Joanne Grant research files, 1963-1968

Joanne Grant research files, 1963-1968

Summary Information

Abstract

This collection consists of the working materials Joanne Grant, a journalist and activist, collected for the research and publication of her 1969 book Confrontation on Campus: Columbia Pattern for the New Protest (New York: New American Library, 1969).

At a Glance

Call No.:
UA#0141
Bib ID:
6892009 View CLIO record
Creator(s):
Grant, Joanne
Repository:
Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Physical Description:
1.44 linear feet (3 document boxes)
Language(s):
English .
Access:
You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.

This collection is located offsite. You will need to request this material at least three business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room.

This collection has no restrictions. Some personal material may be restricted due to the presence of personal names and information.

Description

Summary

This collection is a repository of Joanne Grant's research materials for her 1969 book Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest. The collection contains both Grant's notes taken throughout the Columbia revolt, as well as collected research materials. These materials consist of Strike Coordinating Committee fliers, agendas, leaflets and official statements. In addition, the collection includes the responses of faculty, administration and community members to the strike. The collection also contains materials from the Independent Committee on Vietnam at Columbia University, student protest files against Columbia's involvement in the war. The materials consist of fliers, letters, telegrams and pictures.

Arrangement

This collection is arranged in three series.

Using the Collection

Restrictions on Access

You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.

This collection is located offsite. You will need to request this material at least three business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room.

This collection has no restrictions. Some personal material may be restricted due to the presence of personal names and information.

Terms Governing Use and Reproduction

Single photocopies may be made for research purposes. The RBML maintains ownership of the physical material only. Copyright remains with the creator and his/her heirs. The responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.

Preferred Citation

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Joanne Grant Research Files, Box and Folder; University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

About the Finding Aid / Processing Information

Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Processing Information

Collection, processed by Megan French GSAS, 2013.

Finding aid wittten by Megan French, June, 2008.

Revision Description

2009-03-05 File created.

2009-04-16 xml document instance created by Carrie Hintz

2019-05-20 EAD was imported spring 2019 as part of the ArchivesSpace Phase II migration.

Biographical Note

Joanne Grant, born in 1930 in Ithaca, New York to a biracial mother and white father, graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in history and journalism. At 27, Grant traveled throughout the Soviet Union and China, defying state bans on travel to Communist countries, seeking alternatives to an American political system that perpetuated segregation and class divides. Grant was deeply interested in finding organizing and mobilizing tools through which to address the racial and economic inequities of American democracy. Upon her return, the young journalist briefly assisted W.E.B. DuBois, noted black scholar, intellectual, and activist. DuBois, who had left the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization he had founded, as the leadership became more mainstream, sought increasingly more radical alliances for his activism. Undoubtedly, DuBois' mounting frustrations with the unfulfilled promises of equality through integration and his profound interest in creating international Communist alliances, influenced Grant.

With DuBois' referral, Grant took a position as a journalist at the Leftist New York weekly The National Guardian in 1960 and traveled throughout the South to detail Civil Rights struggles for the paper, writing on Freedom Summer, the Citizenship School movement, marches and voter registration drives. Her reporting connected to her to the folks of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a militant student organization that used direct action to protest segregation, and to SNCC's founder, Ella Baker. Baker, who had gotten her start as an activist in the NAACP some twenty-five years before, had persuaded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to hold a college conference in 1960, on the heels of sporadic youth action to desegregate college campuses. The symposium birthed SNCC, and Baker left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to become the young organization's advisor. Impressed by the expansive direct action program SNCC was implementing, Grant joined the organization, both as a journalist and activist. Her journalism for The Guardian provided a platform for SNCC to publicize their work and the repressive responses of politicians, law enforcement and white citizens.

She married Victor Rabinowitz in 1967, a New York lawyer and activist who defended many Leftist organizations throughout the various freedom struggles of the 1960s including leaders of the Weather Underground, SNCC, and high-profile communists. Grant's experiences with SNCC and the Black freedom movement informed her comprehensive document- based history of the black struggle against oppression entitled Black Protest: 350 Years of History, Documents, and Analyses (New York: Fawcett, 1968). Her involvement with SNCC also led her to cover and participate in the student uprisings at Columbia University in 1968. The result was her history and analysis of the strike in Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest. Evident in her writings is Ms. Grant's overwhelming desire to find new means through which to fight oppression and inequality within the American democratic system.

Grant and Rabinowitz traveled extensively, including a trip to Cuba where Grant charmed Castro into allowing them to accompany the Cuban president on a leg of a speaking tour throughout the country. Her later work, a film entitled Fundi (1981) and later book, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: Wiley, 1998), were both dedicated to exploring the life and grassroots activism of SNCC founder Ella Baker.

Subject Headings

The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches for other collections at Columbia University, through CLIO, the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, and through ArchiveGRID, a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.

All links open new windows.

Genre/Form
Articles
Clippings (Information Artifacts)
Correspondence
Ephemera (general object genre)
Handbills
Newsletters
Press releases
Name
Black Panther Party
Columbia Daily Spectator (Organization)
Columbia University -- Administration
Columbia University -- Alumni and alumnae -- Societies, etc.
Columbia University -- History
Columbia University -- Student strike, 1968
Columbia University -- Students
Columbia University -- Students -- Political activity
Columbia University. Students' Afro-American Society
Columbia-Barnard Citizenship Council
Committee for the Defense of Property Rights
Community Action Committee
December Fourth Movement
Employees for March 25th
Faculty Peace Action Committee
Grant, Joanne
Kirk, Grayson L. (Grayson Louis), 1903-1997
Morningside Housing Committee
Progressive Labor Party
Radical Faculty Group
Rudd, Mark
Student Coordinating Committee
Student Mobilization Committee (U.S.)
Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam a.k.a. SMC
Students for a Democratic Society (U.S.)
Students for a Free Campus
Students for a Reconstructed University a.k.a. SRU
Subject
Civil rights movements -- United States -- History -- 20th century
College students -- Political activity -- New York (State) -- New York
Draft resisters -- Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Peace movements
Social movements
Student movements -- New York (State) -- New York
Student-administrator relationships
Vietnam War, 1961-1975

Series I: Columbia University Student Uprisings, 1963-1968

This series contains materials that document the issues leading up to the uprising and provides a chronology of student, faculty, community and administrative involvement in the 1968 strike. The folders within each subseries are arranged alphabetically.


Subseries I.1. Pre-uprising, 1963-1968

This subseries provides early documentation of anti-Vietnam War sentiment on Columbia University's campus including the official documentation of the Independent Committee on Vietnam as well as student responses to Columbia's class ranking and draft policies. Finally there are five spiral bound notebooks of handwritten notes taken before and during the student strikes.


Box 1 Folder 1

Draft Ranking--Student Responses, circa, 1963-1968


Box 1 Folder 2

National Reserve Officers Training Corps, 1963-1968


Box 1 Folder 3 to 4

Notebooks, 1968, (2 Folders)


Box 1 Folder 5 to 6

Vietnam--Independent Committee at Columbia University, 1965-1967, (2 Folders)


Subseries I.2. Uprising, 1966-1968

contains a compilation of fliers, SCC memoranda, meeting minutes, and statements, press releases, correspondence, and public statements documenting the student uprisings. A full chronology is followed by the materials of various student groups: the Strike Coordinating Committee, black students and students from Barnard College. Many of the student newsletters are addressed to Morris Grossner, a Columbia University student at the time and a leader in Columbia's chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These materials are followed by letters of support and various other responses of those involved in the strike, as well as plans for the restructuring of the University. Also included are submissions, addressing racism, black students and the labor movement, by Columbia University students to the magazineChina Featuresin Peking.


Box 1 Folder 7

China Features--Submissions, 1968


Chronology


Box 1 Folder 8

Student Uprisings, 1966-1967


Box 1 Folder 9

Student Uprisings, 1968 March-June (1 of 2), 1968 March-June


Box 2 Folder 1

Student Uprisings, 1968 March-June (2 of 2), 1968 March-June


Involvement


Box 2 Folder 2

Barnard, 1968 April-May


Box 2 Folder 3

Black Students, 1968 April


Responses


Box 2 Folder 4

Administration, 1968 April-May


Box 2 Folder 5

Community, 1968 April-May


Box 2 Folder 6

Faculty, 1968 March-May


Box 2 Folder 7

Parents, 1968 May


Box 2 Folder 8

Students, 1968 April-May


Box 2 Folder 9

Restructuring of Columbia University, 1968 May


Strike Coordinating Committee


Box 2 Folder 10

Meeting Minutes, 1968 March - June, 1968 March


Box 2 Folder 11

Official Statements and Pamphlets, 1968 March-June


Box 2 Folder 12

Strike Education Committee, 1968 May-June


Box 2 Folder 13

Surveys--Anthropology Department, 1968 April

Series II: Materials Collected from Laura Foner, 1968

This series contains research materials collected from Laura Foner, a Columbia University graduate student and member of SNCC. The papers that were contributed by Foner are marked in the top right hand corner of each page with her initials: LF.


Box 3 Folder 1

Administration, 1968 April-May


Box 3 Folder 2

Columbia Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--Working Materials,, 1968


Box 3 Folder 3

Graduate Student Union--Support and Responses, 1968


Strike Coordinating Committee


Box 3 Folder 4

Press Releases, 1968 April- May, 1968


Box 3 Folder 5

"The Rational Inquirer", 1968


Box 3 Folder 6

Support and Responses, 1968 April-May


Box 3 Folder 7

Strike Education Committee--Class Schedules, 1968 April-May

Series III: Photographs, 1968

Photographs used by Grant in her 1969 book on Columbia University student uprisings Confrontation on Campus. Most of the images are annotated on the back.


Box 3 Folder 8

Photographs--Columbia University Student Uprisings, 1968