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5th Annual Colloquium on Social Change
NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: 10/1/09
CONTACT: LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATION COORDINATOR, (413) 545-0162
UMASS AMHERST LIBRARIES HOSTS
Fifth Annual Colloquium on Social Change
Series of Talks by Blake Slonecker, Todd Gitlin, Raymond Mungo,
and Ray Luc Levasseur
Amherst, MA - On Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009, at 4:00 p.m., the UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives will present a talk by historian Blake Slonecker on the Liberation News Service and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. Following at 7:00 p.m., renowned writers and activists, Todd Gitlin and Raymond Mungo will speak in a discussion moderated by Christian Appy, Professor of History at UMass Amherst. On Thursday, November 12, 2009, at 7:00 p.m. the last talk in the series will be by Ray Luc Levasseur.
Blake Slonecker’s presentation, “We are Marshall Bloom: Suicide, Memory, and the Legacies of the Sixties” will be at 4:00 p.m., Oct. 29, on the 25th Floor of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library. Slonecker will discuss how memories of Marshall Bloom, founder of the Liberation News Service and Montague Farm Commune, have been shaped over the past forty years by individuals with a variety of political intentions. Slonecker is Assistant Professor of History at Waldorf College.
Todd Gitlin and Raymond Mungo will speak at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 29 in the Cape Cod Lounge, Student Union, UMass Amherst.
While a college student in the early 1960s, Todd Gitlin rose to national prominence as a writer and theorist of the New Left. A president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-1964, he was a central figure in the civil rights and antiwar movements, helping to organize the first national mobilization against the war in Vietnam, the March on Washington of 1965. After receiving degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of California Berkeley, Gitlin joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he is currently Professor of Journalism and Sociology and Chair of the doctoral program in Communications. Over the past thirty years, he has written extensively on mass communication, the media, and journalism. The author of twelve books, Gitlin is today a noted public intellectual and prominent critic of both the left and right in American politics, arguing that pragmatic coalition building should replace ideological purity and criticizing the willingness of those on both sides to use violence to reach ends to power.
Raymond Mungo was a key figure in the literary world of the late 1960s counterculture. A founder of the Liberation News Service -- an alternative press agency that distributed news reflecting a left-oriented, antiwar, countercultural perspective -- Mungo moved to western Massachusetts during the summer of 1968 and settled on a commune. A novelist and writer, his first book, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times With Liberation News Service (1970) is considered a classic account of the countercultural left, and his follow-up Total Loss Farm (1971), based on his experiences on the Packer Corners commune, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Mungo has written several novels, screenplays, dozens of essays, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles during a literary career of more than three decades. For the past ten years, he has worked as a social worker in Los Angeles, tending primarily to AIDS patients and the severely mentally ill.
On Thursday, November 12, at 7:00 p.m., Ray Luc Levasseur will speak on “Ray Luc Levasseur: Defendant in the Landmark Sedition Trial of Western Mass Returns after 20 Years,” with opening remarks by Bill Newman, the Director of the Western Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. The presentation takes place in the Amherst Room, 10th Floor, Campus Center, UMass Amherst.
In 1989, Ray Luc Levasseur and his associates Pat Levasseur and Richard Williams stood trial in Springfield, Mass., on federal charges of seditious conspiracy. After 10 months of deliberation, in the most expensive trial in Massachusetts history, a jury found all three not guilty of conspiring to overthrow the United States government. In his first public address in the Pioneer Valley after serving 20 years in prison for his involvement in a series of bombings carried out to protest what he viewed as U.S. backing of South Africa’s apartheid government and Central American death squads, Levasseur will reflect on his past and present, and the significance of the Springfield Sedition trial.
Levasseur’s prison writings and his closing statement from Springfield sedition trial are available on the following websites: http://home.earthlink.net/~neoludd/ and http://home.earthlink.net/~neoludd/statement.html.
Sponsored by the UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), this year’s Colloquium on Social Change will examine how ideas about social justice have shaped American lives with speakers who represent distinctly different radical challenges to American society. As a major resource for documenting the history of social change, with rich archival collections, SCUA seeks to encourage a dialog with our audience to explore how concepts of liberty and justice play out in the lives of ordinary Americans and to reimagine the struggle for social justice in the twenty first century. During the 1960s, our presenters advocated different approaches to social justice, and at a critical distance each has moved into a different understanding of the basis on which social justice can be achieved. In a world in which the formal economy is under enormous stress and in which contestation over identity and social order are ever at the forefront, the discussion should be lively.
All events are free and open to the public. The colloquium is supported in part by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the UMass Amherst Libraries, the Dean of the Graduate School, the Department of History, the Program in Social Thought and Political Economy, Food for Thought Books, the Rosenberg Fund for Children, the Vermont Action for Political Prisoners, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
For additional information, contact Robert Cox (rscox@library.umass.edu, 413-545-6842)
Last Edited: 29 October 2009
