Who’s Your Literary Hero?

There are times when each of us feels overwhelmed or discouraged in our lives. In times of worry and uncertainty, I take refuge in the words of writers I admire. 

One of my literary heroes is James Baldwin, whose work can be explored through the library’s catalog, or through several hundred videos uploaded to YouTube, or many other resources available online. 

I’ve included here a Pacifica Radio Archives audio stream from “The Artist's Struggle for Integrity,” which was originally broadcast by WBAI Radio in New York City on November 29, 1962. It’s well worth a listen in its entirety. 

Archives of Social Protest and Social Change

Image adapted from photo by Arash Azizzada

Although many archives across the country contain selected materials related to social protest and social change, some institutions have highly specialized collections devoted to documenting the history of protests, riots, uprisings, and social movements. Generations of librarians, archivists, historians, and curators have worked to assemble primary source documentation focused on social protest.

Archival luminary, Jerry Ham, challenged archivists to take a more active and creative role in documenting a broader range of culture in 1975. By the 1980s, the prevailing national political climate had chilled earlier archival enthusiasm for protest collections. Sarah Cooper's 1987 essay examines the ebbs and flows in the American effort to document social protest and social change. Despite these fluctuations in popularity, significant collections of these materials remain at institutions committed to following their collecting missions.

I've selected a handful of collections devoted to social protest and social change. Meant as a starting point, this list identifies long-standing archives, along with several newer collections and digital aggregations of archival material.

• The Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan
• The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University
• The Social Protest Collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkley
• The Social Action Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society
• The Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia
• Swarthmore College Peace Collection
• The Southern California Library, Los Angeles, California
• Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• The Social Change Collection, Georgia State University Library 
• The Civil Rights Digital Library, University of Georgia
• Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, University of Southern Mississippi