ANN ARBOR, MI - A lawsuit filed against the University of Michigan seeks sealed records of a noted anti-immigration activist, which are housed at the Bentley Historical Library.
The lawsuit was filed June 12 with the Michigan Court of Claims by Hassan Ahmad of the Virginia-based HMA law firm. He wants documents donated by Dr. John Tanton, which consist of materials documenting Tanton's work as a political and environmental activist from 1960 through the 1990s.
It includes a series related to his involvement with Northern Michigan Planned Parenthood, Zero Population Growth and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which Tanton founded in 1979, seeking to end illegal immigration and set a ceiling on legal immigration.
According to the library, the sealed documents include board meeting minutes from FAIR and correspondence with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), whose mission is "providing immigration policymakers, the academic community, news media, and concerned citizens with reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States," according to its website.
Ahmad filed a Freedom of Information Act request with UM in December 2016, seeking the documents Tanton donated "located in boxes 15-25, and any others marked 'closed' at the Bentley Historical Archive."More at site
http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/06/lawsuit_seeks_documents_of_ant.htmlThere are a few interesting aspects to this story. Dr. John Tanton is a leftist which makes him dangerous to the left. The University clearly doesn't want the left to discover that Tanton was a founder of the Petoskey Mi chapter of planned parenthood and pro eugenics groups. Also he was financially supported by the likes of Warren Buffet.
The other interesting aspect is the censorship aspect. A few years back after the arrest of the (Since acquitted) Hutaree militia and discovery that 1 of them owned a copy of Mein Kampf which led to claims that the member was a fascist. It wasn;t long before it was revealed that the UofM library listed at least 7 copies of their own. The library reacted by immediately pulling them from the shelves and announcing that interested parties would need to register to read them to assure that their interest was "legitimate".
