Robert F. Cohen Jr. was born on November 4, 1946. He graduated from Brown in 1968. His father (Robert F. Cohen) also went to Brown, class of 1932.
While at Brown, Cohen spent the spring semester of 1966 at Tougaloo College, as part of Brown’s program with Tougaloo. It was one of the most profound experiences of his life, and served as a foundation for his later political ideas. After returning from Mississippi he spent the summer of 1966 working for George Wiley, a Providence native and one of the most important, yet largely unknown, civil rights leaders of the 1960s, at the Citywide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Rights Groups in New York. This was his first experience with community organizing. Upon his return to school in the fall of 1966 he became involved with Brown’s Campus Action Council (CAC), formed as an alternative to Students for a Democratic Society. CAC was involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement but also linked their work to local issues of poverty and racism. During his involvement with CAC Cohen participated in numerous campaigns, including a sit-in at the State Capitol leading to the passage of a fair housing law as part of the People Against Poverty campaign, anti-recruitment demonstrations aimed at DOW Chemical, the CIA and the military, an educational seminar series, benefit concerts, including one by Pete Seeger, and coalitional work with other student organizations, including their support of the Freedom School that resulted from a boycott by Brown’s African-American students. Cohen served as the President of CAC during the 1967-1968 school year.
After graduating in 1968 he worked at the Catholic Inner City Center in Providence for Father Henry Shelton. Together with another Brown graduate Jim Dickson, class of 1968, Cohen was an organizer for Rhode Island Fair Welfare, affiliated with the National Welfare Rights Organization. Fair Welfare was, at that time, the largest and most powerful organization of poor people in Rhode Island, with 15-20 chapters around the state. They were the first organization to win a campaign for school clothing from the federal Title I education program.
In 1970 he began attending law school at Boston University. While there he worked part-time for the Harvard Center for Law and Education. He graduated from law school in 1973 and moved to Marion County, West Virginia to work for a community organization called the Mountain Community Union around labor, poverty, environmental and other community issues. He passed the bar in West Virginia in 1974. From 1984-2008, he worked with his wife Kathleen Abate and another lawyer, Richard Paul Cohen, in the firm Cohen, Abate & Cohen, continuing his work around welfare rights, civil rights, civil liberties, black lung, mental health, education, and environmental issues through his legal practice. The law firm of Cohen, Abate, & Cohen was dissolved in 2008 after he was appointed to be a commissioner at the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission. His term on the commission expires in 2012.
There are no restrictions on access, except that the collection can only be seen by prior appointment. Some materials may be stored off-site and cannot be produced on the same day on which they are requested.
Although Brown University has physical ownership of the collection and the materials contained therein, it does not claim literary rights. Researchers should note that compliance with copyright law is their responsibility. Researchers must determine the owners of the literary rights and obtain any necessary permissions from them.
Robert F. Cohen, Jr. papers, MS-1U-C8, Brown University Archives.
The Robert F. Cohen, Jr. papers consist of a wide variety of materials relating to his experiences as a student activist at Brown University and as a community organizer around issues of poverty and racism in Providence and other Rhode Island communities, and New York City. The bulk of the collection relates to his work from 1966-1972 at various organizations.
Overall the collection comprises original materials created in the context of his organizing activities. These include minutes of meetings, research notes, press releases, instructional materials related to organizing, correspondence, leaflets, memoranda, and reports. There are also some published materials he used in the course of his work and research, including state budgets and annual reports. In addition he collected news clippings covering the events he helped to organize. The publications series contains newsletters of progressive organizations and underground publications, all related to community organizing, especially around racism and poverty. Of particular note to those interested in local history is the folder in the Rhode Island Fair Welfare subseries containing various Providence publications as well as Extra! in the Publications series, another Providence publication.
Some highlights of the collection include a copy of a note written by Norman Mailer excusing Cohen from class for attending an anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington D.C. in 1967 as part of CAC’s (Campus Action Council) Mobilization campaigns well as copies of protest songs from that demonstration. Also in the Campus Action Council subseries there are extensive CAC planning notes and minutes of meetings, alongside drafts of flyers and other original organizing materials. The Student Activism series also contains his SDS (Students from a Democratic Society) membership card and original SDS newsletters. Related to the semester he spent at Tougaloo there is a poem about his experience in the Tougaloo-Brown Impression catalog compiled in 1969 and an article on Welfare Rights Organizing in the Brown-Providence Summer Project Report. There is also a letter from Jan Hillegas that connects the Benefit Concerts CAC organized to the Mississippi Freedom of Information Service and a letter he wrote to Patty Seybold the day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reflecting on how his experiences in Tougaloo informed his later political ideology. Other highlights include original reports documenting his research on gentrification and housing discrimination in both Providence and Newport, Rhode Island and discriminatory tracking practices in schools in Boston. As well as five notebooks that contain notes of meetings and research conducted while working for Rhode Island Fair Welfare, 1968-1970. Under the Rhode Island Fair Welfare subseries, there is also material related to the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) whose People Against Poverty Campaign served as a precursor to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. Of particular interest to Brown students there is a folder concerning the NWRO’s Welfare Not Warfare Convention held at Brown in 1971.
These papers represent a valuable resource for those interested in researching campus activism at Brown University in the late 1960s,as well as community organizing around civil rights, welfare rights and housing and education discrimination nationally and locally from 1966-1972.
This collection is arranged into the following series and subseries:
Series 1 (Student Activism) is comprised of two subseries containing general files arranged alphabetically and Campus Action Council files, also arranged alphabetically.
Series 2 (Independent Study) consists of only three folders, arranged alphabetically.
Series 3 (Community Organizing) is comprised of three subseries, determined by the different organizations with which Cohen worked. The subseries themselves are arranged chronologically and the folders within each subseries are arranged alphabetically.
Series 4 (Publications) is arranged alphabetically by publication title.
This collection was donated by Robert F. Cohen on April 24, 2007.
Additional papers are anticipated for this collection.
Brown University Library catalog record for this collection:
This collection forms part of the Community Organizing Archive, a collaboration between the Swearer Center for Public Service and the Brown University Library. This Archive is an effort to document the activities of people and organizations involved in community organizing throughout the United States. For more information see