Scope and Content Note

Arranged alphabetically. This small collection contains a valuable selection of Communist Party and Communist-led organizations' flyers, leaflets, and internal documents, including meeting notes, political analysis and reportage by Michelson, as well as clippings, an oral history transcript and a fragmentary autobiographical notebook (both) from her later years. There is an extensive although incomplete set of minutes (1927-1933) of the American Fund for Public Service, and a related file on the Brookwood School (funded in part by the AFPS) concerning the dispute between A.J. Muste and others re the future of the school. The bulk of the material is from the years 1932-1935, and documents Communist Party activities and initiatives, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Michelson's role therein.

Folders for several Southern states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee) document the Party's 1932 electoral campaign and anti-lynching and other civil rights struggles, and also some mining and textile organizing activity. Three folders cover New York based Scottsboro case activities of the International Labor Defense's Harlem branch and the Party. Other Harlem-centered activity is documented in folders titled Bus Workers (a campaign to obtain jobs from the Fifth Avenue Coach Company), and League of Struggle for Negro Rights (includes minutes of the League and of the Communist fraction therein). Communist Party materials include Harlem Section notes by Michelson, a folder covering the 1946 anti-Browder campaign in the Lower West Side Club, Michelson's notes from the New York County's Leadership Training School, and a Section Headquarters list for New York State. The Department Store Section of the Office Workers Union is represented by brief files (all from 1935) on various stores, which include issues of short-lived shop papers, and there is also a file on a strike it led at the Jewish Morning Journal. The oral history transcript is of a 1979 interview with Michelson (principally) and several other activists, which chiefly concerns the organizing of department store workers.

The Unemployed folder contains documents from a variety of mass and labor organizations, and exemplifies a research strength of this collection, namely its documentation of the Communist Party's late "Third Period" and the beginning of its transition to a Popular Front orientation (see also the folder on the Joint Unity Committee of Independent Trade Unions). The Teachers Union folder includes several mimeographed issues of the Teacher News, and one issue of the Teachers Union Substitute News. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union Education Department file contains several training documents of left-wing orientation. Finally, there are brief files titled/re: American Labor Party NYC Elections (1946), Children, Radical Leaflets, Women (Communist documents), and the Workers School (NY).