Clive and Mary Knowles papers

Clive D. Knowles was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1910. He graduated with honors from Bates College in 1933. He earned a master's degree in social ethics from the University of Chicago in 1934, and an S.T.B. degree from Harvard Divinity School in 1936. He taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., for a year at the invitation of Benjamin E. Mays (Bates Class of 1920) and then dean of the Howard School of Religion. Ordained in the First Unitarian Church of Gardner, Massachusetts, Knowles served that church for a year before becoming executive director of the Massachusetts Labor Non-Partisan Political League.

After serving in combat during World War II, Knowles began a lifetime career in organized labor. He worked with the AFL-CIO in California, was an organizer with United Farmworkers alongside Cesar Chavez, and was also director of the Council of Carpenters. He devoted his life to help win equal pay and working conditions for minority groups in the workplace. After retirement, he was a ski instructor for five years with the Apache Mescalero Tribe of New Mexico. He spent the summers in Franklin, Maine, establishing the Molasses Pond Writer's Workshop, and with his daughter worked on production of the revival of Old Jed Prouty that played in coastal summer theaters. Author of the unpublished Passing Through: A Yankee Radical's Journey, he also wrote a memoir, No Man Can Live Without Hope (1994). He died in Sarasota, Florida, on February 27, 1996.

Mary Gardner Knowles was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1910. Graduating from Bates in 1934, she returned to Watertown to work in the library, and married Clive Knowles that same year. After taking time to raise a family, she returned to work at the Sam Adams School for Social Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1945. In 1947 she began work at the library in South Norwood, Massachusetts. She and Clive Knowles divorced in 1949.

In 1953, however, the activities of the Sam Adams School came to the attention of the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, seeking to determine the extent of communist activity in the U.S. Knowles appeared before the subcommittee in 1953 and plead the Fifth Amendment when questioned. Despite the subcommittee taking no action against her, she was fired by the South Norwood library. Later that year she moved to Philadelphia and began work at the William Jeanes Memorial Library, on a part-time basis. Mary eventually was made director, and worked at the Jeanes Library until her retirement in 1979. She eventually moved to California, and died in November, 1997.