Social Movement Visual Archives (February 2010)
By Lincoln Cushing
When Free Speech Movement activist Michael Rossman died of cancer in May, 2008, he left behind a huge collection of American political posters from the period known broadly as “the sixties.” In fact, the collection consisted of almost 25,000 distinct titles, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area, and mostly dating from 1965 to 2007. As a long-time friend and information management professional, it fell to me to help the family find a home for this remarkable body of work. The nature of the collection and the process of situating it in a suitable repository offered unique opportunities that are worth sharing with the archival community.
Rossman was a natural scientist, radicalized by Berkeley in the 1960s as an activist in the Free Speech Movement. In 1977 that combination prompted him to begin gathering posters as a tool for teaching young people about social movements, a passion which he continued until his death. He was not wealthy, so this collection was largely built through shameless pleading, dumpster diving, and flea market prowling. Fortunately, aside from a few narrow genres, such as rock posters and Black Panther art, this field was under the radar of commercial exploitation. And Michael’s definition of “political” was very broad. Of course, it is rich with the expected –movement basics, including demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, support for Puerto Rican independence, and feminist challenges to the patriarchy. But it pushed that envelope. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, yes; human potential movement, vegetarianism, leather bars- why not? If it involved people trying to change their world, it was in. His personal subject expertise guided the collection. Much of this material is so provocative that it would make the (in)famous “Sun Maid Raisin” AA cover look like something from Reader’s Digest.
Partially because he didn’t have much money or space, and partially because he was inventive and iconoclastic, Rossman shunned flat files for an amazingly robust and compact storage system. He designed and built a series of Masonite folders, sturdy things with square bottoms and rope handles. With four different size categories, he filled these files so that the posters kept each other flat while in an upright position. These folders, in turn, were stored in custom-built cabinets that kept out dust and water.
One example of the virtue of this system is that when we had to move the entire collection out of his house it took four of us less than a day. Although an archival amateur (as many collection-builders are), as a scientist Rossman understood the importance of taxonomy. Beyond certain cryptic notes the collection was not cataloged, but it was arranged by size and subject. Folders for “R/E HA” contained materials about “Race and ethnicity, Hispanic-American” and were further subdivided into subject breakdowns.
