Community and civil rights activist Ruth M. Batson has donated her papers to the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College.

A native of Boston, Batson has been prominent in the battle against racism, having served as commissioner of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) and as founder and director of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), a voluntary desegregation program exchanging students between urban and suburban schools. She was also the first woman president of the New England Regional Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

"We are thrilled to have this collection," said Mary Maples Dunn, director of the Schlesinger Library, the foremost library on the history of women in the United States. "Ruth Batson is one of the great women of twentieth-century Boston and these papers will help document one of the most important social and political movements of our time -- the fight for racial equality."

The papers contain photographs, correspondence, speeches, and clippings, as well as reports from organizations with which Batson was active, including the MCAD, the NAACP, the Museum of Afro-American History, Boston University, and METCO, which she founded. A recent study of METCO, the oldest major city-to-suburban project in the country, reported "extremely high satisfaction with the program." The program sends more than 3,000 Boston schoolchildren to schools in 36 suburbs, and has about 12,500 children on the waiting list.

As an associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine from 1970 to 1986, Batson established models for the delivery of community mental health services to people of all races and classes. She was the president and executive director of the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston from 1985 to 1988 and is the founder and treasurer of the Ruth M. Batson Educational Foundation, which provides grants to African-American students, educational institutions, and community organizations.

As part of the Schlesinger Library's ongoing effort to document the contributions of African-American women, the Library has interviewed 72 African-American women from around the country. The resulting tapes, transcripts, and records have become part of the Schlesinger Library's Black Women Oral History Project.