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In the summer 1962, Harvard student Steve Saltonstall was one of the early wave of white northerners who went into the Jim Crow south to work for civil rights. Still a teenager, Saltonstall assisted a SNCC project in Cairo, Illinois, then a hotbed of KKK activity, that sought to integrate public accommodations built with federal funds.

From there, Saltonstall enlisted on a crew organized by the American Friends Service Committee, to travel fifty miles west to work on a seemingly more mundane project, to help clear a tree-filled drainage ditch near the segregated, all-white community of Circle City, Missouri, that caused the city to flood each year. The AFSC crew was integrated by a single African American woman who, as Saltonstall recalled, “ultimately left the camp for unknown reasons I never fully understood,” and as a result, the northerners was visited nightly by night riders. “But the head camp counselor, Mick Micklem,” Saltonstall wrote, “was a southerner who persuaded the rednecks to leave. We cleared the trees from the ditch and had a Quaker Meeting in it on the last day of camp. It was a beautiful sight, pink cotton flowers as far as one could see.”

After college, Saltonstall spent some time as a back to the land hippie and later received a law degree from Northeastern University. Today he does civil trial work in Vermont, with a specialty in personal injury and wrongful death, criminal defense, and civil rights and civil liberties.

The Saltonstall collection consists of approximately sixty photographs taken by John Engel during his tour with an AFSC crew during the summer of 1962. While most of the images depict the crew’s work near Circle City, Missouri, six photos document a civil rights rally in Cairo, Ill. The images are available in digital form only.

A poet and writer, Daniel M. J. Stokes was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Dec. 27, 1950, the son of Ervin William and Elizabeth (Ray) Stokes. A former editor of the East River Review, Stokes has contributed work to a number of magazines and published several books of poetry, beginning with Wired/LSD: Poems (New York: Culture Review Press, 1974) and including The World and Other Places (Cambridge, Mass: Chthon Press., 1975), Poems from Mexico (Mexico City: s.n., 1987), and Poems on the Run, 1984-1988 (Mexico City: In Exile Press, 1995).

From 1987 through early 1988, he and his wife, Joyce, published Into the Night, “a newsletter for freedom for political prisoners held in the United States.” Based in Brooklyn, N.Y., this simply-produced publication offered updates and commentary on Americans imprisoned for politically-motivated acts. Reflecting both the legacy of 1960s radicalism and the resurgent activism associated with U.S. imperialism in Central America, Into the Night offered news on the Ohio 7 sedition trial, the MOVE organization, and the fate of Plowshares war resisters.

Sent free of charge, the newsletter reached an audience of prisoners convicted of draft resistance, antinuclear protest, and anti-racist and anti-imperialist revolutionary activity, and it was read by others who had become radicalized during their imprisonment. From the outset, Into the Night generated significant resistance from prison authorities, and for unclear reasons, it appears to have ceased publication after its fifth number in March 1988.

Centered around the newsletter Into the Night, the Stokes Papers contains correspondence from a range of self-identified political prisoners, accompanied by an interesting, but ultimately miscellaneous suite of publications from the radical press. As small and tightly focused as it is, the collection provides a valuable window into the radical edge of the late 1980s political spectrum, and particularly the conjunction of antiracist and anti-imperialist groups within the prison system.

Although some of the correspondence is at best mundane — mostly requests for subscriptions — several prisoners provide compelling analyses of their political views and the conditions of imprisonment. Most correspondents are represented by only one or two letters, however the Ohio 7 “seditionists” (Ray Luc Levasseur and Carol Manning), the MOVE organization (Ramona Africa and William Phillips Africa), and members of the Black Liberation Army are somewhat better represented.

Among other noteworthy items in the collection are letters from Chicano revolutionaries Alberto Aranda and Alvaro Hernandez, including protests filed with the Texas Department of Corrections regarding the decision to deny Aranda access to Into the Night, and two lengthy letters from Aranda discussing political prisoners. Marilyn Buck’s letters provide a sharp analysis of the need for political ideology along with a copy of court proceedings filed by her and Mutulu Shakur (see also the folder relating to the Resistance Conspiracy Case). Several African American revolutionaries discuss their political motives and life in prison, including Ramona Africa (filed under MOVE), John Albury (Born Allah), Anthony Bottom (Jalil Muntaqim), Eric Clemmons-Bey, Kenneth Akbar Muhammad Jenkins, Ruchell Cinque Magee, and Richard Williams.

Finally, the collection includes a small number of radical antiwar and antinuclear resisters, most notably Philip Berrigan, Carl Kabat, George Ostensen, and Gillam Kerley.

While editing Into the Night, the Stokes kept copies of other radical publications, many intended for political prisoners or fellow revolutionaries, the more uncommon of which have been retained within the collection, which also includes an apparently complete run of Into the Night, including paste-ups of four of the five extant issues.