Atlanta Progressive News

(APN) ATLANTA — The Georgia State University Library has acquired a box of personal papers from the News Editor and Founder of Atlanta Progressive News–the present writer–covering eight years of progressive history in Atlanta.  The papers are for a special collection called the Social Change Collection held by the library’s Special Collections Department.

 

The papers include:

 

– Numerous papers in connection with the effort to preserve Atlanta’s last remaining large public housing communities, including demolition applications with handwritten notes; petitions, resolutions, and letters prepared by resident association leaders and sent to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development; and other records and correspondence, from 2007, 2008, and 2009.

 

– Papers related to the Atlanta Beltline and the Beltline Affordable Housing Trust Fund, including questions presented to Atlanta Beltline, Inc., and the Beltline Affordable Housing Advisory Board at the Community Development/Human Resources Committee of the City Council of Atlanta; and their responses, from 2010 and 2011.

 

– Draft environmental impact statements for two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, including handwritten notes, from 2007 and 2008.

 

– Various drafts of HB 397 from the 2012 Legislative Session of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, which amended the Georgia Open Meetings Act and Georgia Open Records Act, with handwritten notes.

 

– Files obtained from the federal government by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia showing spying by the federal government on peaceful protesters in Atlanta, from 2006.

 

– Affidavits from voters in Georgia’s Fourth US Congressional District, claiming that electronic voting machines flipped their votes in the 2006 Democratic Primary Run-off Election.

 

– A copy of the program from the 2007 US Social Forum.

– Photocopies of personal scrapbooks containing various news clippings relevant to Atlanta Progressive News.

 

APN’s Editor has signed a Deed of Gift to the Library, to make the “material… available for research, display (including the Internet), educational and publication purposes.”

 

The collection also contains papers from Nuclear Watch South; Occupy Atlanta; Physicians for Social Responsibility; Millard Farmer, a death penalty activist and attorney; Dan Sweat, the “go to guy” for former Mayor of Atlanta Maynard Jackson; and Mike Trotter of Good Government Atlanta.

 

“We want to make our collections socially relevant for researchers, like students working on papers.  We want them to be able to work on topics that are compelling and interesting,” Peter Roberts, Archivist and Associate Professor, told APN.

 

“We try to collect material that people use to write journal articles.  We tend to go after unique material you can’t find in a library, primary source material,” Roberts said.

 

The Library also has several other special collections, including the Southern Labor Archives, which contain the print editions of the former Great Speckled Bird newspaper; Women and Gender; the Georgia Government Documentation Project; Pop Music and Culture; the University Archives; and the Photograph Collection, which contains photographs of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.

 

Roberts is interested in hearing from APN readers who may also have documents of interest.

 

“Anything related to social change, activist organizations – if they’re about to dispose of material that they believe researchers might want to know what was going on at this time, we want to make that accessible for researchers,” Roberts said.

(END/2013)