The donor of this material was a multi-decade veteran of the WSU police force, who self-described himself as sympathetic to the students’ cause.
As was the case nationally, in the late 1960s and early 1970s students at Washington State University organized a number of protests, marches, sit-ins, and other activities in response to U.S. international policies, and in response to perceived racial and economic injustices. WSU campus police were amongst those charged with investigating any criminal activities.
The collection contains materials created by WSU police officers relating to their investigations into campus student unrest; materials published elsewhere relating to student activism (notably FBI-created documents and pro-activism documents), and photostatic copies of materials originally created or collected by WSU campus student activists. The latter were presumably copied by officers in the course of their investigations. Notes on one sheet in folder 6 (IWW regional membership lists) make it appear likely they were copied from materials collected from the office of a particular WSU student activist, whose name appears multiple times throughout the copied documents. These photostatic copies are identified in the folder list by the designation “(copies).”
Due to the small size of the collection, the materials are organized in a simple subject-based order. Within each folder items are either in chronological order (where determinable) or retained in their original order. Folders are ordered alphabetically.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright restrictions apply.
[Item Description] WSU Police Officer Papers, 1967-1972
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
The materials in this collection were donated to the Washington State University Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) on May 4th, 2016, and retained as MS2016-21. The donor, a retired WSU police officer, asked to remain anonymous.
Materials were processed in June, 2016, by University Archivist Mark O’English. One police report was discarded during processing.
Cage 704, Papers of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Washington State University, 1967-1973, consists of papers collected and donated to WSU by Sieg Vogt and Jerry Calvert. What appear to be the originals to some of the photostatic copies in this collection can be found in those SDS papers.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.