Introduction

Since June, I have spent much of my time as a Freedom Archives intern working on processing the vast amount of pinback buttons donated to the archives. It has been a long journey of sorting through buttons and other miscellaneous items stored in ancient plastic bag homes, cataloguing (see Buttons Collection), and finally transferring the almost 900 buttons to a more permanent home (11 binders in the main hall of the archive)!

While less popular today than in the 1960s-90s moment, political buttons stand out as a way for people to communicate their political convictions. For such small objects, buttons communicate their messages strongly with bright colors, striking images, and bold lettering. Unlike branded t-shirts or jewelry designs, wearers can display many different buttons on worn objects, creating a visual map of their personal political commitments and a time capsule of changing conditions and resistance/action. Buttons are usually not made to be valuable, often passed out or sold cheaply so that more people can share the message, yet they stand out as lasting objects, easily stored when not needed and collected as mementos.

As objects in our archives, these buttons add a new layer to our audio-visual and paper collections: objects which distill events and movements into small packages and have been passed around, worn, and weathered. In combination with our other archived material, they present compressed symbols of various histories, summarizing the most urgent communications of their makers and sharing visual /design language of complex theories and movements. The events and organizations represented have passed or evolved since their making, but the impact of these objects remains as rich physical and visual evidence of movements and their global support networks.

HISTORY & SIGNIFICANCE

Pin-back buttons have always been political. They entered the mainstream through distribution by political candidates and supporters in the late 1800s, as a method of cheap and collectible promotion of political campaigns. Buttons became more focused on culture and counterculture movements with surges in the 1960s and 1980s, shifting away from collector’s items centered on presidential candidates and towards political and cultural event/organization mementos.

They have since become a key method of showing personal alignment with various causes and movements. Buttons hold important information about choices in design and trends in visuals and messaging, capturing key moments or catchphrases. They serve many different purposes, some examples shown below:

Commemorating Events: Aids Walk San Francisco, 1988-1993 The AIDS Walk in San Francisco began in 1987, as community members searched for ways to show support for friends and family devastated by AIDS. These buttons showcase designs from seven years of the AIDS walk.

The designs demonstrate shifting focus on simple text with abstract imagery, to an iconic view of San Francisco, and finally emphasis on the event name.

Propagating a Symbol: United Farm Workers Eagle

The United Farm Workers (UFW) emerged from the merging of organizations of Chicano and Filipino workers in 1966, led by Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong. Richard Chavez, César Chavez’s brother, created the eagle symbol which would become iconic for UFW and Chicano culture more broadly. Drawing from Aztec imagery, the design was intended to be easy to replicate and with recognizable colors: “Black was for the workers’ desperation, white was for their hope, and red was for their sacrifice.”

Gathering Support: The Panther 21

This piece centers on the New York Panther 21, a group of 21 Black Panther Party members accused of conspiracy to kill police officers and destroy buildings in April 1969. All were eventually acquitted. This object draws on language of movements, that it will be the people who will free the accused, not the criminal “justice” system that put them there.

THE COLLECTION

Freedom Archives’ buttons available for viewing and are organized into 19 subjects, numbered as follows:

  1. LGBT / AIDS
  2. Labor
  3. Political Prisoners
  4. International
    1. Africa
    2. Latin America
    3. Asia/Europe
  5. Electoral
  6. Anti-War
  7. Anti-Nuclear
  1. Black Liberation
  2. Native American
  3. Women & Reproductive Justice
  4. Students/Youth
  5. Healthcare
  6. Immigration
  7. Nature/Environment
  8. Housing
  9. Anti-Corporate
  10. Boston
  11. Puerto Rico
  12. Political (Random)

TAKEAWAYS

My personal interest in buttons started a few years ago, with a collection of political buttons shared with me through a program with the Asian American Resource Workshop in Boston, where movement elders brought their belongings to share as a “mini museum.” They had collected buttons from various moments and movements of the 1960s-80s across Boston and beyond, pinning them on a Mao-style jacket. Their pins symbolized their years of committed struggle, with personal and movement history commemorated in colorful designs of organizations and pithy political messaging.

While in my studies I read endlessly about figures, campaigns, and organizations, trying to understand what happened, when contained in a pin collection, it was so simple. All these movements and moments could not be considered in isolation. They overlapped, contradicted, built from one another, held both symbolic and material meaning, and were held and worn by people committed to broader ideals of justice and liberation. It happened, and then people continued to respond to the conditions they were facing. And 40 years later, in my relationships to these people and Boston, my commitments were part of their legacy of internationalism and Asian community power too.

Encountering buttons again at Freedom Archives, with the collections of several people mixed and semi-sorted in folders, I was drawn to the idea of organizing them and creating a storage system for them to be displayed more clearly. In researching the details of each button, it was exciting to notice some of the stories: that multiple people attended the same events, like the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or collected the same “Venceremos” pin, or spent time in New York, Boston, or abroad, and even that a donor was distributing buttons themself (we can assume from the 20 duplicates of a button for Jacobin Books). There are plenty of curiosities I still have about the objects themselves: who made them, how many were distributed, where, what folks did with them before donation, etc. Yet, regardless of the objects’ histories, in sum, they represent years of solidarity, struggle, and a core belief in justice. A greater picture of the 1960s-80s and beyond emerges in the buttons: for some, the moment has come and gone, like the successful fight against Prop 6, which tried to ban lesbian and gay people from being teachers, or Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition’s campaigns for presidency. Others are ongoing, such as the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and freedom for political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal. These also remind us that gestures are never the end, for justice to come, direct struggle and solidarity is needed now more than ever.
 
For visitors to the archives, I hope that seeing and touching the buttons helps renew your convictions and helps you feel connected to past, present, and future struggles for justice and liberation. A button alone is a small memento, but in these collections, we get a glimpse of the vast networks of support which have animated social movements for generations, and that we continue to be part of today.
 
-Nacie
Freedom Archives
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