It’s 1971 in Boston and revolution is in the air. A women’s group occupies a Harvard University building for 10 days. Blood spatters the pavement where the Boston Police broke up an anti-war rally downtown. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young perform “Ohio,” their song about the Kent State massacre, at the Music Hall in Boston.
"There were a lot of liberation movements starting, certainly [the] Black power movement, women's movement, gay liberation movement," says Devon Davidson, who was a grad student living in Cambridge at the time. "And this was all in the midst of [an] increasingly active anti-war movement and draft resistors and young men burning draft cards."
It was against this backdrop that the People's Yellow Pages was born. The nearly 100-page book was a modest proposal, at first: a regional directory of activist resources and mission-driven organizations. But the project proved massively successful in (largely white) leftwing circles, spurring similar efforts in other cities and lasting through the decade. Over time, the People's Yellow Pages faded from memory. But it made its way into archives at Harvard and UMass Boston, a quirky relic from a bygone era. Fifty years later, it stands as a testament to grassroots ingenuity and the radical idealism of '70s counterculture.
It all began when Davidson and another young activist named Larry Casalino attended an anti-war meeting.
"A man stood up, and he said, 'You know what we need? We need a directory of places where we can keep our money out of the war economy,'" Davidson recalls.
That gave the pair an idea. What if local activists had a resource like the Yellow Pages — that thick tome the phone company delivered to your doorstep every year?
"There wasn’t the internet," Davidson explains. "If you wanted to know where a shoe repair place was in your neighborhood, you just looked it up in the Yellow Pages."
They set up shop at the Cambridge offices of Vocations for Social Change, a counseling center that Davidson helped found in 1970 under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee, an activist Quaker organization.
"We would work there at night... poring through leaflets and posters, pamphlets, everything we could get our hands on that would give us some information about countercultural businesses and services in the Boston area," says People's Yellow Pages co-founder Larry Casalino.
The People's Yellow Pages became far more than an anti-war resource. It listed everything from women’s consciousness raising groups to free legal aid to recipes for yogurt."Yep, we were all making yogurt!" Davidson says with a laugh. It wasn't very good, she adds.