INTERVIEW: Brad Duncan
Photo courtesy of Brad Duncan
Brad Duncan is an activist, collector of radical political ephemera and the editor of Finally Got The News: The Printed Legacy of The U.S Radical Left 1970 - 1979, a captivating collection of provocative imagery from a vibrantly crazy time in ‘Mericas’ history. He also maintains one of my favorite Instagram accounts, radical_archive.
Although there are a few beat-to-shit copies of Great Speckled Bird languishing somewhere down in the basement, I know that does not make me a collector of radical left mags. So, with a head fulla wonderment on what the world of collecting leaflets and newspapers and demo flyers from this era was all about, I interviewed Brad Duncan. Check out how it went…
SL: When, why, and where did your interest in radical politics happen?
Brad Duncan: I would say I was becoming increasingly tuned into injustice and oppression happening in society around me throughout my adolescence and became fully radicalized in my late teens. But we're talking about the mid-1990s, which looking back from the vantage point of 2020 was a bleak period for left politics in the U.S.
I grew up in suburban Detroit and economic inequality and racism were things I saw all around me. Metro Detroit is really a poster child for racial capitalism. Even though as a young teen I knew in my gut that all of that had to be overthrown or somehow abolished, it took a while for me to discover radical politics. But as an adolescent, I would see people being militant and pushing back against oppression on the evening news, so there was a seed planted in my mind. When I was young the conflict in Northern Ireland, the intifada in Palestine and the anti-apartheid movement were all in full swing, and I was deeply intrigued by news coverage of all of that. It started to dawn on me how different I saw the world from my suburban peers when we responded very differently to the 1991 Gulf War and the 1992 L.A. rebellion.
I started to buy leftist newspapers at a little shop called Paperbacks Unlimited on Woodward Ave in Ferndale, Michigan and found it so refreshing to read articles that seemed to articulate a lot of how I was seeing the world. I also met people associated with Anti-Racist Action (ARA) at punk shows and was excited to connect with leftists who were more experienced than me that I could really learn from. The real crystallizing moment was the 1995 Detroit Newspaper Strike, which was one of the seminal labor battles of the decade. The picket lines turned into mass demonstrations, then mass civil disobedience. I attended demonstrations at 18 years old that just blew my mind. That connected a lot of dots in my mind, and it also introduced me to a ton of seasoned Detroit labor activists and leftists. At the same time, I was spending a lot of time at a place called Zoot's Coffee in the Cass Corridor, which was a great venue in an old house, and met two twin brothers there who were slightly older and already experienced socialists. They had left all of these Marxist newspapers out for everyone at Zoot's to read and they were like a breadcrumb trail for me. I was eagerly searching out anything that had to do with radical left politics, especially reading material and history, but again in the mid-1990s, you had to really work to find it.
When did you decide to begin collecting radical ephemera? Was there a certain item that piqued your interest?
Well at first I was just a voracious reader who wanted to bring myself up to speed on all of these political questions that I was consumed with. What was the history of socialism? How have socialists in the past organized for change? Why did they succeed or fail? What's the real history behind white supremacy and colonialism? So I was looking for books or reading material that would help answer these questions, I didn't see myself as collecting anything for a long time. I just wanted to be an educated leftist and activist. But by spending tons of time going to used bookstores from the enormous John King Books in downtown to little neighborhood shops around Detroit I started to notice that I could find books and especially pamphlets produced by the radical left themselves. Quickly I learned that for a number of historical reasons, Detroit was a major city in the radicalization of the 1960s and 70s. Every single socialist, Marxist, Black nationalist, Pan-African, radical labor, or leftist group had members in Detroit during the 1970s. You had to if you wanted to be taken seriously. This was where many people in the New Left and Black Power movements believed the revolution would be sparked. So every single time I would see an old pamphlet in a used book store or thrift shop or garage sale, I would grab it. And these old pamphlets, and sometimes books or newspapers, were not considered valuable collector’s items at all, so they were all cheap as hell. Remember, in the 1990s many people thought books on these topics were irrelevant relics with no potential audience. I wanted to learn what each different party, each collective, each tendency stood for and what their history was, but I was unknowingly building a library of this material.
But what really kicked everything in high gear in terms of collecting was when I really started to meet a lot of folks who had been involved with the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s, and some of them still had boxes of old flyers, newspapers, handbills, and ephemera in their attics and basements. As soon as I made friends with veterans of the New Left era and they started donating boxes of this material to me, that's when it really started to grow into an archive.
Why do you feel it is important to preserve these documents?
There are a few reasons, but my initial and main motivation is so that future generations of activists can learn about how people waged these battles in the past. I also want to preserve these documents for historians who are doing research and writing about social movements. Most academic libraries did not acquire this type of literature when it was being produced, and special collections departments at research libraries have only started to build up their collections of this material very recently. Honestly, I think it takes someone who is a longtime leftist to build an archive of the left. The reason I am able to get so much amazing stuff is because folks donate it to me, usually because they know me personally from activism, or we have mutual friends or comrades, or they see the work that I do with it. I think you need to know the ins and outs of all the ideological tendencies to know which items are important or even how to catalog them. I also have worked at a university library for nearly a decade, including a number of years in the Rare Books and Manuscripts department, so I'm always developing my archival skills, too.
In record collecting, there is that 'white whale' that a collector will forever be looking for. What is that for you with radical ephemera?
As for things like flyers, most of the items that I really want I don't know exist yet precisely because they are so ephemeral. I might be aware of every pamphlet a collective published and distributed nationally because they often would make a list of publications like that, but the single-sheet flyers that the collective printed in very small batches and only distributed briefly to a local audience are often not known. For example, I'm extremely interested in an organization that was based in Detroit during the first half of the 1970s called the Black Workers Congress. They were a Marxist-Leninist group that emerged from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the auto factories of Detroit and were very influential nationally, even internationally. I have nearly all of the official newspapers and pamphlets that the BWC published, and I can know that because they printed price lists of the literature they had available. So that's a known quantity. Those newspapers are rare as hell, but at least you know how many are out there in terms of issues and print run. But as part of their community organizing efforts in a number of cities they also would print flyers and posters or broadsides that were only distributed in one neighborhood in Cleveland, or only handed out to workers at one specific factory outside Los Angeles. And you know it's out there because you've had long conversations with friends who stood outside those factory gates and distributed it, but there's no accounting of how many items of those there were or how to know when you've tracked them all down.
Could you tell me how the Finally Got The News exhibit came to be and the book you assembled which accompanied it?
In 2016 I approached Josh MacPhee of Interference Archive with the idea of collaborating on an exhibition. Although we had never worked together before, we were both aware of each other's work and it turned out to be a great fit. I had already curated one exhibition based on my archive at Trinosophes in Detroit in 2014 called Power To The Vanguard: Revolutionary Printed Materials from Around the Globe, 1963-1987 and I was really excited by how a public exhibition can get people engaged with learning about this history. So we came up with the idea to do a huge exhibition that covered the entire 1970s, with each main arena of struggle being properly showcased. It was called Finally Got the News: The Printed Legacy of the U.S. Radical Left, 1970-1979, and it was made up of hundreds of printed items. Most of it was from my collection, but there were many items from the Interference Archive as well, especially the posters and the section on anarchism. We decided to turn the exhibition into a large full-color book published by Common Notions. For the book, we got over a dozen veteran activists and leading historians to write essays for each chapter. For example, Dan Berger wrote the chapter on movements against police brutality and prisons, Emily Hobson wrote the chapter on queer liberation, Silvia Federici on International Women's Day, and Akinyele Umoja wrote the chapter on Black revolutionary nationalism. I'm still impressed with the book every time I pick it up, we reproduced the artwork from over 250 different rare radical periodicals and I am proud to have been a part of it. There's also a "roundtable discussion" on radical print culture featuring contributions from New Left luminaries like former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn, Paul Buhle of Radical America, Peter Werbe of the Fifth Estate, and illustrator Lisa Lyons.
Is there a certain subgenre in the history of radical politics you hold a special interest in and why?
I tell people I collect the "radical left and liberation struggles", but I know that can be defined in a number of ways. I will say that I don't collect things related to social democracy, liberalism, or progressivism. I collect things related to socialism, communism, and anarchism primarily. I also collect explicitly leftist writing on topics like women's liberation, but within that topic, I generally only collect material that's explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, or has a systemic, revolutionary critique.
One of the main types of struggles that I hunt for literature related to is national liberation and anti-colonial struggles. I'm especially interested in how anti-colonial struggles have been influenced by socialist politics. So I'm always looking for newspapers or pamphlets from groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, leftist strains in Irish Republicanism, the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, or the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. I collect a lot of material from the Iranian left of the 1970s, including the exiled Iranian student left groups based in the U.S., in part because that history is nearly forgotten. I also collect anything related to the New Afrikan Independence Movement, from the Republic of New Afrika to Afrikan People's Party to Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. And anything related to the annual Africa Liberation Day events that happened throughout the 1970s, which were hugely important to the left and Black nationalist movements.
I've always been completely obsessed with what is called the "party building" movement of the 1970s, which basically refers to the efforts of post-New Left activists to build a new communist or socialist party. Some of these groups were influenced by the Chinese revolution, and these more "Maoist" groups were collectively referred to as the "New Communist Movement". The October League or Revolutionary Union would be in that category. But there were other Marxist groups influenced by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky like the International Socialists or Revolutionary Socialist League or Spark, and still more groups that didn't fall into either category like the Sojourner Truth Organization or the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. There were probably hundreds of groups like this, many of them just local collectives that hoped to merge with others. This is the sub-category of left literature that I probably have the most material related to.
Within the category of 1970s U.S. Marxist organizations, I'm particularly interested in the people of color majority organizations. For example Asian American groups like I Wor Kuen, Wei Min She, and Yellow Seeds, Chicano groups like the August 29th Movement, and African American groups like Congress of Afrikan People and Youth Organization for Black Unity.
I am guessing the present-day world of the radical left isn't as dependent on print as it was in the past. Am I correct in this assumption? If not, who are some of the groups preserving the print aesthetic?
Yeah, I would say that's largely true. I still collect and archive material from contemporary movements, but there's just so much less of it. There was a period in the late 90s and early 2000s when there was a flurry of new left publications springing up around issues like Mumia, capitalist globalization and world trade, and opposition to the War on Terror, but after a certain point activists were using digital media and print was moving to the sidelines. Personally, I say whatever gets the message out to more people is good. If more people are learning about socialism and class struggle and anti-racist ideas from memes and TicToc and not from my dusty old pamphlets, that's fine, as long as the ideas are being popularized. I just want to make sure the print legacy doesn't literally turn to dusk because we'd lose all that history.
There are definitely still folks doing radical printing and publishing. Justseeds is an artists’ collective that has been a launching pad for so much incredible activist art for two decades now, and they're still going strong. There's a whole world of zines, especially queer zines and zines made by people of color, that has taken off in the last decade. The zines are often much more personal and intimate than the old activist literature that I collect but are usually just as political if not more so. For the last few years, a local group here in Philadelphia called Philly Socialists published a gorgeously designed magazine called The Partisan that does an incredible job connecting with local issues. So it's still out there, but clearly the landscape is different than when I was first coming to the left and few people had email addresses and website URLs were long and inscrutable.
How do you come about the items in your archive? Are they donated? Do you scour the internet? Do people reach out to you to get rid of stuff? How does it all happen? And what was your best 'score'?
Overwhelming the material is donated. Usually, someone will donate their entire collection at once, meaning all of the flyers and literature they accumulated from activism over decades. It started with folks I knew personally, but as social media became a thing I started hearing from folks I didn't know much more. So I get it in boxes in bulk and then sort through it, organize it by ideology or country, and then integrate it into the archive.
I do buy things sometimes, but just individual items here and there. It would be too expensive to build a collection through buying online. There's a place in San Francisco called Bolerium Books, and they started in the early 1980s as the first "rare books" store that specializes in the left, labor history, and social movements. I have bought items from them since the early 2000s, and they've become good friends of mine. Back then I used to think Bolerium Books was super expensive. I used to be shocked that an old pamphlet was $35. But in the last decade, old leftist items have become extremely collectible and the prices have essentially tripled on much of what I collect. So nowadays Bolerium Books doesn't seem expensive, which is insane but true.
I've never used eBay at all, and other than thousands of hours on the Bolerium Books website, I have barely ever used the internet to acquire new material. At least not to buy it, like I mentioned I do have folks reach out to me via Instagram or Facebook about donating. But I don't spend money on literature on the internet, it would get too expensive. My archive is about 20,000 items at this point, so bulk acquisitions for free is the only way.
My good friend Dennis lives in New York City and has an insane literature collection due to his five decades as a socialist activist. Over the last nine years, I've been helping him organize his collection so that scholars can access it. Now we advertise ourselves as a collection organizing service to longtime activists with overwhelming collections that need attention. Dennis and I will come to your house, sift through and organize all your boxes of old leftist literature, and then either add the best items to my archive or at least leave their collection organized. We have done probably a dozen house calls, sometimes driving to other states, and each time we leave with boxes of rare treasures. Seven years ago we drove to North Carolina to empty the storage facility of a longtime socialist who knew that Dennis and I would take good care of her activist library. We opened the doors to the storage unit and our jaws dropped. Two dozen boxes of pure gold, well worth the 24 hours in the car in one weekend. We found handwritten letters from Yuri Kochiyama, communiques from underground cells, dozens of issues of The Black Panther, and pamphlets related to nearly every country in Africa. Then that night we went to a dinner where Chokwe Lumumba was the guest speaker and Herman Ferguson was in attendance. We told the folks at our dinner table about our book collecting adventure and two of them said they had stuff to donate too.
So it's word of mouth and being in the right place at the right time over many years. Often I will inherit, or even occasionally purchase, a whole chunk of an organization's library. I have big pieces of organizational collections from the Progressive Labor Party, Socialist Workers Party, Revolutionary Union, Marxist Leninist Party, International Socialists, Line of March, Solidarity, and a number of others. That's an ideal situation because the party itself has already organized it for you, often with Leninist precision. When the Detroit branch of the SWP was shutting down in the early 2000s I gave them $60 and loaded the entire Pathfinder Books store into the back of my truck. When the Maoist Internationalist Movement ended their prison literature program they dropped off the remnants in boxes on my front porch, knowing I would archive it.
I also spend a lot of time talking and doing oral history with the folks whose collections I work with. Just recently Dennis and I sat down and did an oral history with a guy who was in a small Marxist-Leninist group in New Jersey in the 1970s that even we had never heard of. We asked questions for hours, took notes, and then he gave us six boxes of 1970s New Communist Movement flyers and newspapers. So now we know the stories behind the items, and we know the personal history as well as the specifics of the group's ideology (and there's always a hyper-specific ideology!)
To me, that's at the center of collecting radical literature, personal relationships, and oral history. And you can't do that on eBay or just forking over money to a website. That's not shopping for books, that's doing real fieldwork to track down primary sources and the hidden histories behind them.
The biggest and more exciting scores are always the items that weren't distributed publicly, like internal discussion bulletins or notes from meetings. Reading a group's pamphlet tells one story, but reading the internal bulletins where members candidly hash out their differences tells a whole other story. So I want the real guts of the movement, the minutes from meetings, and the correspondence between activists, things that went on behind the scenes. The real holy grails are the split documents where you can read about how the group was torn apart from the inside. When historians come to my archive to use the material for research they're doing, that's the kind of stuff that they want. That's the raw material that historians need if they're going to write about these movements.
What are some projects you are currently working on?
Just a few months back I finished a big exhibition here in Philadelphia at the William Way LGBTQ Community Center called The Most Revolutionary: LGBTQ Politics and the Radical Left, 1969-1999. It was a look at how radical left ideas influenced the socialist and anarchist left and vice versa. Now I'm working with the Wooden Shoe anarchist bookstore in Philly to do an exhibition on the history of their collective. The Wooden Shoe collective donated a lot of their archival materials to me last year, so this project is an outgrowth of that. I do a lot of presentations to college students. Sometimes I do presentations for history students who are learning about protest movements, sometimes I present to art or design students who are learning about different kinds of printmaking and publication design. I also do presentations for activists and community groups, usually with the same format of bringing in archival items and encouraging folks to touch and examine them while we talk about the history behind them. There's always talk of trying to scan and digitize more items, but with 20,000 items it's daunting.
Are there any organizations from the history of the USA's radical left that you would like to research further but there's very little information or printed matter available about them?
There are so many groups like this it's hard to even know where to start. When I first started researching the radical left movements in the U.S. in the 1970s there were basically no good books on the topic. A couple of books on the Black Panthers, but that's it. And then in 2002, Max Elbaum wrote Revolution In the Air: How Sixties Radicals Turned to Lenin, Che, and Mao, and that kicked off a new age of well-researched books on the radicalism of that era. In the last ten years, there have been scholarly, well-researched books published on groups I collect like the Union of Democratic Filipinos, Revolutionary Union, the Young Lords, and others. My friend Edward Onaci just published a book on the Republic of New Afrika, the first full examination of that important movement. So I'm heartened that historians who write about these movements are starting to get some decent history books published in this era. But there are still so many groups that no one has put out a real in-depth study of yet. I want to see a book on the Liberation Support Movement, one of the leading anti-colonial solidarity groups that emerged from the New Left. I want to see more historical writing on Africa Liberation Day and the Africa Liberation Day Support Committee. I know that there are folks doing this research but too often the research becomes a dissertation that only other scholars see, whereas what I want to see is books widely available on these topics. Where is the detailed book on the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization? Where is the book on the International Socialists and their involvement with labor organizing? You see these topics appear as chapters in larger narratives of the New Left, but all of these nodes need their own proper historical examination. And when historians finally write a book-length examination of the Liberation Support Movement or the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, I will make sure that they have access to all of the unique primary sources in my archive.
Thanks for your time. Is there anything else you would like to bring up that I forgot to mention?
We often only think of political movements as being historically important once they're decades in the past, which puts us at a disadvantage for collecting the material history of these movements. So I would say that your readers should think of the political movements that they are participating in today as already of historical importance, and to keep those Black Lives Matter, anti-pipeline, and climate change flyers and stickers you come across. Just put them in a folder, even if it seems too recent and topical to be of lasting importance. Most activists never kept their flyers because they saw those flyers as utilitarian organizing tools, so once the demonstration was over they didn't see the need in holding on to them. There will always be an ideological war over what happened in the past and what it means, and keeping radical history alive and archived for future generations is a part of that fight.