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Our Mission

 

We aim to collect and make permanently available information on the efforts and lessons learned by local activists, students, organizers and those who dreamed of building a better world through new ideas, political advocacy, local organization building, and various other means in the Washington, D.C. area in the years 1960-1975. Our goal is to make materials easily available for future activists, historians, students, writers, and media producers.

Our Scope

We are building an interactive archive/website using:

 

  • original documents including newspapers, pamphlets and other written/printed materials

  • photographs, posters, buttons and other graphic materials

  • written, oral and video personal accounts.  

 

We have collaborated with the Gelman Library at George Washington University to create a repository of materials for future research. We also intend to offer presentations on our findings that facilitate direct dialogue between generations of social justice activists. Future projects may include accessible printed and electronic overviews of the struggles and issues of the period using photographs, essays and original materials.

 

Our objective is to encompass as many as possible of the key local and national movements and events of this period in which D.C-area-based residents were involved. Such a list would include at least the following subjects. Where other archives already exist on specific subjects, we will work to avoid duplication of effort.

  • 1963 March on Washington

  • Anti-Vietnam War organizing

  • Black power movement

  • Campaign to Impeach Nixon

  • Civil rights movement       

  • Collectives, co-ops, communities

  • Court battles to end racially discriminatory practices in D.C. public schools

  • Culture of the 60s in DC

  • DC statehood movement

  • DC Transit bus boycott

  • Early battles against gentrification

  • Earth Day 1970

  • Environmental movement

  • Fair housing

  • FBI spying and use of COINTELPRO tactics

  • Federal employee activism

  • Free D.C. movement and home rule

  • Free school movement

  • Grape boycott

  • Integrating suburban lunch counters

  • Glen Echo Amusement Park

  • International solidarity

  • Karen Silkwood movement

  • King/Kennedy assassinations and 1968 riots

  • Labor movement

  • Lesbian and gay rights movements

  • Locals' role in national movements 

  • May Day 1971

  • Peace movement

  • Picketing retail stores to hire first African-American clerks

  • Poor People’s Campaign

  • Pride, Inc.

  • Public accommodations campaigns

  • PUSH (People United against Slum Housing)

  • Radical political formations

  • Religious left

  • Stop the North Central Freeway/3 Sisters Bridge

  • Student activism for peace and civil rights

  • Underground press

  • Vietnam veterans' organizations

  • Washington Post strike

  • Women’s movement

Who We Are:

 

Planning Committee/Editorial Board: Anne Gallivan (project coordinator), Onka Dekker, John Hanrahan, Norma Lesser,  Norman Oslik, Bonnie Rowan, Esther Siegel, Michael Tabor, Kitty Tucker (deceased)

 

Videographers: Eddie Becker, Russell Belcher, Beth Geglia, Noel Ortega, Peter Roof, Bonnie Rowan, Paul Williams

 

Funders: Samuel Rubin Foundation; anonymous donor

 

Lessons of the Sixties: A History of Local Washington, D.C. Activism for Peace and Justice from 1960-1975 is a volunteer led project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a 501(c)(3) organization.

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