SLATE Digital Archives

The SLATE Digital Archives provides an overview to the history of the University of California at Berkeley student political party, SLATE, through documents and narrative. SLATE, the first of the student organizations in the rising New Left and student movements, was instrumental in shaping the political atmosphere of UC Berkeley during the 1960s and was a model for other progressive student groups throughout the country.

The SLATE Digital Archives is designed to provide access to information about SLATE for students, teachers, and researches of all levels. The project outlines SLATE's organizational history, provides a chronology of important events, includes images to sample documents, and a guide to the records of the SLATE archives.

To learn more about the history of SLATE and its context within the civil rights, new left and students movements, see the history of SLATE page. The chronology details the rise and fall of SLATE. The finding aid provides an inventory of primary source material (manuscripts, correspondence, papers, meeting minutes and other documents) in the SLATE collection, and the digital collection includes a selection of digitized documents from the archive.

IT HAS BEEN 50 YEARS!!!

COME HELP US COMMEMORATE THE CITY HALL “RIOTS”

THAT ROCKED SAN FRANCISCO AND THE COUNTRY IN 1960

May 12, 13, 14, 2010, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the demonstrations at San Francisco City Hall against the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known to most of us as HUAC).

The idea started with one person. Irving Wesley Hall thought, “We should do something to commemorate the event¡ and he immediately went into action.”

He devoted most of his website (www.notinkansas.us) to thoughts about the significance of the demonstrations and the arrests of the 64 demonstrators that took place on May 13. (Friday the 13th.)

He reached out to veterans of the demonstration and soon he had enlisted people interested in making the commemoration possible.

The idea that started in the head of one person began to snowball and it is still growing. Here are some of the plans:

  • Starting at noon on Thursday, May 13, 2010, there will be a ceremony at SF City Hall (under the rotunda)
  • Organizations that had a key role in countering the Committee’s mendacious propaganda are being urged to celebrate their own history as it relates to this event and to the successful fight to abolish the Committee. The California Federation of Teachers, the Northern California ACLU, and the National Lawyers Guild have indicated interest.
  • Several documentary filmmakers are fascinated by the opportunity to cover the events and people both then and now.
  • Participants in the 1960 events are flying in for the reunion from as far away as New York
  • We look forward to Bay Area campus showings of Operation Abolition with veterans of the 1960 events present to talk with students about activism then and now.

WE NEED YOUR HELP.

AS COULD BE EXPECTED, THERE ARE COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH THESE MAY EVENTS AND PROJECTS.

WE ARE DETERMINED TO KEEP COSTS AS LOW AS POSSIBLE, BUT WE ESTIMATE A NEED OF $7,000.00 TO MEET ALL RELATED EXPENSES.

This amount is huge if paid by a few, but can easily be met through the generosity of many.

Checks for tax-deductible donations for the HUAC Resistance Commemoration should be made out to “SLATE Archives”. Please put HUAC Resistance Comm. in the memo field.

Mail your donation to:

HRC
c/o Stack,
2629 Benvenue Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94704.

With warm regards, Burton White