Collecting area: Social change

In 1857, Frederick L. H. Willis earned the singular distinction of being expelled from Harvard Divinity School for acting as a spirit medium. An important figure in the post-Civil War Spiritualist movement, Willis lived a long and eclectic life in which he was at turns an intimate of the family of Bronson Alcott, an ardent proponent of Spiritualism, a lecturer, preacher, homeopathic physician, and writer.

A wide-ranging intellect and steadfast opposition to orthodoxy suffuse the Willis Papers. The heart of the collection is an extensive collection of sermons, lectures, and essays by Frederick L. H. Willis dating from the late 1850s to the turn of the twentieth century. These works veer into commentary on ancient history, art and aesthetics, medicine, astrology, Eastern religion, and social reform, but are rooted firmly in the framework of a Spiritualist worldview. The collection also includes a large number of family photographs, some correspondence, and a few works by Willis’s wife, Love, and daughter, Edith.

A philosopher, writer, activist, and artist, Douglas Wilson founded the Rowe Conference Center affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist camp in Rowe, Mass. Born in Vancouver, B.C., in 1946, but raised primarily in California, Wilson earned degrees at UC Santa Barbara (1967) and the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley (1970), before being ordained at the First Uniarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn. He first came to Rowe in 1971 to work as assistant director of the Junior High summer camp, but soon proposed building a center at Rowe modeled on the Esalen Institute which would offer year-round retreats and workshops founded in Unitarian Universalist principles of equality, justice, freedom, peace, and the respect for the interdependent web of all existence. Serving as Executive Director (and after 1985, as co-Executive Director with his partner Prue Berry), Wilson brought together people who were “politically aware, psychologically sophisticated, and religiously based,” ranging from the Berrigans and Nearings to Jean Houston and Abbie Hoffman. The Wilsons retired from Rowe in December 2012.

The Wilson collection contains nearly forty years of files accumulated during Douglas Wilson’s time as Director of the Rowe Conference Center. In addition to a nearly complete run of the Center newsletter, Wilson retained materials on dozens of the thinkers, writers, and activists who came to Rowe, with each file containing correspondence (usually both directions), background notes and clippings.

A union organizer and labor communicator, Rand Wilson became a rank and file organizer for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union and helped win the first-ever contract for workers at Clinical Assays in Cambridge, Mass., in 1982. He has since taken part in dozens of successful organizing and contract campaigns, both regionally and nationally, for the Communications Workers of America, the Paperworkers, Carpenters, Teamsters and Service Employees International Union, and other unions. Wilson’s notable achievements include coordinating solidarity efforts with the CWA and IBEW during the massive NYNEX telephone workers’ strike in 1989; founding the Massachusetts branch of the community-labor coalition, Jobs with Justice; coordinating communications for the Teamsters in 1997 during the lengthy contract campaign and historic 15-day strike by the 185,000 workers at UPS; and organizing an AFL-CIO-led effort focused on financial institutions’ conflicts of interest that helped to thwart the Bush administration’s efforts to privatize social security. He served as national coordinator for “Labor for Bernie” during the presidential campaign on 2016, and currently works for SEIU Local 888 in Boston.

Documenting forty years of labor activism, the Wilson papers include important material from most of his major initiatives, including organizing campaigns with the CWA, files relating to the Justice at Work/Just Cause for All initiatives, organizing high tech, health care and telephone workers, and Jobs with Justice. Nearly half of the collection is comprised of a comprehensive collection of source materials and documents from the Teamsters’ UPS contract campaign and strike.

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

An educator and activist, Robert (Bob) M. Winston was born in New York City during the first wave of the baby boom and lived many of the principles associated with his generation. Winston became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements while a graduate student at Indiana University in the mid-1960s, working in cause while building his academic career. After being dismissed from a position at the University of New Hampshire for his antiwar activities, he moved on to UMass Amherst, where he earned a doctorate in education, serving as head of the Valley Peace Center at the same time. His activism continued to include social and environmental justice with organizations such as the Greensboro Justice Fund, Karuna Center for Peace Building, and the Performance Project.

The Winston Papers contain a dense assemblage of personal correspondence, subject files, posters, and audiovisual and printed materials documenting a career in social justice movements. The earliest materials in the collection stem from Winston’s involvement in the civil rights movement in Indiana and his opposition to the war in Vietnam, including a surprisingly wide array of materials from left-oriented periodicals to antiwar newspapers printed for servicemen and women, and the collection documents the ups and downs of his academic career. Later materials touch on his interests in U.S. intervention in Central America during the 1980s, the prison-industrial complex, civil liberties, and environmental issues.

A photographer from Washington, D.C., Lloyd Wolf is a well known photojournalist and documentarian who often works on topics in social change. During the course of a career that began in the late 1970s, Wolf has worked on projects ranging from documenting the impact of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to Jewish mothers and fathers, Moroccan Jewry, drug rehabilitation in prison, and Black-Jewish dialog.

The 13 images in the collection are part of Wolf’s series, “Acid Reign,” a project conducted in 1989 with a sociologist from UNC-Greensboro, Rebecca Adams, exploring the lives of dedicated Deadheads. The prints were made for exhibition at the symposium, Unbroken Chain: the Grateful Dead in Music, Culture, and Memory, held at UMass Amherst in November 2007. All rights remain with Lloyd Wolf.

Richard Wolff delivering a lecture at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2011. Photo by Joel Simpson

Hired to the UMass Amherst Economics Department as part of the “radical package” in 1973, Richard D. Wolff is an influential Marxian economist and professor emeritus of economics. Wolff was born in 1942 to Max and Lieselotte Wolff, who emigrated to the United States during World War II. He earned a BA in History from Harvard, MA in Economics from Stanford, and MA and PhD in Economics from Yale University, during which time he was an instructor at Yale. Before coming to UMass, Wolff also taught at the City College of the City University of New York. Wolff and his colleague and frequent collaborator, Stephen Resnick, wrote prolifically during their career at UMass, developing a new framework for considering political economy. While teaching at UMass, Wolff and his colleagues established the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA), which sponsors publication of the journal Rethinking Marxism. In 2012, Wolff co-founded Democracy at Work, a non-profit producing media that provides education and analysis of capitalism, Marxism, and democratic workplaces.

The Richard Wolff Papers document the professorial and professional career of Wolff through course material, writings and publications, book contracts, floppy disks, and a plethora of correspondence in the form of handwritten letters and printed out emails. There is also a small but significant amount of personal material, including family scrapbooks from Germany and his mother’s manuscript on surviving the Holocaust.

Informally referring to themselves as WAGs (Women Against Garage), Fay Kaynor, Mary Snyder, Merrylees Turner, and Mary Wentworth, opposed the building of a parking garage in the center of Amherst. Together they collected newspaper clippings, reports, minutes of meetings, and flyers that tell both sides of the story, but in particular shed light on the motivations of those opposed to the garage, concerns not well represented in the local paper, the Amherst Bulletin, at the time. Potential problems raised by garage opponents focused on the environmental issues that added traffic in Amherst would introduce, as well as the financial impact both on the town, if the revenues from the garage did not cover the investment or maintenance costs, and on locally-owned businesses that might not be able to afford higher rents if property values near the garage increased significantly.

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

In the early 1980s, Paul Connett, a chemist at St. Lawrence University, his wife Ellen, and other environmental activists in upstate New York formed Work on Waste USA to oppose the incineration of solid waste materials. Arguing that incineration was a major source of air pollution, pumping dioxin, mercury, cadmium, and lead into the atmosphere and leaving behind toxic ash and other residues, Work on Waste consulted nationally on issues surrounding incineration, coordinating with dozens of local organizations, and it became an ardent proponent of recycling as an alternative. From 1988-2000, WOW published a pro-recycling, anti-incineration newsletter, Waste Not.

The records of Work on Waste document the national struggle against the incineration of solid waste. With materials from dozens of groups opposing incineration in their communities, the collection provides insight into community activism and grassroots legal and media campaigns. The collection also includes materials relating to Work on Waste’s support for recycling and extensive data on the environmental impact of dioxin and other chemicals, medical waste, and ash landfills, and on the operation of incinerators.

The 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance was held in Durban, South Africa, under the auspices of the United Nations as an international forum to address a range of issues, from the legacy of colonialism and slavery to Zionism. In response to a draft document equating Zionism with racism, both the United States and Israel withdrew from the Conference, and although it is often considered a landmark in the antiracist struggle, political events following the September 11 terrorist attacks have blunted its impact.

This small collection consists of a selection of ephemera and approximately 20 collected by an American attendee at the World Conference.

A 1968 graduate in mathematics from MIT, Ferd Wulkan has been a fixture in activist circles for many years. A member of SDS in college and a rank-and-file clerical union leader at Boston University, Wulkan moved to Amherst in 1989. His passion has been the intersection of the labor movement with other progressive movements; he served for 15 years as a field representative with Locals 509 and 888 of SEIU, working with non-faculty professional personnel at UMass Amherst and Boston, and then as a representative and organizer for the Massachusetts Society of Professors from 2004 to 2016. In 2007, Wulkan became organizing director for the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM), a grassroots advocacy organization for affordable and accessible public higher education.

The Wulkan Collection consists of a fascinating array of material from Leftist and radical political movements during the late 1960s and early 1980s, with an emphasis on the Cambridge-Somerville area. In addition to a rich assemblage of formally published pamphlets and magazines, the collection includes a large number of fliers, handouts, informally published works, and underground newspapers on Socialist, Feminist, and anarchist topics and relating to the war in Vietnam, the labor movement, civil rights, and Black Power. The collection also contains three unprocessed boxes of material related to the clerical/technical union at Boston University. This union was affiliated with District 65, UAW, and District 65 had been part of the Distributive Workers of America, and affiliated with the United Auto Workers in the early 1980s. Related to this collection is a thesis by Leslie Lomasson, who worked at BU and completed her Master’s at UMass Amherst: “We Built the Union Ourselves: A Feminist Model of Unionism at Boston University” (1994).