Garbage
New Left
"Bringing the revolution to the Ruling Class, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers export garbage from their Lower East Side ghetto to the halls of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts-all the while, New York was in its longest bitterest sanitation workers strike. " (Roz Payne Archive) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KtX8IEWabTY" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
film
El Caso Contra Lincoln Center (The Case Against Lincoln Center)
Urban Redevelopment
"To keep the well-to-do from continuing to flee the city and depleting its tax base, city, state, and federal government, and the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Mellons finance the prestigious Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. It was built in the middle of a Puerto Rican ghetto, displacing thousands of families and a lively street culture. Upper-income families move into high-rise apartment houses and gourmandise the "humanities," financially inaccessible and culturally irrelevant to the lives of the former residents." (Roz Payne Archives) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u7NjO8dl8v8" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
Prelinger Archives - YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
film
Nixon Inaugural Action
(1 image)
1968 Election
Roz Payne took this photo while in Washington, D.C., for a protest of Richard Nixon's inauguration in 1968.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
New Left Notes, vol. 1, no. 29, August 5, 1966
New Left
New Left Notes was the official newspaper published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This issue includes articles about the upcoming SDS national convention in Clear Lake, Iowa; a debate over electoral politics and the National Council for a New Politics; a burglary at the Chicago headquarters of the DuBois Clubs of America; definitions of radicalism; an update from the Iowa City chapter; a discussion of the intersection of race and poverty and ERAP; a response to a previous article on the Communist Convention; SDS and ideology; “derisive terminology”; the radical tradition in America; the “crisis of Cold War ideology”; an Cleveland gathering of anti-war groups; “representative democracy” vs. “referendum democracy”; recent racial conflict on Chicago’s West Side; an upcoming Socialist Scholars Conference; grape strike; SSOC; a response to a critique of the New Left by Tom Kahn; letters to the editor.
Students for a Democratic Society
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
August 5, 1966
underground press
Call for a National Hard Times Conference
Anti-Poverty Movement
This pamphlet advertises the Hard Times Conference, which took place between January 30 and February 1, 1976, at the University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago. The conference was organized by the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, with the support of a number of Weather Underground leaders and sought to challenge political cuts to social welfare programs, protest inflation and advocate for a guaranteed jobs and income program. The conference slogan was “Hard Times are Fighting Times.” This pamphlet discusses the accessibility of social services in urban neighborhoods, the importance of obtaining a living wage, and problems accruing from inflation. According to the Freedom Archive, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee was “An anti-imperialist group that began as the Prairie Fire Distributing Committee in 1974 to distribute Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, written by members of the Weather Underground Organization. After its initial publication, groups sprang up around the country to discuss the book. PFOC was formally organized in 1976 and was active in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Chicago until the mid-1990s. Their work embraced a broad range of issues: international solidarity with national liberation struggles in Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador; and with the struggles for self-determination of Puerto Rican, African-American, Mexicano, and Native peoples inside U.S. borders; support of political prisoners; opposition to white and male supremacy and support of women’s and gay liberation.”
Hard Times Conference Board
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1976
color print
pamphlet
R Cobb Cartoon on Capitalism and Poverty
Anti-Capitalism
This cartoon links poverty and starvation to capitalism.
R Cobb
El Gaucho
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
May 6, 1970
newsprint
newspaper
United Farm Workers of New York Pamphlet
United Farm Workers
The United Farm Workers of America was founded in 1962 following the merger between Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association. The new union was led by Chavez and Delores Huerta. In general, the UFWA sought to raise awareness of migrant workers’ rights and utilized nonviolent strategies such as collective bargaining, strikes, and boycotts, to secure and protect farm-workers labor rights, work hours, wages and access to health care. During the late-1960s and mid-1970s, the UFWA initiated well-known boycotts against table grapes and lettuce to protest what they viewed as unfair labor contracts and unacceptable working conditions.
This document, created by the New York chapter of the UFW includes a interview with Cesar Chavez, data about seasonal farm workers, the impact of farm labor on children, poverty level wages for farm workers, and solidarity with the Vietnamese people.
United Farm Workers New York
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
early-1970s
pamphlet
Fresh Air Fund - Friendly Town
Environmentalism
Founded in 1877, the Fresh Air Fund organization served as a non-profit outreach program for low-income, urban youths to gain access to country living. This button addresses the Friendly Town program, which enabled some families residing in small towns to host inner-city children from New York City in their homes.
The Fresh Air Fund
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
undated
Button
Physical Object
NLG v. FBI
Civil Liberties and Legal Justice
The National Lawyers Guild was formed in 1937 as a network of progressive lawyers interested in “human rights over property rights.” During the 1930s and 1940s, the NLG was involved in defending labor rights, fighting fascism in Spain and helping prosecute Nazis during the Nuremburg Trials. They also fought for racial justice and helped draft the U.N.’s Declaration on Human Rights. In the late-1940s and 1950s, the NLG pioneered storefront law offices for low-income people and defended many victims of the McCarthyite attacks on civil liberties, the Rosenbergs and Hollywood Ten.
According to the NLG website, “In the 1960s, the Guild set up offices in the South and organized thousands of volunteer lawyers and law students to support the civil rights movement long before the federal government or other bar associations were involved. Guild members represented the families of murdered civil rights activists Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, who had heeded the Guild’s call to join the civil rights struggle and were assassinated by local law enforcement/Ku Klux Klan members.
Lawsuits initiated by the National Lawyers Guild brought the Kennedy Justice Department directly into the civil rights struggle in Mississippi and challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Guild lawyers defended thousands of civil rights activists who were arrested for exercising basic rights and established new federal constitutional protections in groundbreaking Supreme Court cases such as Dombrowski v. Pfister, which enjoined thousands of racially motivated state court criminal prosecutions; Goldberg v. Kelly, the case that established the concept of “entitlements” to social benefits that require Due Process protections; and Monell v. Department of Social Services, which held municipalities liable for brutal police officers.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guild members represented Vietnam War draft resisters, antiwar activists, and the Chicago 7 after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Guild offices in Asia represented GIs who opposed the war. Guild members argued U.S. v. U.S. District Court, the Supreme Court case that established that Nixon could not ignore the Bill of Rights in the name of “national security” and that led to the Watergate hearings and his eventual resignation.
Guild members defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement and helped expose illegal FBI and CIA surveillance, infiltration, and disruption tactics that the U.S. Senate Church Commission detailed in the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings, which led to enactment of the Freedom of Information Act and other specific limitations on federal investigative power.” (https://nlgmass.org/nlg-national-history/)
National Lawyers Guild
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
late-1960s or early-1970s
Button
Physical Object
National Hard Times Conference
Ant-Poverty
This poster, created by Flood Time’s Here Culture Collective for the New England Regional Office for the National Hard Times Conference, promotes the Hard Times Conference, which took place between January 30 and February 1, 1976, at the University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago. The conference was organized by the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, with the support of a number of Weather Underground leaders and sought to challenge political cuts to social welfare programs, protest inflation and advocate for a guaranteed jobs and income program. The conference slogan was “Hard Times are Fighting Times.” According to the Freedom Archive, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee was “An anti-imperialist group that began as the Prairie Fire Distributing Committee in 1974 to distribute Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, written by members of the Weather Underground Organization. After its initial publication, groups sprang up around the country to discuss the book. PFOC was formally organized in 1976 and was active in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Chicago until the mid-1990s. Their work embraced a broad range of issues: international solidarity with national liberation struggles in Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador; and with the struggles for self-determination of Puerto Rican, African-American, Mexicano, and Native peoples inside U.S. borders; support of political prisoners; opposition to white and male supremacy and support of women’s and gay liberation.”
New England Regional Office for the National Hard Times Conference
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1976
poster