Laird Wilcox
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Laird Wilcox is an American researcher specializing in the study of political fringe movements.
Wilcox is the founder of the Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements, [1] one of the largest collections of American left- and right-wing political material in the United States, which is housed in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. [2] He received a Kansas City Area Archivists Award of Excellence in 1989 for his role in founding and maintaining the collection. [3] He is also editor of the Wilcox Report newsletter.
William Norman Grigg writes that Wilcox is "considered by many academics to be one of the nation’s foremost experts on 'fringe' political movements. A longtime member of the ACLU and veteran of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, [he is] a forthright critic of professional anti-right activists ..."[4]
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[edit] Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements
The Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, housed in the Kansas Collection of Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, includes coverage of "more than 10,000 individuals and organizations. The bulk of the collection covers 1960 to the present and is comprised of nearly 10,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals, 800 audio tapes, 73 linear feet of manuscript materials and more than 100,000 pieces of ephemera including flyers, brochures, mailings, clippings and bumper stickers." Wilcox continues to make regular donations. [5]
The collection began in 1963-4 when Wilcox, then a student at the University of Kansas, kept a scrapbook while he was chair of the Student Union Association Minority Opinions Forum. According to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library website, the forum was very active that year, with speakers invited to discuss apartheid, communism, the American Nazi Party, and the Socialist Labor Party. In 1965, the university purchased a number of books, serials, and pamphlets from Wilcox, and the Wilcox Collection began. [2]
On November 4, 2005 the University of Kansas honored Wilcox, then 63, "a retired carpenter who also is an investigator and writer in Olathe" in the Spencer library's North Gallery for his role in founding the collection. [6]
[edit] Books
- Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe is a 1992 book by John George (professor of political science and sociology at the University of Central Oklahoma) and Laird Wilcox. It is an examination of political extremism of both the far left and far right in the United States. It was published by Prometheus Books (Buffalo, New York) in 1992 as a 523-page hardcover (ISBN 0-87975-680-2). In 1996, Prometheus Books (Amherst, New York) republished it as American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists and Others in a 443-page paperback (ISBN 1-57392-058-4).[7]
- The Watchdogs: A Close Look At Anti-Racist "Watchdog" Groups (ISBN 0-933592-89-2) is a book by Laird Wilcox self published under the publishing house name Editorial Research Service. "Included are documented instances of illegal spying, theft of police files, fund-raising irregularities, questionable "hate crime" statistics, irresponsible and fraudulent claims, perjury, harassment and stalking, violence, and deep and longstanding involvements with Marxist-Leninist extremists. Extensively footnoted. 1997."[8]
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Voluntaryist article What Is Political "Extremism"? by Laird Wilcox From Issue 27 - Aug. 1987
- ^ a b Free Speech and the Wilcox Collection: Forty Years of Collecting Political Documents Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
- ^ KCAA Award of Excellence Recipient
- ^ "Propagandizing the Police", The New American, published by The John Birch Society, Vol. 15, No. 23, November 8, 1999.
- ^ University of Kansas Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
- ^ KU News Release article Wilcox Collection of political literature to celebrate 40 years at KU by University of Kansas published October 12, 2005
- ^ Amazon American Extremists (Paperback)
- ^ lairdwilcox.com The Watchdogs (Paperback)
[edit] Further reading
- American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists and Others
- Wilcox, Laird. "The Spectre Haunting Holocaust Revisionism", Revisionist Letters, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.
- The Wilcox Report newsletter, Box 2047, Olathe, Kansas 66061.
