Harvey Silver political literature and ephemera

The Harvey Silver collection consists of news clippings, publications, documents, fliers, posters, pamphlets, buttons, handbills, campaign literature, and other political ephemera documenting Silver’s involvement in social and political campaigns and engagement in activism as a high school student and as an undergraduate at Queens College in the mid-to-late 1960s through the early 1970s. Materials in this collection reflect Silver’s participation in student groups, political organizations and electoral campaigns, and Anti-Vietnam War movement organizations. Specific protests, rallies, and cultural events held against the Vietnam War, the draft, and political candidates in New York City and Washington D.C. during the late 1960s and early 1970s are documented.

The collection contains items on the broader national activities of prominent political campaign organizations surrounding the U.S. presidential election and US Senate seat races of 1968. These items include campaign literature as well as advertisements for rallies advocating against specific candidates such as Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphreys. In addition to these electorally focused items, there is protest literature from the Vietnam War Protest Movement, including materials by the Radical Organizing Committee (ROC), the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. A large number of handbills and posters promoting rallies and protests organized by these various groups can be found within the collection.

The collection includes materials relating to student-led occupations of Queens College campus buildings in the spring of 1969. Items in the collection document the inciting events as well as the organizing efforts, activists’ demands, and responses from faculty and broader student population that were issued by parties involved including the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Ad Hoc Committee to End Political Suppression, the Student Coalition, and members of the faculty and administration at Queens College.

The collection contains materials that chronicle a 1968 conflict between community leaders and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) union in the Ocean Hill and Brownsville neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York, regarding the movement for local control of schools. The materials include news clippings, fliers, and accounts that reflect the socio-cultural dynamic and tension existing between the students, striking teachers, community members, and school administration in the public school system.

The collection also includes a small number of items such as fliers, educational pamphlets, and essays that refer to political actions and campaigns advocating for a range of political causes. These causes include: international issues such as the Nigerian Civil War, national concerns such as the arrest of Black Panther Party members and a Women’s Liberation reading list, and more local efforts at Queens College including cultural events and the development of food co-ops.