Collecting area: Social change

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 October of 1970 and authorized in the following year as a Registered Student Organization. Over the years, BCMP played various roles on campus, including hosting cultural events, lectures, workshops, and social gatherings. 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 highlighting African American music and current affairs.

The BCMP collection consists of ~500 reel to reel audiotapes of radio broadcasts aired over WFCR and 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.

Named for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “Rebel Girl,” Elizabeth “Liz” Blum has worked to live up to her name through public activism, organizing, and community service in the civil rights, anti-war, women’s, anti-apartheid, co-op, and other movements. After graduating from Bennington College in 1964, Blum went south as a part of the Mississippi Freedom Vote, going door to door in northwestern Mississippi until her house in Tupelo was firebombed, forcing her to relocate to Columbus for the remainder of the registration drive. She continued her work and connections with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in New Haven as a worker for the Freedom School and the Economic Research and Action Program, and additionally lived in New York City and San Francisco before returning to Vermont in 1967 to live in a commune and teach French at Castleton University. There Blum organized an SDS chapter and women’s group before moving to Cambridge, Mass., joining the Boston Women’s Health Collective and helping to edit Our Bodies, Ourselves. A retired Occupational Therapist, Blum is currently county chair of the Vermont Progressive Party, serves on the Board of the Hanover Co-op Food Stores where she heads the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, and continues her diverse advocacy work through personal and community action.

Small in size, but generous in topic and form, the Blum Papers consist of correspondence and two newsletter portions with commentary on numerous events and activist groups during the first half of the 1960s. Personal experiences and reflections on national politics and trends, student and community organizing, and the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements, reveal how individuals negotiated and prioritized their thoughts and actions during such turbulent times. Correspondents include Henry M. Aronson, Ike Coleman, Vernon Grizzard, and Mike Miller, and updates from and to Blum are mostly from Mississippi, but also San Francisco, Cambridge, New Haven, and Selma.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

A native of Washington, D.C., and graduate of the University of Wisconsin (1970) and Loyola University of Chicago Law School (1973), Norman Blumenthal moved to La Jolla, Calif., in 1976 to accept a position as Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel for an oil and gas exploration company. After twelve years in the corporate sector, Blumenthal entered private practice, shifting focus to the protection of employees, consumers, and securities buyers from unfair business practices and pursuing both class action and individual cases. Among other notable cases, Blumenthal led a class action suit against the city of Escondido, Calif. (Coshow v. City of Escondido, 132 Cal. App. 4th 687), arguing that their decision to fluoridate the city water supply in 2001 amounted to “mass medicating the entire community” without consent using chemicals that were known to be carcinogenic. In 2005, the court upheld the City’s fluoridation plan.

The Blumenthal collection represents the extensive legal and research files employed by the plaintiffs in Coshow v. Escondido and the appeals that ensued, including correspondence, litigants’ files, depositions, exhibits, “expert documents,” research materials and drafts, “extras.”

Educator, sociologist, scholar, and author. Includes personal and professional correspondence; administrative and teaching records; research data; manuscripts of published and unpublished speeches, articles and books; photographs; and Bond family papers, especially those of Horace Bond’s father, James Bond. Fully represented are Bond’s two major interests: black education, especially its history and sociological aspects, and Africa, particularly as related to educational and political conditions.

Correspondents include many notable African American educators, Africanists, activists, authors and others, such as Albert C. Barnes, Claude A. Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arna Bontemps, Ralph Bunche, Rufus Clement, J. G. St. Clair Drake, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edwin Embree, John Hope Franklin, E. Franklin Frazier, W. C. Handy, Thurgood Marshall, Benjamin E. Mays, Pauli Murray, Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Ezra Park, A. Phillip Randolph, Lawrence P. Reddick, A. A. Schomburg, George Shepperson, Carter G. Woodson and Monroe Work.

A nationally renowned labor arbitrator and writer, Tim L. Bornstein graduated from Harvard Law School in 1957. After stints working for Goldberg, Feller & Bredhoff in Washington, D.C., the National Labor Relations Board, and the Retail Clerks International Union, Bornstein joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1969, becoming a Professor of Law and Industrial Relations in the Business School. He taught at UMass for twenty years, maintaining a practice in arbitration and mediation all the while. During his career, Bornstein served as a Vice President and Governor for the National Academy of Arbitrators and has wrote two books and numerous articles on labor law and arbitration. He died on June 3, 2019.

Bornstein’s professional interest in organized labor translated into collecting historical memorabilia from the labor movement. His collection contains a range of union-related convention badges and buttons, broadsides, union cards, small banners, and other ephemeral items.

Born on February 12, 1936, to John and Jenny Bos of Tonawanda, New York, John Henry Bos graduated from Carnegie Tech with a B.A. in drama. His career in the arts began with a job in technical support in summer theaters and included work at major theaters, such as the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, and Deputy Director of the performing arts division for the New York State Council on the Arts. Bos served as Director of Performance Programs for National Public Radio during the 1980s where he earned a Peabody Award. Following his time at NPR, he hosted Arts America, a weekly cultural television program produced by the United States Information Agency. In the 1990s, Bos relocated to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, where he provided arts consulting and was involved in the revival of Memorial Hall, one of the many locations in which he hosted musical performances as a part of Rural Renaissance. It was during this time that Bos began writing, first as a member of the writing group, Spirit of the Written Word, at the CancerConnection during his first bout with cancer, and later as a bi-weekly columnist for the Greenfield Recorder. In his column, “Connecting the Dots,” Bos advocated for climate change and political life. He died of December 11, 2024, at the age of 88.

The John Bos Collection consists of an array of materials related to his career in the arts including theater programs, photographs, documents from the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, as well as copies of his articles printed in the Greenfield Recorder and other publications.

A constructed language developed by a Polish physician, L.L. Zamenhof, and first published in 1887, Esperanto is the most widely spoken auxiliary language in the world. Fundamentally utopian in origin, Esperanto is a simplified and highly rationalized language derived from a pastiche of languages, primarily European. By creating a universal second language, Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto would help transcend national and cultural boundaries and thus promote peace and understanding in a fractious world. Allan Boschen, an engineer with General Electric in Pittsfield, was a student and teacher of Esperanto and longtime officer with the Esperanto Society of New England.

The Esperanto book collection includes instructional materials in the language from around the world along with a diversity of imprints ranging from novels and poetry to travel books, histories and biographies, political writings, materials on China and Vietnam, children’s literature, and even a cookbook. We expect to add to the collection in future.