ANN ARBOR—The many facets of Detroit native Joseph A. Labadie, an exhibit featuring letters, photos, flyers, and poetry by this influential labor activist and anarchist will be on display through Nov. 22 on the seventh floor of U-M’s Hatcher Graduate Library. The exhibit is open Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-noon.Admission is free.

Labadie was involved with such organizations as the Knights of Labor, the Haymarket Defense Effort, the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Labor Party and such issues as the single tax movement, civil liberties and individualist anarchism.

He was also an avid collector of materials pertaining to these interests and donated his collection to U-M in 1911. That collection served as a core of anarchist materials which was later widened considerably to include a great variety of social protest literature together with political views from both the extreme left and the extreme right. Among its 35,000 books, 8,000 periodicals, and 6,000 subject vertical files, the Labadie Collection contains materials relating to civil liberties with an emphasis on racial minorities, socialism, communism, colonialism, and imperialism. The collection also contains extensivematerials pertaining to American labor history through the 1930s, the IWW, the Spanish Civil War, sexual freedom, women’s liberation, gay liberation, the underground press, and student protest.

In conjunction with the exhibit, the Special Collections Library will present a symposium on Oct. 18 that will explore the life of Joseph Labadie. Among the speakers will be Labadie’s granddaughter CarlottaAnderson. Anderson is the author of “All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement.” She will be speaking on Labadie’s political life. Paul Avrich, an American scholar of anarchist history, will concentrate on Labadie’s writings; and Philip Mason, who is an archivist, labor historian, and editor and author of several books on Michigan history, will speak about Labadie as a collector.

The symposium is free and open to the public and will begin at 4 p.m. in the Special Collections Library on the seventh floor of U-M’s Hatcher Graduate Library.

For more information about the exhibit or seminar, contact Julie Herrada at the Labadie Collection at (734) 764-9377 or at [email protected]. Additional information about U-M’s Labadie Collection is available at www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/SpecColl.lib/labadie.html.

Joseph A. Labadie

Hatcher Graduate Library

Labadie Collection