Collections

This collection features legal, personal, and family social history documents relating to the life, career, capital murder conviction and death sentence of Doyle Lee Hamm, who was the subject of an attempted execution by lethal injection by the State of Alabama on February 22, 2018. The social history materials collected during the mitigation investigation of Mr. Hamm's capital murder case date back to the Depression Era. Hamm died of complications from lymphatic cancer on November 28, 2021, in the William C. Holman Correctional Facility near Atmore, in southern Alabama. He was 64.

Correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, and printed materials of Lamont. Letters from George Santayana (1863-1952), with Lamont and others, a few early manuscripts, interviews and other notes on Santayana, and general correspondence about him. A series of letters from John Dewey to Lamont, discussing his ideas on humanism and religion. Extensive correspondence with the family of John Masefield including approximately 100 letters from Judith Masefield to Lamont, primarily written shortly after the death in 1967 of her father the poet John Masefield, and dealing with his life and work. Also, a few of her own writings; a number of the letters are descriptive of historical England and her concern for contemporary events. Among the letters from other family members are fifteen from Lamont's nephew, Jack Masefield, and 53 from his cousin Sir Peter G. Masefield, 1970-1983, conveying news about Judith as well as interest in the publication of John Masefield's letters from the World War I years and their continuing appreciation of Lamont's work on Masefield. There is discussion on the publication of Masefield's letters to Corliss' mother, Florence Lamont, printed in 1979.

Correspondence, reports, pamphlets, and clippings of Norman. Among the subjects represented are health, population control, civil liberties, refugees, exiled governments and peoples of World War II, United Nations, education, delinquency, race relations, emerging nationalities, censorship, and foreign aid. Much of the correspondence in the collection centers around Mrs. Norman's column in THE NEW YORK POST in the 1940s. Organizations in the collection include Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Democratic Action, American Citizens Committee for Economic Aid Abroad, Women's City Club, American Emergency Food Committee for India, Urban League, Liberal Party, Citizens Union, Free Germany Movement, Free China Movement, and United World Federation. Also included are correspondence, manuscripts, research materials, and printed materials dealing with Norman's research and writing on India. There are two working manuscripts, one on India, the other on Nehru. Also, a fragmentary manuscript of her memoirs and the beginnings of a study of Alfred Stieglitz.

Guichard Parris papers consist of correspondence, diaries, manuscripts, notes and printed material from his personal files, his files on the history of the National Urban League, manuscript material for Blacks in the City; A History of the National Urban League, Boston, Little, Brown, 1971 (co-authored with Lester Brooks) and administrative files of the National Urban League. Parris' personal files include folders on his organizational affiliations outside the National Urban League; of particular interest are copies of his correspondence with Mary McLeod Bethune while he was affiliated with the National Youth Administration. Bethune is among the cataloged correspondence, as are Theodore Roosevelt and Ruth Standish Baldwin.