Collecting area: Social change

Formed in 1963, the Greenfield Peace Center viewed itself as an educational organization teaching about and advocating for world peace. Their activities included organizing peace marches, warning against the dangers of nuclear war, conducting teach-ins, campaigning against war toys, and counseling on the alternatives to the draft.

Correspondence, administrative documents, and news clippings relating to peace activism centered in Greenfield, Massachusetts and in the upper Pioneer Valley, especially by the Greenfield Community Peace Center, William Hefner, and Turn Toward Peace.

Greening Greenfield is a citizen group based in Greenfield, Massachusetts, focused on environmental action. The group has been active since 2008, when it was known as the Greenfield Energy Committee, before being called the Greening Greenfield Energy Committee. It has been known as Greening Greenfield since 2010. Members work with residents, businesses, and town government to promote sustainability on a local level. The group successfully propelled Greenfield toward being the first municipality in Massachusetts to be classified as a Green Community.

The collection consists of meeting minutes, newspaper clippings, planning documents for programming, and grant applications.

Five organizers affiliated with the Communist Workers Party were murdered by Klansmen and Nazis in Greenboro, N.C., on Nov. 3, 1979. Although an all white jury acquitted the defendants of murder and a second jury acquitted them of civil rights violations, a civil suit filed by survivors of the assault resulted in eight Klansmen being found liable for wrongful death in 1985. First conceived in 1980 as an organization to support the survivors of the assault, the Greensboro Justice Fund grew to support grassroots organizations and activists working for civil rights, social change, and radical democracy in the South.

The records of the Greensboro Justice Fund offer dramatic testimony to the impact of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979, and the manner in which a community of survivors and supporters cooperated to establish an organization that supplied grants to support grassroots social justice initiatives throughout the South.

Jean Bergantini Grillo was the Cambridge and Boston Phoenix’s Senior Editor from its first issue in 1969 through 1972. When the original staff of the Phoenix was let go after the paper’s sale in the summer of 1972, Grillo helped start The Real Paper with the rest of the fired staff. While at the Phoenix, Grillo was an art critic and covered feminist issues and activism. She graduated from Rhode Island College in 1966 with a degree in English and after working at the Phoenix, continued an active career as a journalist, art critic, television writer and playwright.

The Jean Bargantini Grillo Collection contains a complete run of the Phoenix from its first issue as the Cambridge Phoenix in 1969 until the original staff moved to the Real Paper in 1972. There are also several early issues of The Real Paper until Grillo left the paper in late 1972. There is also a small group of reporter’s notebooks used by Grillo in 1971 and 1972, index cards from her rolodex, and a proof for a political cartoon created for the Phoenix by William D. Steele.

Lester Grinspoon, the Harvard psychiatrist who became a celebrated advocate for reforming marijuana laws, was born June 24, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts. A veteran of the Merchant Marines and a graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Medical School, he trained at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute but later turned away from psychoanalysis. Senior psychiatrist for 40 years at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Grinspoon is associate professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In the mid-1960s, struck by the rising popularity of marijuana and its reputed dangers, Grinspoon began to examine the medical and scientific literature about marijuana usage. To his surprise, he found no evidence to support claims of marijuana’s harmful effects, and his resulting 1969 Scientific American article drew wide attention. His research ultimately convinced him of marijuana’s benefits, including enhanced creativity and medicinal uses. His own young son, undergoing chemotherapy for the leukemia that eventually took his life, found his severe nausea greatly eased by marijuana. By his 40s, Grinspoon had gained renown as an outspoken proponent of responsible adult use and legalization.

The Lester Grinspoon Papers comprehensively document Grinspoon’s advocacy and activism, including his role as a board member of NORML; his research and writing of the books Marihuana Reconsidered and Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine, numerous articles, two web sites, and more; his position as an expert witness in criminal trials; and his relationships with friends, colleagues, and many others, such as Carl Sagan, John Lennon, Keith Stroup, and Melanie Dreher. The collection comprises correspondence, research material, drafts and publications, clinical accounts, clippings, ephemera, scrapbooks, and audiovisual materials: photographs, as well as videotapes and DVDs of Grinspoon’s appearances on television and in documentary films.

Born in Indiana, the writer Lucy Gwin (1943-2014) lived “a lot of lives,” in her own words, working in advertising, as a dairy farmer, civil rights activist, and deckhand on ships servicing oil rigs, all before the age of 40. While living in Rochester, N.Y., in 1989, however, her life took a sudden turn. After a head-on collision with a drunk driver left her with traumatic brain injury, Gwin was remanded for care to the New Medico Brain Rehabilitation Center, where she witnessed a world of isolation, patient abuse, and powerlessness. Never one to shrink from a challenge, she escaped from the Center and used her skills as an organizer and writer to expose conditions at New Medico and shut the facility down. Through her experiences, Gwin emerged as a powerful, often acerbic voice in all-disability rights advocacy, becoming the founder, designer, and editor of the influential Mouth Magazine in 1990.

Lucy Gwin’s papers document the advocacy of an important figure in the disability rights movement. The rich documentation for Mouth Magazine includes comprehensive editorial files arranged issue by issue, some correspondence with authors and supporters, and copies of the published issue. The balance of the collection contains Gwin’s other work as a writer, personal correspondence, and materials relating to her experiences with and campaign against New Medico.

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

As a member of the Montague Farm community, Anna Gyorgy became a leader in the movement against nuclear energy. In 1974, she helped organize the Alternative Energy Alliance in Montague, Mass., and two years later, she was part of the coalition that founded the Clamshell Alliance. An author, ecofeminist, and peace activist, she has lived In Ireland, West Africa, and Germany since 1985 and remains deeply involved in international movements for justice and peace.

Tightly focused on Anna Gyorgy’s activism from the mid-1970s through late 1980s, the collection contains important documentation on the early antinuclear movement in western Massachusetts with some material on the international movement in the 1980s. In addition to a small run of correspondence, the collection includes writings, news clippings, publications, and ephemera relating to antinuclear activism during the 1970s and 1980s and to other related causes, including the Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson’s run for the presidency in 1984.

While in college, Tommy Hadges expected to become a dentist. After graduating with a Biology degree from Tufts University, he attended Harvard Dental School for 18 months, but discovered that his calling wasn’t in dentistry, it was in radio. While at Tufts, Hadges was involved in resurrecting Tufts’ campus station WTUR, & also worked at the MIT student-run broadcast radio station WTBS. Still an undergraduate, Hadges was recruited by Ray Riepen in 1968 to be among the first DJs (along with along with fellow WTUR announcers Joe Rogers & J.J. Jackson) at WBCN, Riepen’s experiment to bring freeform, rock radio to Boston. WBCN was a massive and groundbreaking success, and after 2 years splitting school with part-time announcing at WBCN, Hadges returned to the station in 1970 to be a full time announcer. Hadges was promoted to Program Director at WBCN in 1977 and then left to become Program Director for neighboring WCOZ in 1978. Hadges gathered significant experience in commercial radio at WCOZ and later at Los Angeles’ KLOS, where he doubled the station’s ratings. This experience positioned him to become a consultant with Pollack Media Group, eventually becoming President & spending several decades helping grow the consultancy into a major international business, serving as a radio producer for international broadcasts (including the Live Aid, Live 8 and Live Earth concerts) and helping new stations build technical infrastructure. Hadges retired from Pollack Media Group in 2018.

The Tommy Hadges Papers document his years at WBCN in Boston, and includes photographs — some of the only depicting WBCN’s Stuart Street location, ephemera, and promotional materials.

An ornithologist and conservationist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Joseph A. “Archie” Hagar’s career was rooted in the generation of naturalists such as William Brewster, Edward Howe Forbush, and Arthur Cleveland Bent. Born in Lawrence, Mass., on May 13, 1896, Hagar’s undergraduate career at Harvard was interrupted by service in the First World War, after which he completed his studies at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, graduating with the class of 1921. An expert field biologist and ecologist, he was appointed State Ornithologist in the Department of Fish and Game in November 1934 serving in that position for almost twenty-five years. A specialist in waterfowl and raptors, Hagar was deeply involved in early conservation efforts in New England, noted for his work on wetland conservation and for linking the use of DDT with eggshell thinning in peregrine falcons, and he was famously at the center of a dispute with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the design of the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. Never a prolific writer, he was an active member of the American Ornithological Union, the Nuttall Ornithological Club, the Wildlife Society, and other professional organizations, and after retirement, he was specially cited for his work in waterfowl conservation by Ducks Unlimited. Active until late in life, he died at home in Marshfield Hills on Dec. 17, 1989.

The Hagar Papers are a deep and valuable resource for the study of New England birds and the growth of modern conservation biology. With abundant professional correspondence, field notes on shorebirds and raptors, and drafts of articles, the collection documents the full range of Hagar’s activities as State Ornithologist, including a particularly thick run of material for the controversy over the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. Hagar also acquired a set of field notes, 1897-1921, from the Harvard ornithologist John E. Thayer.

A theoretical physicist at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Paul Halpern is the author of a dozen popular books on science and dozens of scholarly articles. After spending his undergraduate years at Temple University, Halpern received a doctorate at SUNY Stony Brook, and has since written on complex and higher-dimensional solutions in general relativity theory and the nature of time as well as the history of the modern physical sciences. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

The hundreds of ephemeral publications, fliers, and handbills in the Halpern Collection provide a window into political and social activism in Philadelphia during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The content ranges widely from publications produced by peace and disarmament groups to the literature of anti-imperialist (e.g. CISPES), antinuclear groups (SANE and post-Three Mile Island mobilization), radical political parties, and religious organizations including the Unification Church and the Church of Scientology.