Bob Winston Papers
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.