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Title: The Lucy Parsons Center
Author: James Herod
Date: January 1999
Language: en
Topics: Lucy E. Parsons, infoshops, Boston

James Herod

The Lucy Parsons Center

The Red Book Store (now the Lucy Parsons Center) began in 1970 in

Central Square, Cambridge. It moved a time or two in the first couple of

years, before settling into what would be its home until 1983 in a large

space on the corner of River and Pleasant streets in Cambridge. In 1983

the project moved to Jamaica Plain, Boston. It stayed there until May

1994, returning to Central Square, where it stayed four years until it

was evicted so the building could be demolished. In May 1998 it moved

into a temporary space in Davis Square, Somerville.

The project incorporated in 1971; in 1992 it re-incorporated as a

not-for-profit corporation and changed its name to the Lucy Parsons

Center.

The Red Book Store was a project of the movements of the sixties.

Sixties activists were at that time (early and mid-seventies) busy

setting up all kinds of “alternative institutions” like day care

centers, neighborhood health clinics, food coops, so-called

“underground” newspapers — and bookstores. Radical bookstores were

springing up all over the country — Dorrwar bookstore in Providence,

Rhode Island, for example, or Bound Together books in San Francisco,

Food for Thought in Amherst, Massachusetts, Wooden Shoe in Philadelphia,

Left Bank Books in Seattle, Fifth Estate in Detroit. Many underground

newspapers had bookstores associated with them. These were not merely

bookstores, of course. That is, they were not commercial projects; they

were centers of activism. They were places where radicals gathered — for

meetings, parties, film showings, discussions and lectures — or simply

places where they could hang out.

Nor was this bookstore tradition new to the sixties. It has always been

a part of the left, in one form or another. The Wobblies had their

bookstores and reading rooms. Socialists and communists throughout the

first half of the century maintained bookstores. When the revolts of the

sixties broke out these institutions were invaluable resources for

sixties radicals (for example, Jefferson bookstore, the communist-run

bookstore in Union Square in New York City, or the bookstores of the

Socialist Workers Party). Charles H. Kerr publishing house in Chicago

should also be mentioned, America’s oldest radical publishing house,

founded in 1886 during the struggle for the eight-hour day (it was

rejuvenated in the 1970s). Recently another variant of this long

tradition seems to be emerging — the so-called “info-shops.” Mostly

anarchist or autonomist, and utilizing copy machines and computers more

than ordinary bookstores, these projects are nevertheless similar in

most respects to their predecessors, although they have perhaps more of

a “clubhouse” atmosphere with less stress on reaching out to the general

public. They are in no sense, though, a completely new phenomenon.

Red Book/Lucy Parsons Center has survived for thirty years. It has been

truly a community project of Boston’s radicals. Dozens and dozens of

people have worked in the store over the years, mostly as volunteers,

but some for pay (low pay). Boston’s progressive community has rallied

again and again to keep it in existence. It was never affiliated with

any one party or group, but was an independent radical bookstore. Its

bulletin boards and shelves were open to all the many groups in the

radical movement, very broadly defined. It seriously tried to represent

all tendencies on the left. It was eclectic. There was never a party

line, which is not to say that there weren’t changing emphases in

different periods. And this is why it was such an exciting project, and

so vibrant. Ideas were discussed there. There were almost always heated

arguments going on. And there still are.

Nevertheless the project passed through phases. It’s a shame there is so

little documentation to help reconstruct these changing emphases. It’s a

shame also that no one thought to collect taped interviews as we went

along, to build an oral history. But there was always so much work to do

just to keep the project afloat. Radicals should probably start using

oral histories more as we go along, considering that we don’t have

libraries, and that so many of our projects are so ephemeral, and that

we often don’t even have the resources to hang on to documents (but who

would save the tapes?).

So very roughly, as an impression, the project was heavily Maoist at the

beginning — Maoist in the New Left sense, that is, a militant wing of

the New Left which had rediscovered Marxism and then the Chinese

revolution and Mao. But even then the store had a section on anarchism.

By the late seventies the project was predominantly feminist. This

lasted roughly until the mid-eighties, at which time the collective had

become truly eclectic, having a couple of staunch anarchists, a Leninist

or two, feminists, progressive liberals, and so forth. By the late 1990s

the collective had become predominantly anarchist, but with Marxists,

feminists and progressives still represented. In a sense, then, the

store has simply reflected the predominant emphases of Boston’s radical

community itself, which has passed through similar phases. This was

possible because the project was a relatively open one, was always

democratically organized, and thus changed as the activists surrounding

it changed.

The subject categories of the bookstore however have remained fairly

constant throughout its thirty year history, and reflect primarily the

New Left’s invention of Identity Politics and its focus on third world

revolutions. (Some sections have grown or shrunk, depending on what was

happening in the larger movement.) There were sections on Black

Liberation, Women’s Liberation, Gay and Lesbian Liberation, Children’s

Liberation, Imperialism, and area sections (Latin America, Middle East,

Africa, etc.). There were in addition sections on anarchism, radical

environmentalism, Marxism, radical social thought, progressive

literature, workers and labor history, radical U.S. history, media,

schools, ruling class institutions like the military and corporations,

and so forth. In comparison with a mainstream bookstore, it was an

education in itself just to walk into the store and be exposed to the

different way of categorizing knowledge. (The identity categories later

spread to mainstream stores, of course.)

The types of material stocked and sold in the store has also remained

stable over the years. We have sold primarily books — new books (bought

directly from the publishers or through a distributor), used books

(mostly donated, but some bought at library sales or from other

bookstores), and remainders or bargain books (bought from remainder

houses). We have also sold a large number of magazines, journals and

newspapers. Most of these we got through one or two distributors. But

some of them we ordered directly from the publishers and some of them

were hand-delivered to the store by the publishers themselves (i.e., by

local radical groups). We always maintained a large selection of radical

posters for sale. Other items have included: bumperstickers, buttons,

postcards, tee shirts, old magazines and journals (which had been

donated to us), music and pamphlets (both new and used). There has

usually been some free material put out, as well as large numbers of

flyers about events, projects and groups around the city.

Redbook spawned two other projects, one of which still exists. The

Prison Book Program began in the Redbook basement, but within a year or

two incorporated independently as a non-profit organization in order to

get grant money. It remained located at Redbook, though, and moved with

the store to Jamaica Plain, where it still remains (as there was no

suitable space when we moved back to Central Square). Angry Arts also

began in Redbook’s basement, with film showings there. It soon evolved

into a separate project, sponsoring the showing of radical films around

the city. It lasted until the mid-‘80s, when attendance at the showings

dropped so low that it just wasn’t worth it to continue the project.

Except for the years 1992 to 1996, and 1999, there has always been some

paid staff at the project. In the heydays of the ‘70s, when yearly sales

could top $100,000, the project supported several full time employees.

That was no longer possible by the mid-‘80s, especially after the move

to Jamaica Plain (where there were many fewer sales, due not only to the

declining radical movement, but also to its isolated location in a

residential neighborhood). Volunteers had always been a big part of the

project, but by then it was mostly a volunteer-run project, with the

assistance of one or two part-time paid staff. By 1992 it was no longer

possible to have even part-time paid workers, so the project became

entirely supported by volunteers until the summer of 1996, after the

move back to Central Square, when a half-time project coordinator was

hired.

So one tension has been between paid staff and volunteers. This tension

was not as great as in some other projects, Dorrwar for example, where

the tension between a stable core of three or four paid staff persons

and a constantly changing large group of volunteers, was apparently

quite severe. At Red Book, the turnover was so great among both paid

staff and volunteers that such a split never had a chance to solidify.

Everything was always in flux.

A second tension has been between “collective members” and volunteers.

Throughout its entire history the project has been governed by a

“collective” or steering committee. Not all volunteers were members of

the collective. Most didn’t want to be, and if they did it was not all

that hard to join. The project has always been relatively open, but

procedures for joining the “collective” have been sometimes looser and

sometimes tighter. The “collective” was the decision-making body and set

the policies for the project. Thus, even though volunteers might be

putting in a lot of time in the project, they couldn’t consider

themselves members of the “collective.” Volunteers were thus put into

the position of being second-class members of the project. This

situation was finally remedied in 1995 when it was decided that anyone

volunteering automatically became a member of the collective after six

weeks, with a right to come to Steering Committee meetings, unless asked

to leave the project. Thus the tension between collective members and

volunteers was finally resolved. Everyone working in the project was a

member of the Lucy Parsons Center collective. But attendance at the

steering committee meetings did not increase. The problem has always

been to get people to come, not to keep them out. People are not

pounding on the door demanding to work long hours for free to keep a

little radical bookstore open.

Another problem soon arose however regarding membership in the

collective. Although we had resolved the issue of entrance we had not

solved the issue of exit, that is, when did members cease to have a

right to come to the steering committee meetings and help make policy

even though they were no longer active in the project? This became an

issue because during heated disputes members would reach back into the

past for allies and get these people to come to a crucial meeting, even

though they hadn’t worked in the project for years, in order to

strengthen their side of the dispute. This question was never resolved.

We just sort of blundered along. Non-active ex-volunteers were never

explicitly excluded from decision making. This is an indication of how

incredibly open the project was. It did introduce an element of

irresponsibility, though. Usually the ex-volunteers who were recruited

back for a particular meeting were ill-informed about the issues, since

they hadn’t been there and had heard only one side of the dispute. A

project like this cannot belong to everyone, to the community at large.

It belongs to the people who are doing the work to keep it going. These

people can set up advisory boards and establish all sorts of ties to the

community at large, but policy making for the project rests with those

who are doing it. Otherwise, they would most likely end up with a Board

of Directors (outsiders, non-workers, non-activists), who would direct

the project from afar, telling those who were doing the work what to do.

There was another “boundary” problem. Who decides which books and

magazines are to be stocked in the store? Throughout most of its history

there existed a fairly firm consensus about the boundaries of the

“radical movement.” There were always disputes of course. Russell Jacoby

has written of his experience in the Red Book Store in the seventies,

that although there was a large shelf of books on Albania, he could

never get the collective to accept any anti-psychiatry books for sale in

the store. At one point there was a long debate about whether to carry

Bad Attitude or not, and in general what to do about magazines with

explicit sexual content. Another ongoing dispute revolved around

mainstream social science books. There would be a book with a great

title, like “the causes of homelessness,” but which would not contain a

radical analysis of the problem, only a liberal one. People without a

background in the critiques of mainstream social science that had

emerged in the sixties would select these books and insist that they be

stocked in the store. This problem got worse as the years passed and the

cultural climate became predominantly right wing, with young people

growing up thinking that to be liberal was radical, never having known

anything else.

Nevertheless, until the mid-nineties no one had ever argued that there

should be no boundaries to the project at all, and that the store should

carry everything. At that time a couple of fanatic individualists

working in the project insisted that the store should carry everything,

conservative and liberal books, along with radical books. They said

there should be no “censorship.” Furthermore, they insisted that anyone

working in the project had a right to select any book they wanted to,

and that it was nobody’s business which books anyone selected. Quite

obviously, if this view had prevailed, it would have destroyed the

project. The only reason why a radical bookstore is needed in the first

place is because radical materials are excluded from mainstream stores,

and increasingly so given the cancerous spread of super chain stores and

the disappearance of independently owned bookstores.

Historically, at the Lucy Parsons Center (formerly Redbook), the content

of the store has always been decided democratically by the collective.

These issues were argued out in the steering committee. At one point,

when the collective was small, with only about eight people, all the

ordering was processed through the steering committee. That is, all

orders for books and magazines were approved directly by the collective.

At other times, with more people, acquisitions were divided up, either

by publisher or section, but with final control, in the case of

disputes, still resting with the collective. The idea that it was a

free-for-all, that “any thing goes,” was a direct threat to the

integrity of the project. Fortunately, this threat was defeated.

A further tension was between those who put a lot of time into the

project, especially if they had been in the project a long time, and

those who put in only a little time, or were new. Naturally, new

volunteers had to learn the procedures and policies of the project from

those who were already there. Naturally also, the few people who defined

the project as their main political work had more at stake than those

who only did a shift a week and came to an occasional meeting. This

tension only became severe on a couple of occasions. By and large, most

people realized that every decision could not be channeled through the

steering committee; we would have been meeting for hours two or three

times a week. It seems inevitable that the people who are putting in

more time and effort will have more say. Nevertheless, this imbalance

was always redressed at the Lucy Parsons Center by a really active and

vigorous steering committee.

Why didn’t we just have a set of bylaws to clarify all these issues?

Good question. There may have been bylaws during the early years of the

project. We have not been able to find out. But there certainly were

none during the last fifteen years. At some point in the early nineties

a member wrote up a set of draft bylaws, but they were never adopted.

Why not? Who knows? The project was entering a period of extreme crisis.

There always seemed to be more important things to deal with. At one

steering committee meeting the idea of bylaws was discussed at some

length, and it was decided that for the time being we would simply “fly

by the seat of our pants.” This meant that it was a self-governing

project in the extreme; there was not even any commitment or obligation

to a set of rules which we ourselves could have written. In a sense this

was good. We took each issue as it came. We decided each case on its

merits. One trouble with bylaws is that we tend to forget that we

ourselves wrote them and that they can be changed. They are not eternal

laws written in stone. Another problem is that bylaws are only as good

as the people who are there to interpret, enforce and defend them. (And

this holds for constitutions in general.) In retrospect however, given

the extreme turnover in the project, it would probably have been better

to have had bylaws. They would have provided more stability and

continuity in the project.

It takes a lot of work to keep a bookstore open, especially a mostly

volunteer-run bookstore. How to divide up this work was an ongoing

issue. The best division of labor we ever had was in the mid-nineties,

when there were about twenty-five people in the project. We picked

thirteen or fourteen coordinators, covering bookkeeping, staff

scheduling, book tabling, volunteer coordinating, acquisitions,

magazines, fund-raising, publicity and promotion, used book donations,

office and mail matters, store maintenance, inventory, and so forth.

This system worked well for a year or two, but then people started

moving away, the project lost energy, coordinating slots remained

uncovered, and the whole system finally collapsed. Just keeping the

store open, with someone behind the desk to handle sales, is already a

tremendous task. During the Central Square years in the nineties, the

store was open seven days a week, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through

Saturday, and on Sundays from 12 noon to 5 p.m. With three hours shifts,

we needed 20 people each week, at one shift apiece, to cover the hours.

But of course this was only the beginning. Books and magazines had to be

ordered and the orders processed, priced and shelved when they came in.

The accounts had to be kept; taxes had to be paid; new volunteers had to

be trained; prospective volunteers had to be called; book donations had

to be sorted, priced and shelved; sections had to be periodically

alphabetized; the store had to be cleaned; child care had on occasions

to be provided during programs; book tables at events had to be

organized; catalogs from publishers had to be filed; remainders and used

books had to be purchased; newsletters had to be written, printed and

mailed; the mailing list had to be kept up to date; fundraising had to

be done; unsold books and magazines had to be returned; publicity and

promotion had to be carried out. And this was just the everyday work of

the project. There still remained all the special projects we wanted to

do, like guest speakers and film showings. It’s a wonder the project has

lasted thirty years.

Our four years in Central Square in the 1990s were fairly typical of the

project’s entire history, in terms of its programs and activities. The

store space was made available to other groups as a place to meet. We

organized a public lecture series in the local library. We sponsored

talks in the store itself, and film showings, radio programs and book

signings. Guests from abroad came and talked in the store. We organized

benefits to raise money. We set up many book tables at events around

town. We put out several newsletters. And of course we organized to try

to stop the demolition of our building by greedy realtors and giant

chain stores. This was all in addition to maintaining a really great

offering of radical books and a first-rate magazine rack with over three

hundred titles.

And then there were our dreams, projects we wanted to do, which had been

on the drafting boards, sometimes for years, but which never saw the

light of day. Actually, some of them were realized for short periods. We

had a children’s story hour for a summer. We had a lecture series for a

while. Classes and seminars were occasionally conducted in the store.

But we never did any publishing, and we never got the reference library

organized. It had been our hope to archive a room full of rare radical

books, magazines and pamphlets, and to make these available to the

public for use in the store. We never had the resources to do this,

although we were in a good position to acquire the materials. But we

never did any systematic collecting. We were always so broke it was hard

to hold back rare materials rather than sell them. Nevertheless, at the

time of our eviction from Central Square in 1998, we deposited 105 boxes

of materials in the Lucy Parsons Center Archive of the Literature of

Liberation in the special collections library at Brown University. This

was mostly old magazines and pamphlets. It is not exactly a collection,

but more in the nature of left-overs, surplus or discards. But it is

something, and there is much valuable and interesting material.

Hopefully it will all be cataloged some day and made available to anyone

interested.

As this article is being written, the Lucy Parsons Center is in

transition. It was evicted from Central Square on May 1, 1998, so that

the landlord could tear down the building and replace it with

high-priced apartments. Lucy Parsons did not go quietly, serving as a

focal point for a grassroots campaign against the demolition that

obtained thousands of signatures on petitions, mobilized hundreds of

people to appear and testify at public hearings on the project, and sued

the city for violating open meeting and zoning laws and disregarding

community concerns and evidence that the project would result in serious

dislocation and harm to the neighborhood.

The Center is now in an interim space in Somerville’s Davis Square, in a

300-square-foot room practically invisible from the street. While two

dozen volunteers keep the Center open 75 hours a week, the limited space

makes it impossible to host meetings and events or even to carry a

reasonably comprehensive assortment of books, magazines and pamphlets.

And the limited visibility means that we reach few of the dozens of

people who used to browse on a daily basis (and the thousands more who

passed by the informational flyers and displays in the front window).

Although a tight real estate market has driven up rents, the Center is

in the process of negotiating for a new home in a busy Boston commercial

district that would once again offer sufficient space for small meetings

and events, alongside the Center’s wide array of progressive books and

journals. And ultimately, the Lucy Parsons Center hopes to acquire a

building of its own which would offer offices, meeting rooms, a lending

library and facilities for producing literature, in addition to the

bookstore.

The Lucy Parsons Center has always been an outward-looking project,

bringing a wide range of radical ideas not only to activists but to a

general public. This commitment to reaching the uncommitted means that

the Center operates quite differently from the typical info-shop.

Throughout its three decades, the Center has always been located in

high-traffic areas close by the subway, meeting the high rents by

selling books and magazines (supplemented by the occasional benefit).

The Center is open nine to 12 hours a day, and vigorously maintains a

nonsectarian, nondogmatic approach. And the Center seeks to bridge the

gaps between activists in different tendencies, and from different

communities.

The name itself, the Lucy Parsons Center, was chosen to reflect this

commitment. Lucy Parsons was a labor activist who worked with anarchists

and communists. Of black and Mexican dissent, she fought the injustices

of capitalism and the state for her entire life. Like its namesake, the

Lucy Parsons Center actively reaches out to all the oppressed, with

large sections devoted to women’s, labor, indigenous and

African-American struggles, as well as Spanish- and Creole-language

titles. Anarchist and Marxist titles sit side by side, along with the

full range of radical history and social thought. Children’s and

literature sections focus on the struggles of the oppressed for their

liberation, but also celebrate the liberation of the imagination. And

the front of the Center is devoted to leaflets, community newspapers and

other free literature.

A project such as the Lucy Parsons Center cannot hope to bring about the

social reorganization that is so urgently needed by itself, but it can

provide a venue for discussion and reflection, for getting out ideas and

exploring alternatives. As the realm of culture is increasingly

industrialized and subsumed to corporate dictates, the Lucy Parsons

Center remains a thorn in the side of the ruling class. It deprives them

of total cultural hegemony. As long as it exists there is still a window

open to another, better, world. It means that there is still hope, that

our oppressors have still not managed to bury their detractors, despite

their enormous firepower. Their project of total control of everything

for the purpose of making profit is not only absurd, it is in fact

impossible. Humans are simply too ornery for them ever to succeed.