Whatever Happened to Radicalism? Voices from the George Vickers Papers

This exhibit offers a glimpse of the world as seen by George Vickers (1943-2018), whose lifelong fascination with social movements brought him into contact with struggles for transformative change in the US and abroad, first as a student activist and later as a sociologist and human rights advocate. In the late 1950s, Vickers joined the peace movement developing in Evanston, Illinois and neighboring Chicago, and soon embraced civil rights activism. As a student at Northwestern University, he deepened his involvement in the New Left movement––in his words a “heterogeneous mixture” of 1960s activist groups convinced “that poverty, racism, and militarism were linked.” On the leadership team of the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice (1971-1972), he went on to coordinate national opposition to the Vietnam War. As New Left activism waned in the 1970s and some media cast the movement as a failure, Vickers contested that notion in a 1977 article titled “Whatever Happened to Radicalism?”

Poster commemorating the eighth anniversary of the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero.

Vickers’ own post-movement path stands as one answer to that question. On the sociology faculty of Brooklyn College from 1975, he remained engaged with the legacy of US intervention in Vietnam, but soon grew incensed by US foreign policy closer to home, in Central America. In the name of curbing supposed “communism,” US military aid was used to suppress popular movements—both armed and peaceful—for greater economic equality in El Salvador and Guatemala and to oppose the revolutionary government that had seized power in Nicaragua in 1979. Through routine visits to the region between 1984 and 1992 as well as a 1988 election observation mission to Chile, Vickers built a distinctive collection of documents, images, and over 150 recorded interviews. A selection of these items, juxtaposed with materials Vickers retained from his earlier activism, invites reflection on distinct yet interrelated social movements and their contested legacies. 

Curated by William Gertz Runyan, Marshall T. Meyer Human Rights Archive Intern at the Rubenstein Library. Yoon Kim completed the exhibition preparation and design work for the in-person and online exhibitions, Aaron Welborn edited the text, Janelle Hutchinson created the graphics, the Digital Production Center digitized the Cambodian album, Michael Daul created the album viewer, and Ana María Silva Campo suggested improvements to the Spanish-language audio transcript. This exhibition was supported in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.