Collecting area: Social change

Du Bois Williams (center) surrounded by family during her graduation, ca. 1959

Yolande Du Bois Williams Irvin, the only grandchild of American sociologist and historian W. E. B. Du Bois, was introduced to social thought at an early age, devoting her career to being an educator and avid supporter of civil rights. Her specific area of interest was youth mental health, especially that of teenage girls. She studied psychology in university and worked with various organizations to promote mental health causes. Following in her grandfather’s footsteps, she delivered lectures across the United States regarding African American history, civil rights, feminism, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s work, retaining a consistent connection to her family and the similarities in academic values that they held.

The collection reveals the daily life of the family, including education, careers, and personal everyday life, both in context of and as separate as relatives of Du Bois. Other members of the Du Bois family in the collection include Yolande Du Bois Williams Irvin’s mother (Nina Yolande Du Bois), husband (Arthur McFarlane I), son (Arthur McFarlane II), economic confidant (Gloria Peress), and close contacts Janette Trout and Melissa Williams. Materials largely stem from her graduate education, as well as professional and educational experience.

David Graham Du Bois was a visiting lecturer in the Journalism and African-American Studies Departments from 1983 until his retirement in 2001. Du Bois was the son of activist and artist Shirley Graham Du Bois, who married W.E.B Du Bois in 1961. Du Bois earned his B.A. at Hunter College in 1950 and a Masters in American Civilization from New York University in 1956. After studying at Beijing University, he traveled to Cairo, Egypt, fell in love with the city, and settled there in 1961, working as a foreign correspondent for the Pacific News Service, Variety, and as an assistant editor for several Egyptian news publications. An activist, like his step-father and mother, Du Bois became the spokesperson for the Black Panther Party, and agitated for racial liberation throughout his life. After his mother’s death in 1977, he became the custodian of W.E.B Du Bois’ legacy and founded the W.E.B. Du Bois Foundation to continue working toward his step-father’s goals. While at the University, Du Bois played an essential role in naming the University Library after his step-father. Du Bois died on January 28, 2005.

The David Graham Du Bois Papers document his later life and his managing of W.E.B. Du Bois’ estate. The papers include a selection of David Du Bois’ correspondence, speech manuscripts, clippings describing his step-father, as well as seleced personal financial records from his time in Amherst, Massachusetts. Additional Du Bois materials remain with the family.

Scholar, writer, editor of The Crisis and other journals, co-founder of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan African Congresses, international spokesperson for peace and for the rights of oppressed minorities, W.E.B. Du Bois was a son of Massachusetts who articulated the strivings of African Americans and developed a trenchant analysis of the problem of the color line in the twentieth century.

The Du Bois Papers contain almost 165 linear feet of the personal and professional papers of a remarkable social activist and intellectual. Touching on all aspects of his long life from his childhood during Reconstruction through the end of his life in 1963, the collection reflects the extraordinary breadth of his social and academic commitments from research in sociology to poetry and plays, from organizing for social change to organizing for Black consciousness.

The linguist Audrey R. Duckert was a pioneer in the study of American regional English. Born in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, Duckert studied dialect at the University of Wisconsin, and after completing her doctorate at Radcliffe College in 1959, she joined the faculty at UMass Amherst. During her forty year career at UMass, Duckert became a founding member of the Dictionary of American Regional English (1965) and she was the first UMass woman admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. In addition to her linguistic work, she developed an avid interest in local history and was involved with several local historical societies, including the Swift River Valley Historical Society in New Salem.

The Duckert oral history collection consists of a series of 53 audiocassette recordings containing interviews with persons displaced when the Swift River Valley was flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir in 1939. The histories include rich recollections of life in the towns of Greenwich, Enfield, Dana, and Prescott, with village life, education, family, and the changes that accompanied the inundation of the region. The original audiocassettes are in the possession of the Swift River Valley Historical Society.

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

Established by Lois Barber in Amherst, Mass., in 1992 with their first campaign at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, EarthAction has been organizing international campaigns ever since. As the world’s largest action network, the group’s campaigns address a variety of global issues from climate change and nuclear weapons to children’s rights and empowering women to protect the land. With a mission both to inform people about pressing problems facing the world and to move them to action, EarthAction creates and distributes information kits aimed at different audiences: individuals and groups, policymakers, and journalists.

The collection includes administrative files that illustrate the process of building a campaign, financial records, and publications, as well as action, legislative, and media kits created for many of the group’s international campaigns.

The concept of product marketing in a Communist state may seem slightly incongruous, but in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, consumer goods were packaged and sold with much the same care as they were in the west. The Packaging Design Collection contains examples of quotidian products sold during the post-war period, ranging from boxes for soap powder to toothpaste, shampoo, and sugar sacks. The collection documents the visual language used on consumer products in East Germany and the evolution of graphic design in the Communist states of Eastern Europe from the 1950s through 1980s.

From the official optimism of the post-war years in East Germany through the dynamic press of the 1970s to the end of the regime in 1989, the state and its critics developed a distinctive print culture that was reflected in its literary and artistic output and in its popular and academic works.

The DDR collection contains miscellaneous volumes printed in East Germany, including literature and drama, touristic books, popular history, works on the arts, and a variety of academic and reference works.

View the full DRR collection in the library’s catalog.

Since the early 1970s, George Ebert has been a significant national figure in the anti-psychiatry and psychiatric survivors’ movements. Radicalized by three periods of involuntary incarceration, Ebert founded the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance in 1978 as a self-help, mutual support, human rights, and advocacy organization, and he has spoken out consistently against all forms of coercive psychiatry, including electroconvulsive therapy and forced drugging. While serving as director of the Mental Patients Alliance of Central New York, Ebert has also been active in Activists for Alternatives and the Network Against Coercive Psychiatry.

A significant collection for study of the psychiatric survivors’ movement, Ebert’s papers contain a wealth of correspondence from activists throughout the United States and abroad, along with notable runs of newsletters and periodicals from many early ex-patient groups that are now defunct, photographs of demonstrations, and organizational materials relating to the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance.

War on Poverty cartoon from New Haven ERAP Newsletter, July 23, 1965

The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) was a community organizing project sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It began in 1963, with SDS activists working in low-income urban neighborhoods to help residents come together to identify and agitate for shared needs. While practical goals included education and advocacy for welfare rights, youth programing such as free school lunches, and increasing minority participation in local politics, the program as a whole had grand aspirations of abolishing poverty and ending racial inequality through an interracial and community organized movement of the poor in America. The largest and longest lasting projects were located in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Newark, but multiple cities had ERAP groups. While none achieved an ongoing interracial movement of the poor, all had lasting effects in bringing minority and urban resident voices to the SDS platform, in teaching the skills, obstacles, and possibilities of community organizing, and in encouraging individuals, both from SDS and local neighborhoods, to participate and engage with diverse people in seeking social change.

New Haven ERAP Records are a small but rich collection, mainly consisting of three summer of 1965 issues of the ERAP Newsletter from the New Haven Project. Additional materials include a clipping from the April 30, 1965, Life issue featuring photographs of New Haven ERAP members working in a “slum called The Hill”; two printed photographs from Life not used in the article; and a written report and supporting research interview on the failure of the New Haven corporation Community Progress, Inc., to provide good services and comply with the requirements of the Economic Opportunity Act and the Community Action Program Guide.

A wife and husband team of photographers based in Provincetown, Mass., Maxine Smith and John Economos, known collectively as Econosmith, are photographers of the folk music scene, social action, and the landscape and people of outer Cape Cod. Social activists themselves, the Econosmiths were photographers for Pete Seeger during the last decade of his life and headed up the photography team at the Clearwater Festival, giving them unusual access to dozens of performers.

With compelling images of musicians in performance, the Economsmith collection is a rich visual record of the contemporary folk scene, with a special focus on Pete Seeger and the Clearwater Festival (also known as the Great Hudson River Revival). Over 90% of the images were born digital, with the remainder split between color negatives and 35mm. slides. The collection also includes photographs of antiwar demonstrations sparked by the Iraq War and images of the scenery and people of Provincetown and outer Cape Cod.