This post is the second by guest author and Archives intern, Ash Smith ’23 on the Bloom Ephemera. You can read the first blog post about processing the collection at this link.
About the Collection
The Bloom Ephemera Collection consists of roughly 20,000 pamphlets, fliers, newsletters, magazines, and other ephemeral publications from American left wing and radical organizations – published between 1960 and 1980 – that were compiled by the Liberation News Service.
In 1967, Marshall Bloom (AC 1966) and Raymond Mungo of Boston University co-founded the Liberation News Service to deliver news to “underground” presses, college/high-school presses, radio stations and independent newspapers as an alternative to established mainstream news services. These papers, presses, and publishers would send the LNS one copy of every issue their stories were published in. Around 3,500 newspapers were moved from the Ephemera collection and became the Marshall Bloom Alternative Press Collection.
I never know what to expect when I open a box from the Bloom Ephemera. The collection’s pamphlets, images, letters, and leaflets offer heterogeneous snapshots of the domestic and global events that shaped people’s connections, publications, lives, and aspirations from the 1960s to the 1980s.
One of my favorite parts of working with the collection has been observing the strategies journalists and organizers used to preserve their communities and movements. Forms of community support look like the Chicago Area Draft Resisters (CADRE) publishing their incarcerated comrades’ testimonies to prepare un-imprisoned abolitionists for time in jail. The queers of the Boston Gay Community News starting a phone tree to quickly disseminate information and mobilize queers for community defense. The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) encouraged transnational alliances through their compelling invitations for solidarity in Black American newspapers and their reliance on the NYC Committee for a Free Mozambique (CFM) for funding and circulating FRELIMO’s news and poetry. And as the media wing of the Provisional IRA, Irish Republican Information Service journalists broadcasted the cross-gender, cross-compound expansion of Republican prisoner hunger strikes followed by the uprising and arson at Long Kesh Prison.
Teens also formed independent presses to broadcast the student organizing and world-building happening around them. The New Jersey Student Union (NJSU) worked beyond the scope of academic repression and their individual institutions by publishing an array of essays, art, and actions from students across school districts in The Unity Paper. The Union reported generously on the Newark Student Federation’s 101 demands delivered to the Board of Education concerning their schools’ deplorable facilities, over policing, and limited curriculum — while popular media outlets narrowly focused on the Federation’s demand to fly the black liberation flag in their predominantly Black schools.
Student dissent towards their neglectful, repressive academic institutions reflected wider frustrations about the structure and purpose of public education, and kickstarted many alternative education groups in the 1960s. The aforementioned Newark Student Federation formed in large part to create a liberation school so students could study while their teachers were striking. And the Teacher Drop-Out Center in Amherst, MA regularly disseminated long lists of “free universities” and “new schools” as students, organizers, and professors built educational programs external to state schooling and formal universities.
The desire to create holistic, self-sustaining, and autonomous communities ran through the free school movement and finds space in other parts of the collection: the extensive material on cooperative living, pamphlets from tenant unions, and statements of purpose from community coalitions for healthcare.
I’d also argue that the desire for co-creating alternative life finds form in the art that animates many of the publications. Some pamphlets are so creatively designed, with attention to the context and significance of their work as well as the the humor and vision of its creators. Many smaller publications are not printed with expensive colored ink because makers could not afford it, but the artists among them filled their publications with sketches, comics, and text designs. Artists like those working on The Black Panther often used a single color for their covers both to invite attention and as metaphor; the splash of red across the 20th issue of Alma Mater is the blood of eight Cuban students executed by Spanish colonial officers in 1871, now honored by the oldest youth magazine in Cuba. Other government funded publications like Verde Olivo – the first from the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces – sometimes offer more complex visual effects: the cover scanned below has an interesting chromatic aberration applied that few other pamphlets do.
It’s hard to describe how rich the material in this collection is just with words, so I’ll share some covers that made me pause as I worked!
You must be logged in to post a comment.