers offer an extraordinary perspective on the major social, economic, and cultural changes experienced by the American people. Includes correspondence, speeches, press releases, bill files, his voting record, committee files, scrapbooks, travel files, audio-visual materials and over 5,000 photographs and slides.

An educator, farmer’s wife, and resident of South Deerfield, Massachusetts, Bertha Strong Cooley was an ardent Socialist who published regularly in local newspapers on topics ranging from anti-imperialism, democracy, capitalism, Communism, Russia, World War II, and civil rights.

The Cooley scrapbooks reflect the views of a teacher and farmer’s wife who used the newspapers to express her passion for social justice. Cooley ranged widely in responding to the news of the day, espousing Socialism and opposing racial injustice, war, imperialism, economic oppression, and Capitalism. One scrapbook contains writings by Cooley, the other clippings of articles dealing with topics of interest.