![]() "A number of people involved in important issues did not want to be listed. "Many people who are involved in alternative movements to effect change in their working, living, and social communities of Afro-Americans, Spanish, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans had never heard of the People's Yellow Pages," the editor writes. An editor's note in the 1976 edition describes the difficulty of this task. In later editions, the group took pains to include more resources serving communities of color. But, since the People's Yellow Pages' creators were primarily white, college-educated and young, its audience was, too. "We were trying to be conscious of being anti-racist," Davidson says. They even created an instructional manual so that activists in other cities could start their own countercultural directories. The first edition sold out so quickly, the group started work on a second edition before the year was up. It wasn't very good, she adds.Īs quirky as it seems now, the People's Yellow Pages filled a void unique to the times, when certain resources were a lot harder to find - like where to get a safe abortion, or how to join local gay rights groups. "Yep, we were all making yogurt!" Davidson says with a laugh. From left to right: A cartoon from the 1971 People's Yellow Pages explaining a citizen's rights when approached by the FBI A page from the 1976 edition with gay liberation listings A recipe for yogurt in the 1971 edition. It listed everything from women’s consciousness raising groups to free legal aid to recipes for yogurt. The People's Yellow Pages became far more than an anti-war resource. poring through leaflets and posters, pamphlets, everything we could get our hands on that would give us some information about countercultural businesses and services in the Boston area," says People's Yellow Pages co-founder Larry Casalino. They set up shop at the Cambridge offices of Vocations for Social Change, a counseling center that Davidson helped found in 1970 under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee, an activist Quaker organization. "If you wanted to know where a shoe repair place was in your neighborhood, you just looked it up in the Yellow Pages." "There wasn’t the internet," Davidson explains. What if local activists had a resource like the Yellow Pages - that thick tome the phone company delivered to your doorstep every year? "A man stood up, and he said, 'You know what we need? We need a directory of places where we can keep our money out of the war economy,'" Davidson recalls. It all began when Davidson and another young activist named Larry Casalino attended an anti-war meeting. ![]() Fifty years later, it stands as a testament to grassroots ingenuity and the radical idealism of '70s counterculture. But it made its way into archives at Harvard and UMass Boston, a quirky relic from a bygone era. Over time, the People's Yellow Pages faded from memory. From left to right: The cover of the 1971 edition of the People's Yellow Pages a page from the 1976 edition listing Black-owned businesses in the Boston area a page from the 1971 edition with listings for pregnancy counseling and abortion access. But the project proved massively successful in (largely white) leftwing circles, spurring similar efforts in other cities and lasting through the decade. The nearly 100-page book was a modest proposal, at first: a regional directory of activist resources and mission-driven organizations. It was against this backdrop that the People's Yellow Pages was born. "And this was all in the midst of increasingly active anti-war movement and draft resistors and young men burning draft cards." "There were a lot of liberation movements starting, certainly Black power movement, women's movement, gay liberation movement," says Devon Davidson, who was a grad student living in Cambridge at the time. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young perform “Ohio,” their song about the Kent State massacre, at the Music Hall in Boston. Blood spatters the pavement where the Boston Police broke up an anti-war rally downtown. A women’s group occupies a Harvard University building for 10 days. It’s 1971 in Boston and revolution is in the air. (Courtesy Shelley Rotner) This article is more than 1 year old. A photo from the 1976 edition of the People's Yellow Pages shows the publication's volunteers assembled before the Vocations for Social Change office in Cambridge.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |