Content Warning
The item titled “Dow Doesn’t Care About People” in the “Other Student Actions” page contains an image of a child suffering from injuries caused by napalm. The image is in black and white and is not a high resolution image. The authors encourage users to exercise caution when viewing this item.
Timeline of Anti-War Action
This online archive is dedicated to the history of anti-Vietnam War student activism at the University of Michigan. Although the war in Vietnam lasted 20 years, from 1955-1975, we chose to focus on a more limited time span from 1965-1972 that showcase some of the most dynamic elements of the anti-war movement. We explored the multifaceted nature of the student movement in a variety of formats to collect items related to the central community-facing events of the U-M student anti-war effort and then contextualizing those resources within the broader student anti-Vietnam War movement elsewhere throughout the United States.
The design of this online archive consciously disrupts the traditional archival practices of original order and respect des fonds. We chose to place records of different origins together to depict the events of the movement from the perspective of a wide variety of creators.
The collections process for this online archive, we focused on items that were directly related to the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor communities, located through a combination of strategies beginning with University of Michigan’s finding aids and the Michigan Daily Digital Archive website. We then expanded our search to the finding aids and digital archives of other universities, as well as the FBI Vault to contextualize the movement’s reach in student populations across the country. We prioritized finding records focused on major events in the UM student anti-Vietnam War movement within our established time frame, especially those related to public-facing event that displayed significant community impact. However, we also added selected records to provide some of the establishment’s perspective of the student anti-war protests, demonstrating that the narrative created by those in power was different than the one being created by the student movement itself.
This archive was primarily designed for the use of the University of Michigan students to understand the impact and legacy of student anti-war activism on their campus, to show what tactics were used in the anti-Vietnam War movement, as well as the results of those actions to inform the current generation of campus protest. Other members of the Ann Arbor community and those who are interested in the history of student anti-Vietnam War activism may also find this online archive valuable as a method of connecting with their own history as residents of the community, or for more general interest in the university and community’s history.
Through this online archive, we sought to depict the major events UM student activist movement through their own writings, images, and other media, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the motivations and aspirations of the students without the filter of backlash from mainstream media and governmental institutions (Protests and Backlash, n.d.). Although there was widespread coverage of anti-Vietnam War dissent in the media, it frequently excluded the voices and perspectives of the protesters themselves (Herman and Chomsky, 2002). Therefore, in response, we intentionally did not incorporate many records from outside perspectives but rather selected a few to highlight certain elements of the opposition to the student anti-war movement without making it the focus of our archive. Additionally, inspired by the writing of Iacovino, we sought to incorporate the concept of co-creatorship into our metadata strategy to better reflect the collective nature of activism within the archive description, to better acknowledge those previously depicted as subjects as contributors, (Iacovino, 2010).
However, this archive does have limitations. Although we incorporated records that included student photos and publications, which are more likely to represent their own voices, we did primarily access materials within mainstream institutional archives, which does not achieve the goals of Wakimoto et. al of collecting outside of mainstream institutions as a method of combatting instututional bias as manifested in the archive (Wakimoto et. al, 2013). Additionally, the perspectives of Black student organizations and a Women for Peace are largely lacking, part of a larger trend of an “invisibilizing feedback loop,” in which documentation of the social movements of 1960s and 1970s often leave out women of color in particular, a phenomenon that is widely applicable across intersections of race and gender in this archive (Cotera, 2015). As a result of this feedback loop, white, male students are more visible in records and this visibility is replicated in our archives, making the contributions of women and BIPOC activists less visible as a result. This gap could be addressed in future iterations for this archive to offer a more intersectional perspective.