The Civil Rights History Project: Survey of Collections and Repositories

Oral history of the American left: radical histories collection

Repository: New York University. Tamiment Library

Collection Description (CRHP): This collection contains a number of oral histories with members of Students for a Democratic Society and the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Several interviews deal with African American civil rights in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s and student protesters in the North.

Collection Description (Extant): The Tamiment Library at New York University established the Oral History of the American Left in 1976 in order to collect and preserve the memories of veteran activists. These interviews describe seven decades of Left politics from the 1910s through the 1970s. They document the full spectrum of left politics in the twentieth century: Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Trotskyism, and the New Left. There are interviews with both leaders and rank-and-file activists.

The tapes and transcripts in the Oral History of the American Left collection came from a variety of sources. Most of the interviews were done by Jon Bloom, Paul Buhle, Bea Lemisch, and Ruth Prago. They cover many subjects including: immigrant/ethnic radicalism, labor, women's history, radical newspapers, fraternal organizations, and student radicalism from 1910s through 1970s. Several group interviews or conferences were recorded, including the Southern Negro Youth Congress.

Ninety-five percent of these interviews are on cassette tapes with accompanying indexes. The rest are transcripts without tapes.

Access Copy Note: Open for research without restrictions.

Date(s): 1976-1978

Digital Status: No

Existing IDs: OH 002

Finding Aid URL: http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/ohal.html

Language: English

Interviewees: Howard Johnson, Ernest Rice McKinney, Vincent Young, Grace Lee Boggs, Elaine Perry, Henry Winston, James Jackson, Grace Tillman Bassett, Esther Jackson, Dorothy Burnham, Jane Dudley, Alfred Baker Lewis, Anne Shore, Wendell Carroll

Rights (CRHP): Contact the repository which holds the collection for information on rights

Subjects:

Civil rights and socialism
Communist Party of the United States of America
Labor movement
Socialist Workers Party
Southern Negro Youth Congress
Students for a Democratic Society (U.S.)

Genres:

Interviews
Sound recordings
Transcripts