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Elliot Linzer Papers

 Collection — Multiple Containers
Identifier: SCA-0036

Scope and Contents Note

The Elliot Linzer Collection primarily documents the activities of various Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapters in New York City in 1963 and 1964. The items often pertain to specific events such as pickets, boycotts, fundraisers, and educational seminars.

Dates

  • 1961-1966

Creator

Access

Collection is open for research. Staff may restrict access at its discretion on the basis on physical condition.

Copyright

The Elliot Linzer Collection is physically owned by the Queens College Libraries. All intellectual rights, including copyright, belong to the authors or their legal heirs and assignees. The collection is subject to all copyright laws. Queens College assumes no responsibility for the infringement of copyrights held by the original authors, creators, or producers of materials.

Biographical Note

Elliot Linzer was born on July 11, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York, but his family later moved to Rosedale in Queens. By the time Linzer entered high school, he had become interested in pacifist and civil rights activism, and joined the War Resisters League at age 14. The press coverage of the 1961 Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C. to Montgomery, Alabama left a strong impression on Linzer.

Upon enrolling at Queens College as an engineering student in August 1963, he joined the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the organization which initiated the Freedom Ride. He had already participated in some CORE activities the previous summer, attending lectures by CORE officers and selling tickets to a CORE benefit concert at Carnegie Hall.

Linzer's involvement with CORE coincided with the organization's zenith in power and membership, a period of rapid expansion in the wake of the 1962 Freedom Ride through the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. Since he graduated early from high school, Linzer was just a few months too young to meet the criteria for involvement with Freedom Summer Project, which provided voter registration services to disenfranchised southern Blacks. However, Linzer did manage a Freedom School in St. Alban's, Queens during a CORE-sponsored school boycott in early 1964. Although he joined CORE through the Queens College chapter, Linzer participated in a number of other chapters, most notably South Jamaica CORE.

Linzer never held office but he worked as a staff member for the March of Washington of 1963, which was sponsored by CORE and other civil rights organizations. His CORE activities included frequent attendance on picket lines, and publicity tasks such as the creation of flyers and handbills for events, pickets, and meetings.

In 1967, Linzer suspended his studies at Queens College and enrolled in an interdisciplinary sociology program at the New School for Social Research. He obtained his B.A. from the New School in 1969 and began working on a Ph.D. in Sociology. Later he received an M.A. in Sociology from Queens College. During his graduate education, he worked as a freelance bibliographic indexer and indexing continues to be his livelihood. He currently lives in Flushing, New York.

Extent

1 Linear Feet (1 document box and 1 small box of buttons)

Language of Materials

English

Abstract

The Elliot Linzer Collection consists primarily of near-print materials such as handbills, mimeographed flyers, and pamphlets documenting the activities of New York City chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights organization, during the early 1960s. Elliot Linzer is a Queens College alumnus and former member of CORE.

Arrangement Note

Materials are organized by their origination from national, local, and regional offices, and are comprised of organizational materials including pamphlets, announcements, flyers, reprints, fundraising appeals, newsletters, and reports. Materials from other organizations are grouped separately in Series V, and a small collection of political buttons comprises Series VI.

Series I: Personal materials

Series II: CORE (National)

Series III: CORE (New York)

Series IV: CORE (Other regional offices)

Series V: Additional Civil Rights Organizations and Events

Series VI: Buttons

Source

Donated by Elliot Linzer in 2009.

Related Materials

The following Queens College collections also include records about the Student Help Project in Jamaica, New York and Farmville, Virginia:

Debby Yaffe Papers

Jean L. Konzal Papers

Michael Wenger Papers

Phyllis Padow-Sederbaum Papers

Rosalind (Silverman) Andrews Papers

Stan Shaw Papers

Finding aids to the collections above may be found in the Civil Rights and Social Justice Collecting Area.

Source

Creator

Status
Completed
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
Undetermined
Script of description
Code for undetermined script

Repository Details

Part of the Queens College (New York, N.Y.) Special Collections and Archives Repository

Contact:
Queens College Library, CUNY
Benjamin Rosenthal Library RO317
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing 11367 USA us