Collecting area: Social change

Labor historian John W. Bennett has researched the history of the labor movement since his days as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts (Class of 1952). A born collector, he began accumulating memorabilia associated with unions, drawn to their potential as a visual record of labor iconography and self-representation.

Extending back to the 1880s, the Bennett Collection includes examples from around the country, but with a particularly strong representation of New England unions between the mid-1930s and mid-1970s.

An avid birder and eminent ornithologist, Arthur Cleveland Bent was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, on November 25, 1866. After receiving his A.B. from Harvard in 1889, bent was employed as an agent for the Safety Pocket Company and from 1900 to 1914, he was General Manager of Mason Machine Works. His passion, however, was birds. An associate in Ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, Bent became a collaborator at the Smithsonian and president (1935-1937) of the American Ornithologists’ Union. The culmination of his research was the massive, 26 volume Life Histories of North American Birds (1919-1968).

The Bent collection is a glimpse into the birding life of a remarkable amateur ornithologist. It contains the field notebooks of his collaborator, Owen Durfee (1880-1909), his own journals (1887-1942), photographs and negatives (1896-1930), correspondence concerning the photographs (1925-1946), and mimeographed and printed material. Bent’s records cover nest observations, egg measurements, bird sightings, and notes on specimens provided to organizations such as the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Bristol County Agricultural School, and the United States National Museum.

Bernard B. Berger served as the Director of the Water Resources Research Center from 1966 to 1978 and was a world-renowned expert on water supply management and the effects of pollution. Berger was born in 1912 in New York City, earned a B.S. in 1935 from MIT and an M.S. in Sanitary Engineering in 1948 from Harvard. Before coming to the University of Massachusetts, Berger worked as a civil engineer for twenty-five years in the United States Public Health Service, where he researched and advocated policy on pollution control. While at the University, Berger served as the United States’ water resources specialist in the executive office of Science and Technology and worked as a consultant to Israel in 1972 on that country’s creation of the Israel Environmental Service, now the Department of the Environment and as a consultant to South Africa on a similar project in 1975. The year after retiring from the University in 1978, Berger earned an honorary doctorate of science. He died on December 8, 2000.

The Bernard B. Berger Papers includes correspondence and reports from his consultancy work with Israel and South Africa. The collection also includes several folders of Berger’s published and unpublished writings, personal and professional correspondence and documents relating to his receipt of his honorary degree and other awards and recognitions.

Born in New York City in 1935, Roy Berkeley’s eclectic creative career began while working his way through Columbia University (BA, 1956) as an editor for the New York Post and pseudonymous author of 14 pulp novels, and continued after graduation, working for two years at the height of the Cold War in U.S. intelligence. A self-taught guitarist, he became a stalwart of the folk music scene in Greenwich Village, performing at the Gaslight regularly and at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and eventually recording three albums. In 1966, Berkeley married Ellen Perry, a writer and editor for Progressive Architecture and Architectural Forum, and one of the few women architectural critics of the time. Their time in New York City ended in 1971, however, when Ellen’s job as an editor at an architectural magazine ended. Using Roy’s winnings from his appearance on the television show Jeopardy, the couple relocated to Shaftsbury, Vt., where they led a freelance life as writers, editors, teachers, and lecturers. Roy was eventually appointed deputy Sheriff in town and became a member of the state’s Fish and Wildlife Board. After a struggle with cancer, Roy Berkeley died in 2009 at the age of 73.

The bulk of the Perry Papers consists of Roy’s research files and drafts of a never-completed history of the folk music scene, along with some correspondence, notes, and ephemera that includes both editions of his Bosses Songbook, a satirical send-up of the People’s Songbook. The collection also contains a sampling of the exceptional range of Ellen’s writing on topics from architecture to cats, cookery, to grieving.

A member of the Department of Political Science at Penn State University, Michael Bernhard specializes in the comparative history of institutional change in East Central Europe and the political economy of democratic survival and breakdown. Since receiving his doctorate from Columbia University in 1988, Bernhard has written extensively on various aspects of the democratic transition in Poland and East Germany.

The Bernhard Collection contains photocopies and some original materials of underground publications by the Solidarity Movement in Poland, most of which were crudely published and illegally distributed. The collection also includes a series of posters for Solidarity candidates during the first post-Communist election.

An important figure in building a network of antifluoridation activists, Martha Bevis was born in North Carolina in 1927 and lived most of her adult life in Houston, Texas. She worked on the staff of Senator Lyndon Johnson beginning in the early 1950s, remaining with him through his period as Vice President. Always energetic, she was involved in a number of political and civic organizations, including those promoting natural childbirth and breastfeeding, but from the mid-1970s, she was especially associated with the antifluoridation movement. A founder of the Safe Water Foundation of Texas, she became a key litigant in a case seeking to block fluoridation of the water supply in Houston, and although the court ruled in 1980 that fluoride was harmful, it permitted the city council to proceed with fluoridation. From that point forward, she played a key role regionally and nationally as an organizer, researcher, propagandist, and funding source for the antifluoridation movement. Bevis died in Houston on April 22, 2007.

This massive archive stems from Martha Bevis’s role as a connector and mediator of information for the antifluoridation movement. Beginning in the 1970s, Bevis gathered, copied, and distributed huge quantities of information on the health effects of fluoride, legal strategies and cases opposing fluoridation of public water supplies, and the antifluoridation movement generally. Bevis maintained a regular correspondence with other activists and antifluoride organizations and played an important role in gathering and preserving the papers of other activists.

Hanif Shabazz Bey is one of the “Virgin Island Five” accused and convicted of murdering eight tourists at a golf course in the U.S. Virgin Islands on September 6, 1972. The murders occurred during a turbulent period of rebellion on the Islands, a time when a movement to resist colonial rule was growing in the U.S. occupied Virgin Islands and elsewhere. The reaction to the crime, which was rapidly characterized as racially and politically motivated, from the authorities was both swift and revealing: over a hundred Black activists were picked up for interrogation and the island of St. Croix was put under martial law. Beaumont Gereau (Hanif Shabazz Bey) was one of five men apprehended and charged with the attack; each of the men accused was a known supporter of the Virgin Island independence movement. Detained and subjected to torture, the five men ultimately confessed to the crime and were tried for murder. Despite the many indications that the subsequent trial was profoundly flawed, the men were found guilty and sentenced to eight consecutive life terms.

“The Beginning of Hell” is a typed memoir by Hanif Shabazz Bey, a prisoner from the Virgin Islands held in the U.S. Written sometime after 1985, the memoir provides a personal account of Bey’s childhood in the Virgin Islands, his service in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, and the social and political conditions of the Islands during the early 1970s that led up to his arrest and conviction for the murder of eight tourists in 1972. Bey details the torture and other harsh interrogation tactics employed by prosecutors, the trial, and its aftermath, including his confinement to prisons first in Puerto Rico and then the U.S. In prison, Bey chronicles inhumane treatment and conditions, his conversion to Islam, and his efforts to seek assistance to reduce his sentence.

Since the early 1990s, Michael Bianchi has been involved in the community of electric vehicle developers and enthusiasts and is a key figure in documenting the history of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association’s annual American Tour de Sol Electric Vehicle Challenge. A resident of northern New Jersey and a developer of software management and operations support systems with Bellcore and other companies, Bianchi became interested in alternatives to petroleum-fueled vehicles in the early 1990s, attending his first Tour de Sol in 1993. Since that time he has served as announcer for the Tour and documented each contest with photographs, oral histories with participants, and highly detailed summary reports (1994-2009). For many years, Bianchi drove his own electric vehicle, beginning with a Solectria Force, and he continues to write on the development of electric vehicles.

The Bianchi collection contains reports, photographs, and ephemera associated with the American Tour De Sol, along with an assortment of scarce newsletters and magazines on electric vehicles. Of special note are interviews (on microcassette) with Tour participants.

A new medical waste incinerator for New York city hospitals became the focal point of drawn-out controversy in the 1990s. After proposals to place the facility in Rockland County and downtown Manhattan were scotched, a site in the South Bronx was selected. Even before it opened in 1991, the Bronx-Lebanon incinerator touched off fierce opposition. Built to dispose of up to 48 tons per day of medical waste gathered from fifteen regional hospitals, the incinerator was located in a poor and densely populated area, and worse, raising charges of environmental racism. Making matters worse, during its years of operation, it was cited for hundreds of violations of state pollution standards. A coalition of grassroots organizations led an effective campaign to close the facility, and in June 1997 the plant’s owner, Browning Ferris Industries agreed. In an agreement with the state two years later, BFI agreed to disable the plant and remove the emission stacks.

Gathered by an environmental activist and consultant from New York city, Sam Bishop, this collection documents the turbulent history of public opposition to the Bronx-Lebanon medical waste incinerator. In addition to informational materials on medical waste incineration, the collection includes reports and legal filings relative to the facility, some materials on the campaign to close it, and a small quantity of correspondence and notes from activists.

The Black Mass Communications Project was founded as an educational and informational outlet for Black students at UMass Amherst in 1970 and authorized in the following year as a Registered Student Organization. Over the years, BCMP played varied roles on campus, hosting cultural events, lectures, workshops, and social gatherings as to help keep black music alive. Many of its early members were also affiliated with the student radio station WMUA, and throughout the 1970s, the organization played a prominent role in providing programming to the station, offering programming highlighting African American music and current affairs.

The BCMP collection consists of many dozens of reel to reel audiotapes of radio broadcasts aired over WMUA during the 1970s and early 1980s by and for the university’s African American community. Included is a range of locally-produced public affairs, cultural, and music programming, with some content licensed from around the country. A few of the tapes are associated with the Five College’s National Public Radio affiliate, WFCR. An inventory of the collection is available to view which includes dates, descriptions, program titles and tapes that have been digitized.