Collecting area: Political activism

Born in the coal mining town of Blossburg, Pa., in 1913, Laura Ross (nee Kaplowitz) grew up in poverty as one of seven children of Lithuanian immigrants. In about 1932, Ross married Harry Naddell, a wine merchant, and settled into a comfortable life Brooklyn, N.Y., raising a son and daughter. During the Second World War, however, she became intensely politicized through her work with Russian War Relief, joining the Communist Party and eventually divorcing her les radical husband. Moving to the Boston area, she married Max Ross in 1963, an attorney for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and became a noted presence in a wide range of political activities, working for civil rights, the antiwar movement, and for many years, helping to run the Center for Marxist Education in Central Square , Cambridge. Perhaps most notably, between 1974 and 1984, Ross ran for Congress three times on the Communist Party ticket, taking on the powerful incumbent Tip O’Neill and winning almost a quarter of the vote. An activist to the end, Ross died in Cambridge on August 5, 2007.

The Ross papers are the legacy of a highly visible activist, organizer, educator, and member of the Communist Party USA. Heavily concentrated in the period 1967-1990, the collection includes material relating to her affiliation with CPUSA and her work with the Center for Marxist Education in Cambridge, Mass., including information on party membership, platforms, and conventions, minutes from various district committee meetings, material relating to the People’s Daily World, and course information and syllabi. Scattered throughout the collection are materials pertaining to contemporary political issues and elections, particularly the policies associated with Ronald Reagan. Ross was a vocal and persistent opponent of Reaganomics and the nuclear arms race that Reagan accelerated.

Ruth Mansberg was a writer, editor, poet, mother, and ardent peace activist. She worked with several civic, social, service, and political organizations dedicated to social change including a Pound Ridge, NY Nuclear Freeze chapter, the League of Women Voters, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She lived with her husband Hyman Mansberg and children Laura and Daniel in Pound Ridge, NY until moving to Chapel Hill, NC in 1991. After sidelining a writing career due to family obligations, she returned to writing upon her children entering adulthood. She enrolled in a continuing education writing course at the University of Connecticut, Stamford, where, thanks to a teacher there named Mel Goldberg, she picked up freelance work with two trade journals, Dental Management and Optometric Management. In 1971 she pitched a story to Dental Management on Bernard Bender, a 52 year old Los Angeles dentist who was convicted of helping young men avoid the draft by applying braces to their teeth. He was convicted in February of 1972 and sentenced to 15 years in Federal prison, but was later released in late 1973. Mansberg worked for a number of newspapers and trade publications and co-authored two books. She died in November of 2000 in Chapel Hill

This small collection consists of Mansberg’s correspondence and research materials related to her article, “The Strange Case of Dr. Bender”, which was published in the June 1972 issue of Dental Management. This includes correspondence between Mansberg, Dr. Bender and his wife Bea discussing the article and other things. In addition, there is correspondence with Mel Goldberg, the editor of Dental Management and others, whom she wrote for information about the case. There is also a reporter’s transcript of the trial and the testimony of dentist Spiro J. Chacanos.

Born in Montefegatesi, Italy, in April 1937, Roland Sarti began his academic career as a teaching assistant and instructor at Rutgers University from 1960-1964. In the fall of 1967, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Italian History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, becoming chair of the University Seminar on Studies in Modern Italy five years later. A scholar of the fascist movement in Italy, Sarti also wrote on topics ranging from rural life in the Apennines to the life of the revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. During his tenure at UMass, he served on the Personnel, Curriculum, and Graduate Studies Committees, and played a prominent role in the Faculty Senate and the International Programs Office, particularly with respect to the summer programs in Italy. A past president of the New England Historical Society and the Society for Italian Historical Studies, he was a board member for the European History Quarterly and the H-Italy Network. He retired from active teaching in 2002.

The Sarti Papers document Sarti’s distinguished career as professor, author, and chair of the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They consist of professional correspondence, history department records, records of major crises at the University, Italian studies newsletters, student publications, and historical society records. A significant amount of the materials, particularly among the correspondence and periodicals, are in Italian.

At the height of the antiwar struggle in the late 1960s, a group of scientists and engineers based in Cambridge, Mass., began to turn a critical eye on the role of their fields in the larger political culture. Calling themselves Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA), the group took the slogan “Science for the People,” which in turn became the name of their organization. With a collective membership that spread nation-wide, Science for the People was a voice for radical science and an active presence framing several of the scientific debates of the day. Through its vigorous publications, SftP explored issues ranging from the impact of military and corporate control of research to scientific rationalization of racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality; and they contributed to the discussions of recombinant DNA, sociobiology, IQ and biological determinism, women’s health care, nuclear power, and the rise of biotechnology. Many members were engaged in supporting anti-imperialist resistance in Central America and Asia during the 1980s. The organization gradually waned in the 1980s and published the last issue of its magazine in 1989.
Donated by several members of the organization, the Science for the People collection provides a window into the organization and operation of a collective devoted to radical science. In addition to meeting minutes and notes, and some correspondence, the collection includes a nearly complete run of the Science for the People magazine, and a substantial representation of the national and Nicaragua newsletters and topical publications. Photographs from the group’s trip to China and other areas abroad in 1978 are available online, along with videos of the talks and sessions from a 2014 conference on the history and legacy of SftP.

David Seager’s 1995 PhD history thesis, “Repression in Academia: New Left and Antiwar College Teachers and Political Dissent in the Vietnam War era, 1964-1975” is one of the few in-depth studies of academic repression during the Vietnam era. Besides Ellen Schrecker, who has written extensively on academic freedom and repression in higher education, there has been a dearth of material written about the personal and career consequences faced by American college and university teachers who spoke out against the Vietnam War. For his thesis, Seager did extensive primary and secondary source research and directly interviewed 35 instructors and corresponded with 38 additional ones throughout 1993 and 1994.
               
The project was fully self-funded by Seager who had very little financial support. Early in the research project, his advisor passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack. He worked with a competent replacement, but they were not involved with the original concept and Seager was, in a sense, orphaned. Seager planned to expand the thesis with additional post-graduate work, but he was instead caught in a desperate financial bind with no help from a true mentor, a growing pile of job rejections, and a need for income, so the project ended with the thesis.

Peter Simon’s life and work as a photojournalist follows the quintessential arc of the counterculture, baby boom generation. The son of Richard Simon, founder of Simon and Schuster, Peter grew up in the New York City suburb of Riverdale and attended Boston University, graduating in 1969. While a student at BU, he began documenting the political turmoil in the US when he became photo editor for the radical student newspaper, the BU News, and later as a press photographer for the Cambridge Phoenix. In 1970, Simon left Boston to form Tree Frog Farm, a back-to-the-land commune in Guilford, Vermont, and after leaving there in 1972, he immersed himself in the New Age, forming a close relationship with spiritual leader Ram Dass. Among the most constant threads connecting his work throughout these changes was music. Simon’s sisters, Carly, Lucy, and Joanna have all been involved in music, and through a partnership with longtime friend Stephen Davis and his association with Rolling Stone magazine, Simon enjoyed unique access to many of the most important musicians of his generation. He spent time on the road with the Grateful Dead; went backstage and at home with Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and many others. His early forays into the world of reggae with Bob Marley and other Jamaican recording artists resulted in one of his nine books, Reggae Bloodlines. Simon’s other photographic interests are as wide-ranging as his background. A visitor to Martha’s Vineyard since the 1950s and a resident since 1974, his work reflects the changes and cultural richness of that island; his family’s friendship with Jackie Robinson has driven his lifelong documentation of baseball, and he is in high demand for portraits, weddings, and other work for hire.

The Peter Simon Collection houses the original negatives for Simon’s complete body of work as a photo journalist and also includes many photographs taken by his father Richard, an avid amateur photographer, which documents the Simon family and life in Riverdale and Stamford, Connecticut, where the family had a summer home.

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

An attorney, writer, publisher, and journalist, Robert Ellis Smith is a leading expert in privacy. A graduate of Harvard (1962) and Georgetown University Law Center (1975), Smith has publishedsince 1974, a newsletter dedicated to the individual’s right to privacy, and several books, including Privacy: How to Protect What’s Left of It (1979), Workrights (1983), The Law of Privacy Explained (1993), and Our Vanishing Privacy (1993). An adjunct Professor at Roger Williams University School of Law, he is often called upon to speak on and testify concerning privacy rights. Smith’s other activism has included work in the Civil Rights movement and in environmental protection.

The Smith collection consists of publications and research files relating to Robert Ellis Smith’s long interest in the law and culture of privacy. In addition to a complete run of Privacy Journal and Smith’s publications, the collection includes material on topics ranging from cyber security to privacy in employment, medical care, identity theft, electronic surveillance, and telecommunications, and a thick run of correspondence relating to Privacy Journal, including letters seeking advice on issues in privacy and privacy invasion. Also included is a small collection of material relating to Smith’s civil rights work in Alabama during the mid-1960s.

The term social change is used in SCUA to refer to individuals and organizations who actively seek to better the world around them, as well as to individuals experiencing shifts in economic, cultural, and social life. Few movements for change exist in isolation. Following W.E.B. Du Bois, we recognize that seemingly disparate issues in social justice are often intrinsically and deeply interconnected, so that to create change in one area requires close attention to others. It is the flow of ideas, people, and organizations that constitutes the warp and weft of social change in the twentieth century.

Created to collocate small groups of manuscripts, documents, letters, and other unpublished materials relating to the history and experience of social change, the Social Change Collection is focused largely on movements of the 1960s and after. While entirely miscellaneous, the collection includes interesting material relating to the peace and antiwar movements during the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the conflict in Vietnam, antiimperialist movements in Central and South America, and a small number of items relating to sexuality, gender, and feminism.

Assembled to bring together short and broken runs of periodicals produced by activists and movements for social justice, the Social Change Periodicals Collection touches on a wide variety of topics. Much of the original collection came from subscriptions held by the Everywoman’s Center at UMass Amherst, however the collection has grown to include materials supplied by many other donors. The bulk of periodicals come from the period 1965-1990 and the subjects covered range from feminism to gay rights, and political radicalism, to peace, prison, labor, antiracism, and the counterculture more generally. The collection has been organized thematically into 19 series.

A renowned independent film maker and founder of Gabriel Films, Jonathan Stack has written and produced over two dozen documentary films and fifty television programs. Born in New York City in 1957, Stack graduated from UMass Amherst in 1979. From the time of his film Damned in the USA (1992), Stack has taken on challenging subjects, earning a reputation for gaining access into forbidden and often dangerous situations, from crack dens in Harlem to war-torn Liberia. The recipient of numerous honors in his career, Stack has been awarded five Emmy Awards, has twice been nominated for the Academy Award, and his film The Farm, on Angola Prison, won Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in 1998.

The films and videos in the Stack collection include copies of his work in Liberia and Haiti and material from his documentary on prison rodeos at Angola Prison. The collection includes film from Damned in the USA (1992), Final Judgment (1996), and The Farm (1998), as well as footage from Harlem, Angola Prison, St. Gabriel Women’s Prison, and on body piercing, rodeo, and the prisoner Vincent Simmons.