Collections: mss

Revolutionary organizers, writers, and theorists, Eric Mann and Lian Hurst Mann have been active in the struggle for civil rights for decades. The son of Jewish Socialist and labor organizer from New York, Mann came of age during the early phases of the Civil Rights movement and after graduating from Cornell (1964), he became field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality. Increasingly radicalized through exposure to Black revolutionary nationalists, Mann took part in the Newark Community Union Project and became a leader in anti-imperialist opposition to the war in Vietnam as a New England regional coordinator for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and later with the Revolutionary Youth Movement I — the Weatherman above-ground tendency of SDS. Following a militant demonstration at the Harvard Center for International Affairs late in 1969, Mann was convicted of assault on the basis of perjured testimony and sentenced to two years in prison. An organizer of his fellow prisoners even behind bars, he was “shipped out” often in the middle of the night, from prison to prison, spending the last year at Concord State Prison. After being released early in July 1971, he continued his prison activism through the Red Prison Movement. At the same time, as a writer, he earned a national audience for his book Comrade George: an account of the life, politics, and assassination of Soledad Brother George Jackson. Feeling himself at a low point in his radical career, Mann met Lian Hurst while vacationing in Mexico during the summer 1974. Hurst, a leader in the Berkeley Oakland Women’s Union, architect, and a strong Socialist Feminist, soon became his partner in life and politics, and Mann left Massachusetts to join with her in Berkeley. Hurst lead a group of women from BOWU who formed a “Thursday night group” and left the organization with the polemic, “socialist feminism is bourgeois feminism” all of whom moved towards integrating women’s liberation and Marxism-Leninism. At her urging, the two took part in Marxist Leninist party building, becoming union organizers with the United Auto Workers, and eventually moving to Los Angeles. Hurst was elected shop steward by her fellow workers as a known revolutionary. There, Mann led a campaign to keep the Van Nuys assembly plant open (1982-1992) — captured in his book, Taking on General Motors. They joined the August 29th Movement and its successor, the League of Revolutionary Struggle. They left LRS in 1984. In 1989, Mann and veterans of the GM Van Nuys Campaign formed the Labor/Community Strategy Center, which has been a primary focal points for their work ever since, helping to build consciousness, leadership, and organization within communities of color. Hurst became editor of AhoraNow, an innovative bilingual left publication that featured articles by Black and Latino working class leaders and helped initiate the center’s National School for Strategic Organizing. In 2003 Hurst wrote, “Socialist Feminism: Thoughts After 30 Years” for AhoraNow, a critical re-engagement of those important debates from an historical perspective after a 30 year reunion of BOWU’s key leaders. Mann’s latest book is Playbook For Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer. Hurst and Mann continue to write and agitate in the cause of revolutionary change, particularly for oppressed communities of color.

The Mann-Hurst collection contains the records of two lives intertwined with one another with the cause of liberation of Black and Latino communities, women, and an internationalist pro-socialist anti-imperialism. Containing a nearly complete set of publications, the collection also contains early materials on Lian Hurst’s work with BOWU and the both Eric and Lian’s time as organizers for the UAW and their participation in the August 29th Movement and League of Revolutionary Struggle. Of particular interest are a series of letters home written by Eric during his imprisonment. The collection contains comparatively little on Hurst and Manns’ more recent work with the Labor/Strategy Strategy Center or Bus Riders Union

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.

After meeting as a worship group for thirty years in Fort Fairfield in the northern reaches of Maine, Maple Grove Monthly Meeting of Friends was set off Unity Monthly Meeting in 1890. It was a part of Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting until it was laid down in 1962 to Vassalboro Monthly.

The single volume of surviving records from Maple Grove contain a nearly complete run of minutes for the duration of the monthly meeting, lacking only the last seven years.

John Marier, ca.1952

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

The environmental chemist John R. Marier (1925-1992) joined the staff of the Applied Biology Division of the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC) as a “laboratory helper” in Aug. 1943 and though entirely without university training, worked his way up to laboratory technician and, by 1967, into the ranks of professional staff. His early work on food and dairy chemistry grew into sustained research into the quantitative chemical analysis of biological tissues. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he wrote frequently on the environmental and physiological impact of fluoride, culminating in his 1971 report, Environmental Fluoride, and is noted as an important figure in raising concern over its role as “a persistent bioaccumulator.” Marier retired from the NRCC in 1985, but remained active in the field for several years, expanding into research on magnesium and its function in muscle contraction. Marier died of a massive cardiac and pulmonary failure on Mar. 4, 1992.

The Marier Papers are a particularly rich record of correspondence and notes on the impact of fluoridation from a Canadian specialist in environmental chemistry.

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

Rob Kampia, the valedictorian of his high school class, was an undergraduate at Penn State when he was arrested for growing marijuana for personal use and sentenced to three months in a Pennsylvania county jail. Out of that experience, he decided to move to Washington, D.C., to work for the legalization of marijuana. After working briefly at NORML, he and colleagues Chuck Thomas and Mike Kirshner established the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) in January 1995, which lobbies at the federal level to changes laws to enable states to set their own policies regarding marijuana and at the state level to promote legalization and regulation. MPP has an educational branch, the MPP Foundation, and a branch that donates to congressional candidates, MPP PAC.

The Marijuana Policy Project Records span MPP’s work from its early years through recent efforts and include voluminous research files and reports, promotional materials, newsletters and mailings and other printed items, strategic plans, and grants funded by its foundation. Additions to the collection are expected.

Michella Marino received her doctorate from the Department History of at UMass Amherst in May 2013. Her dissertation, Sweating femininity: women athletes, masculine culture, and American inequality from 1930 to the present, drew on extensive oral historical and archival research to examine how feminist women negotiated the cultural boundaries surrounding gender to carve out identities as women, athletes, and mothers. Focusing on women’s participation in two sports, basketball and roller derby, Marino wrote that her goal was to “explain the tension between women’s representation and agency, between cultural constructs and women’s lives, between images of women and their individual identities.”

The Marino Collection consists of 23 oral historical interviews with female and male participants in roller derby and basketball.

Quakers have a tangled history in Marion, Mass., a coastal town located on the northwestern edge of Buzzards Bay. As early as 1702, Friends established a preparative meeting in the village of Sippican (currently part of Marion), however this fed particular meetings in the neighboring towns of Rochester or Mattapoisett, rather than Marion itself. An independent worship ground was established in East Marion in 1946, followed in 1970 by a separate independent meeting in Marion under the care of Sandwich Quarter. This latter became the core of Marion Monthly Meeting, which was formally set off in 1973. The meeting was laid down in 1992.

Somewhat intermingled, this collection documents the complete, though comparatively brief history of the Quaker monthly meeting in Marion, Mass. It includes a thorough set of minutes for all but the final two years of the meeting, plus a small quantity of correspondence and financial information.

The activist George Markham was born in Wisconsin on Aug. 15, 1909. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he began working with the Associated Press in 1936 where he became an ardent member of the American Newspaper Guild. During the Second World War, he served with distinction on the aircraft carriers Saratoga and Yorktown in the South Pacific, however after the war, his leftist politics and associations with Communists led to his dismissal with less than honorable discharge. Following the trial, Markham returned to college to earn a masters degree in social studies and began teaching middle school in Pelham, NY, but was released, probably for political reasons. He later taught in colleges in New York before he and his second wife, Arky, moved to Northampton in the 1960s. George and Arky remain active on behalf of peace and social justice.

The Markham Papers contain materials relating to George Markham’s McCarthy-era trial and dismissal from the Navy, along with documents relating to other aspects of his life and career and the Markham family in Wisconsin. Among these is a fine Civil War unit history of the 20th Indiana Regiment written by Markham’s grandfather, William Emery Brown.

A minister, published poet, and physician from New Salem, Massachusetts, Perry Marshall carried on a lively correspondence with Dorothy Bullard, also from New Salem, from 1927 until 1929.

Although personal in nature, Marshall’s letters are not romantic, but are written from the perspective of an older gentleman who late in life has come to admire, and perhaps adore, a young woman. Bullard, a lively and thoughtful young woman, clearly returns the admiration, if not the affection. The collection also includes several of Marshall’s published works.

A Quaker worship group was held on Martha’s Vineyard from 1946 to 1953 under the care of Providence Monthly Meeting and was revived as an independent worship group in 1978. The group was accorded status as a monthly meeting under Sandwich Quarter in 1984.

The collection contains a nearly complete set of minutes for the Martha’s Vineyard Friends Meeting from its inception in 1984 to 2007.