For this week’s Peace of History:
On March 10, 1987, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights officially determined conscientious objection to military service to be a human right. The men and women who founded the CNVA “Peace Farm” (that became the Voluntown Peace Trust) identified as conscientious objectors, and many more involved with VPT over the years have identified similarly. Most men deeply involved with the CNVA and VPT had resisted being drafted into the military during the Vietnam War, and women resisted war and militarism by other means, as we shared in last week’s post. In recognition of the UN decision and VPT’s own history, let us analyze the meaning of conscientious objection today.
Conscientious objection has a history at least a few hundred years long in the western world, largely based off of the beliefs of pacifist religious minorities. Historically, conscientious objection meant supporting a state’s war effort by means other than military service: usually alternative labor or an additional tax. Where C.O. status was not legally granted, C.O.s faced incarceration, and sometimes execution. Most modern states have granted some recognition to conscientious objection, usually granting “exemptions” from military service and assigning alternative labor in service to the state. And yet even this practice is fraught with problems. What are the limits to “exemption” to military service within the context of an economy built around an unfettered military-industrial complex?
And so it is significant that on multiple occasions following its initial adoption in 1976, the UN has reiterated the official interpretation of Article 18 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as including conscientious objection to military service. Article 18 defends “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” However, it is worth examining the exact recommendations and requests that the UN laid out in the 1987 decision. Included are appeals to “exemption from military service on the basis of a genuinely held conscientious objection” and the establishment of “impartial decision-making procedures to determine whether a conscientious objection is valid” (emphases added). But by what measures and tools can a state judge the authenticity of one’s moral beliefs?
The nebulousness of defining “genuine” conscientious objection is a major problem. Under current United States law, conscientious objection is defined as: “A firm, fixed, and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason of religious training and/or belief.” The GI Rights Hotline (linked in the sources) does an excellent job of deconstructing this definition. But the interpretation of the definition, and thus the judgment of one’s authenticity, is ultimately up to one’s local board, a mental health specialist, a military chaplain, and an investigating officer -- all connected to the military. The terms “training and/or belief” is especially troubling, as they imply a kind of consistency that excludes personal growth and revelatory experiences. The term “religious,” too, is confusing especially since it is meant to encompass more than just “traditional religious beliefs,” but not to include “political, sociological, or philosophical views.” Which then begs the question: what kind of ethical argument to defend conscientious objection does not rely on religion, politics, sociology, or philosophy?
To a certain extent, attempting to define conscientious objection is a rhetorical trap for those already resisting war. One former member of the US Army, Stephanie Atkinson, begins her account of going AWOL before Operation Desert Storm by stating, “I am not a conscientious objector. I am not someone who has had to defend my beliefs for not participating in war. I am someone who when called upon to participate in a war that I thought was unjustifiable for many reasons, refused to go.” She goes on to describe her reasons as “political” but also as “murky” and coming from “feelings and experiences that indicated to me that my participation in the first Gulf War would be wrong.” But for those who did not grow up in a religious tradition, activist community, or other pacifist organization -- for those who reach the decision to resist military participation through later life experiences -- how can they defend their beliefs as legitimate to the military itself? And by what right can anyone say that their new beliefs are any less authentic as a lifelong acolyte of faith?
Another resister, Diedra Cobb, describes the difficulty of gaining C.O. status in the contemporary U.S. military. Having begun basic training in January 2002, Cobb immediately realized that the violent chants and the actual weapons trainings, alongside the absolute dearth of cultural understanding of other peoples was all very disturbing to her. Within a few months after training, Cobb’s perspective was solidified even further by reading a book by Julia Alvarez. Deceived into reporting for duty, Cobb was sent to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland with her C.O. papers in hand, and then deployed to Iraq. After months of bureaucratic stalling, false threats by an ambitious commander, and a sexual assault in the barracks, Cobb returned home in December 2003. After all that, her C.O. case was denied, and she began working with a lawyer to defend her objection if she were to be called upon again. The difficulty Cobb describes in her story is unfortunately not uncommon.
And so we return to the question of what conscientious objection means today. In practice, the term is quite arbitrary and is in a very real way defined by the body to which the term objects. Indeed, the United Nations acknowledges certain limitations on the rights to freedom of thought, including those “necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.” While clearly written to curtail and delegitimize violent or oppressive personal beliefs, that caveat can just as easily be misapplied by a sufficiently motivated military to coerce C.O.s to participate in war more directly. Therefore, for those not already in the military, sometimes other types of resistance are more effective. Perhaps the most familiar type of draft resistance is simply to fail to show up when called to serve. When the draft is inactive, some refuse to register with the Selective Service at all. And for those who awaken to their conscientious objection while already in the military, but who are then denied C.O. status, refusing to obey orders or even desert may be their only options so that they do not violate their conscience.
Next week: we will look at what happens when one objects to even indirect participation in war, including the story of Bayard Rustin’s resistance in WWII.
Sources:
Elster Ellen and Majken Jul Sorensen, Editors. “Women Conscientious Objectors: An Anthology.” War Resisters’ International, 2010.
“Conscientious Objection: Fact Sheet.” https://girightshotline.org/en/military-knowledge-base/topic/conscientious-objection-discharge
“Conscientious objection to military service.” https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/RuleOfLaw/Pages/ConscientiousObjection.aspx
“Conscientious objection to military service.” https://www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f0ce50.html
“Conscientious Objector.” https://www.sss.gov/consobj
“International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CCPR.aspx

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For this week’s Peace of History:
In acknowledgement of International Women’s Day on March 8, we will share stories of women’s direct resistance to military service. Some resisted their own service, after enlisting under false assumptions, misconceptions, or outright deceit. Others have put themselves at risk of arrest and bodily harm to resist as surrogates for others. And still others have made themselves into roadblocks to hamper the draft effort.

One woman, Jean Zwickel, lost her job as a teacher for refusing to conscript students during World War II. She joined the Harlem Ashram, then the greater peace movement, remaining a dedicated activist into her eighties. Another woman, Erna Harris, a member of the War Resisters League and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, risked arrest and worse when she and a friend encouraged the “guys from the camp” to either apply for conscientious objector designation or to go “over the hill” and desert. Harris, a black woman and journalist who continued to be active in the pacifist and civil rights movements years later, provided shelter and aid to C.O.s and deserters. From her own words, “What we women were mostly doing was trying to take care of the guys who went to camp and make sure they didn’t feel deserted, which was easy to feel, and to take care of the ones who didn’t get their classification or who decided not to register and, therefore, were in trials or on their way to prisons.”

Years later, as the draft returned during the Vietnam War, the Committee for Nonviolent Action staged a remarkable protest in Washington, D.C. On June 19, 1968, under umbrellas and plastic coverings at the foot of the Supreme Court Building, several men handed over their draft cards to their female co-conspirators, who lit the cards ablaze with a little propane torch. The women and some men over the draft age again put themselves at risk of arrest and injury to voice their opposition to compulsory military service. Exemption from the draft did not include exemption for the penalty of burning a draft card. Several of these activists, including Mary Suzuki who lived a CNVA in Voluntown (predecessor to VPT), were subjected to being dragged by their hair and clothes by police as activists nonviolently obstructed the arrests of their fellow protesters. Others were arrested later, when police forcibly broke into a church, interrupting a nonviolent resistance training for teens and adults.

Our society is changing rapidly, and some in more recent times have argued that true gender equality would also mean that women should have to register for selective service alongside men -- otherwise, those proponents say, the feminists’ call for gender equality is revealed to be disingenuous. And yet in the past decade alone, at least 20-32% of female service members have been sexually assaulted by other service members, often by officers and senior staff. Accurate numbers are difficult to attain, but several surveys have determined that while sexual assault in the armed forces is at least twice as high as in the general public, it is also extremely underreported, and even fewer reports result in convictions. At least half of those who report assault have suffered some form of retaliation by their superiors, and some have been dishonorably discharged for reasons relating to the assault. The entire premise of the military is built upon authoritarianism and patriarchy. To impose the draft on more people would only serve to expand and reinforce such an institution, and to impose the draft on women would especially reproduce and amplify the worst elements of toxic masculinity in the world.

If the choice between gender-neutral selective service and the dismissal of gender equality is a false dichotomy, so is the choice between being a “Rosie-the-Riveter” and a helpless maiden as one’s country decides to go to war. For some years now, there has been an increased effort to promote and celebrate stories of women’s contributions to great national war efforts on the “homefront”: working in factories to replace the male workers, caring for families and children who have lost their main breadwinners, and generally maintaining the social fabric of their communities. And yet, little has been made of the converse: the remarkable women who resisted war, militarism, and selective service with action or noncompliance, even when it may have been easier to comply. May those women who resisted be an inspiration for us, as they show us that to have inner strength means to remain true to our convictions even when there is no immediate threat to us personally.

Next week, we will discuss the various reasons for conscientious objection, the different paths that have led many to pacifism, and what it means for the United Nations to have deemed conscientious objection as a human right.

Sources:
Allsup, Citti. “Sisters Say Yes.” Direct Action for a Nonviolent World. New England Committee for Nonviolent Action, June-July 1968.
Elster Ellen and Majken Jul Sorensen, Editors. “Women Conscientious Objectors: An Anthology.” War Resisters’ International, 2010.
https://www.newsweek.com/militarys-secret-shame-66459
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/02/us/military-sex-assault-report.html?_r=0
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/01/military-sexual-assault-reports-soar-pentagon-report
Photos from Direct Action for a Nonviolent World, June-July 1968.

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On this Week’s Peace of History:
We direct our attention to Robert “Bob” Parris Moses: African-American civil rights activist, peace activist, public education advocate, and math literacy educator. Although a contemporary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the shape of Moses’ leadership style differed sharply from that of the more famous reverend. Where Dr. King’s leadership was based largely around his personal charisma on the national stage, Bob Moses avoided the limelight and preferred to foster grassroots, community-based movements. Despite the difference, however, Dr. King appreciated Moses’ experiments in nonviolent resistance, calling his “contribution to the freedom struggle in America” an “inspiration.”

Born on January 23, 1935 in New York City, Moses showed himself to be very bright at a young age. Moses grew up in a housing project in Harlem and was one of only a handful of African-American students at the time who gained entry into Stuyvesant High School, the elite public school in Brooklyn. His experience receiving a top-rate education at a public school, while also witnessing the unequal opportunities for so many others in his community, left a profound influence on him. After graduating, Moses won a scholarship to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and then earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1957. His doctorate studies were cut short with the death of his mother and hospitalization of his father, but he returned to New York sometime later and worked as a math teacher at Horace Mann School.

Moses’ entry into the civil rights movement began in the late 1950s, as the breadth of the struggle spread through the South and the news of the movement penetrated the North. In 1959, Moses volunteered in a minor capacity for the second Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, D.C., but organizers like Bayard Rustin encouraged him to do more. Upon Rustin’s suggestion, Moses traveled to Atlanta during his summer teaching break the following year, initially to volunteer for Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Once there, Moses volunteered with the still-nascent Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which shared an office with SCLC. Founded that April by students interested in doing nonviolent direct action, SNCC initially worked to desegregate lunch counters -- an effort that initially made Moses uncomfortable. He came around, however, when he realized that grassroots organizing meant that locals must follow “their own ideas, not mine.” Thus, he was sent by Ella Baker on a recruiting and outreach tour through the South. In Mississippi that summer, Moses met the local NAACP chapter president Amzie Moore. It was from Moore that Moses learned about black voter suppression south of the “Cotton Curtain,” and Moore who convinced Moses to return the next year.

Bob Moses kept his word, returning to Mississippi in the summer of 1961 to volunteer for SNCC. That summer, Moses became the special field secretary for SNCC in McComb, Mississippi, and with NAACP member C.C. Bryant and other local community leaders began SNCC’s first voter registration campaign. Through the campaign, Moses and the other SNCC organizers learned of the immense untapped political energy of disenfranchised local people, and moreover, of the leadership already present in each community they worked in. This revelation was immensely influential to SNCC, and the group let this lesson shape their organizing style thenceforth. Moses and the other organizers would support and train up local community leaders and work closely with local activists like Fannie Lou Hamer to continue the work after outside SNCC organizers would leave. In Moses’ own words: “Leadership is there in the people. You don’t have to worry about where your leaders are, how are we going to get some leaders...If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge.”

By the next year, Moses was named co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), the larger umbrella coalition of civil rights groups in the state. He was the main architect of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, which brought student volunteers from across the United States to staff Freedom Schools, community centers, and door-to-door organizing for the re-enfranchisement of African-Americans in the state. When three of the volunteers went missing (their bodies found buried in an earthen dam by the FBI weeks later), many of the other student volunteers became frightened. According to first-hand accounts, Moses’ explicit acceptance of the mortal danger as a necessary risk to achieve their goals inspired all the other volunteers; everyone stayed. With that first challenge cleared, however, internal strife grew as the two white murder victims received the vast majority of media attention, while the murder of the black activist, as well as past black activist murder victims, did not get the same attention. At the same time, many volunteers were having difficulty accepting complete nonviolence as the best code of conduct for the movement. Bob Moses helped the diverse and at times distrustful members of the Project maintain their unity and commitment to the cause by letting the deaths of their comrades be a source of motivation, so that their sacrifices would not be in vain.

By late 1964, after Freedom Summer and the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), Bob Moses resigned from his position of co-director of COFO, saying that his role in the organization had become “too strong, too central, so that people who did not need to, began to lean on me, to use me as a crutch.” Uncomfortable with the power he had accumulated, Moses stepped back from the civil rights movement and redirected his energies to the anti-war effort, even dropping his surname for his middle name for a while. In 1965, at one of the first major demonstrations in Washington, D.C. against the war in Vietnam, Moses was a featured speaker and drew comparisons between the racism underlying the war in Vietnam to the racism behind the murders of civil rights activists in Mississippi. In 1967, Bob Moses fled to Canada along with other young black men to avoid the military draft. Some took on the identities of Black Nova Scotians: primarily descendents of enslaved African-Americans who were either granted freedom by the British as “Black Loyalists” or who had escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. Bob Moses lived there for two years before moving to Tanzania where he taught mathematics. He returned to the US in 1976 under the amnesty program for draft resisters.

Today, Bob Moses is perhaps best known for his innovative Algebra Project, a national nonprofit that promotes quality public education and helps improve math literacy in children of poor communities. Throughout the decades, this humble man has continued in the struggle for justice in one form or another, and he continues to do so as his position as an educator.

“Bob Moses.” https://snccdigital.org/people/bob-moses/
Intondi, Vincent J. African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement. Stanford University Press, 2015.
“Moses, Robert Parris.” https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ency…/moses-robert-parris
“Robert ‘Bob’ Moses.” http://freedom50.org/moses/
Visser-Maessen, Laura. Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots.

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For this week’s Piece of History:
We shine a light on the little-known peace and justice activist Ray Robinson. Born in Bogue Chitto, Alabama on September 12, 1937, Ray Robinson was a prize fighter before joining the peace and justice movements. Like Juanita and Wally Nelson, and many other African-Americans involved in the 20th century peace and justice movements, Ray is often characterized as a “civil rights” activist, but his work went well beyond black liberation in America. As his daughter Desiree Mark is quoted: “His whole thing was not black civil rights. It was human civil rights.”

Ray attended the 1963 March on Washington, but one could argue that his fully active participation in the movement began later that year when he joined the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace organized by the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA). From Power of the People: “The purpose of the walk was to present to the Cuban people and their leaders the idea of nonviolent resistance and to protest the existence of the US naval base at Guantanamo.” From the beginning, however, the organizers had planned for the Walk to be racially integrated, and had expected to be challenged by citizens and law enforcement as they walked through the segregated South. Thus, the Quebec to Guantanamo Walk demonstrated nonviolent civil disobedience in practice, and promoted peace on the interpersonal, national, and international levels.

Although not yet a “tried nonviolent activist” at the time he joined the Walk, Ray’s charisma, forthrightness, and audacity convinced Bradford Lyttle and other organizers to welcome him into the group. Ray was often described as a born leader, one who “put himself out in front of the project.” For example, while the other Walkers themselves were antiracist, many of them were still hesitant to openly challenge segregation in the South until Ray pointed out the hypocrisy of even entertaining the notion: “He wondered who was going to listen to us if we didn’t even feel free, ourselves, to behave naturally with one another” (Deming p. 75). Ray was tall, boisterous, and very visible, which sometimes made him a main target for segregationists. In Griffin, Georgia, after he and his fellow Walkers had been arrested for leafleting in a public park, the local police and a Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) agent used an electric cattle prodder on the walkers’ legs, genitals, spines, chests, and faces. Ray, however, was “particularly brutally tortured,” a pattern that would unfortunately repeat itself.

The group was later arrested again in Albany, Georgia. There, Ray and several others went on a hunger strike to protest the conditions of the prison where they were incarcerated. Ray also attempted abstention from water multiple times. Chief Pritchett of the Albany Police Department had had a particular hatred for the Walkers, and especially for Ray Robinson. From Barbara Deming’s Prison Notes: “Ray has obsessed the Chief’s imagination from the start. He has, for one thing, been especially uncooperative -- even flipping himself off the stretcher as he was being carried into jail. Just the fact of his great physical strength and agility has obsessed the Chief, giving him hope of provoking him into using it to our discredit -- especially when he learned that Ray had once been a professional boxer…” (Deming p. 112). Pritchett attempted to break Ray’s fasts and provoke Ray’s aggression by a great range of physical and psychological tortures and threats, from beginning the process to transfer him to a mental asylum, to locking him in a “cell within [a] cell” where he could fit only if he “lay catercorner” (p. 107).

There were more than a few times when Ray struggled with his own commitment to nonviolence under the injustice and torment of his incarceration. For example, at one point, Ray broke some shutters and a window in his overcrowded cell, and also pulled the toilet off the floor, in order to get medical attention for a sick but neglected African-American inmate. And yet, as Barbara Deming speculates, “Perhaps the very fact that Ray has to struggle with himself more than most to try to be nonviolent has made him especially real to a man like Pritchett.” Even as the Chief delighted in tormenting his prisoners, he was still known to deliver the handwritten notes that the prisoners would write to each other, including those of Ray. From Deming: “I remind myself, too, of the Chief’s surprising act upon Ray’s return -- when he brought around to my cell some writings Ray wanted me to see. Would he have been moved to such a gesture if, in the course of gaining his “victory” over Ray, Ray had not become for him the opposite of the grotesque stereotype the Chief liked to conjure up for us -- if he had not become for him a real person?” (Deming p. 115-116). Indeed, Ray had written a statement for Barbara Deming regarding the material damage he had caused in the prison, which Barbara then sent to the local paper. The text, more like a prayer than a legal statement, explained his personal growth and inner struggles regarding peace and nonviolence, and was widely circulated. Deming wrote: “I wonder now whether the words published in the Herald could have touched any of the paper’s readers in the white community. It doesn’t seem impossible to me… [An African-American woman Pritchett knew and respected] called him and read Ray’s statement to him over the telephone. Ray had now begun his first water fast… She told me that after she read Ray’s words to the Chief there was simply a long silence at the other end of the line. The Chief could usually find something to say, and it was her guess -- though it could only be a guess -- that he had been shaken.” (p. 114-115).

After the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace, Ray continued his involvement in the peace and justice movements, participating in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, throwing in his support for Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1967, and helping to organize the Poor People’s Campaign’s Resurrection City at the Washington Mall in 1968, among many other activities. In 1973, while members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the FBI faced off at Wounded Knee at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, over the objections of his wife Cheryl, Ray Robinson traveled up to South Dakota to see what he could do to help reconcile the tense situation. Stories differ over what happened when Ray arrived at Pine Ridge, but most reports agree that he was shot by a Native man over a misunderstanding or what was perceived as insubordination. Anti-black prejudice may have played a factor, and some AIM members made it clear that Ray and other African-Americans were not wanted in “Indian Country.” Nevertheless, it appears that Ray’s last acts were guided by the pacifism and the faith in interracial peace he had begun to develop a decade earlier.

Let us leave you this week with Ray’s statement from that Albany jail, that prayer that stunned his tormenter into silence:
“Yes I was one of the angry young men, yes I rebel against society. I had no respect for law and order or man, especially the white man the one who has made me feel inferior… The most powerful weapon to me at the time being hatred, disrespect for anyone [white], I never trusted him, and every chance I got, I tried to hurt him… I was violence. I got at one point where I started waiting for one to assault me, where I could strike back with all my strength… I could not fight him legally, and win, so I decided to take up boxing where the world could watch and see me beat one with my hands… Revenge was what I thought I got… So now come a new thing to me that’s called nonviolence and I’m trying it. But yet my past of hatred for him has been stirred up again. Which way shall I go? It’s easy to go back to revenge, and God know I have all the rights… This thing that’s called nonviolence is the biggest challenge I have ever tried as a man and altho it’s hard, I have manage to continue to hold my violence in check. But how much longer can I stay this way? … Maybe more strength on my part will help. But really why should it be on my part, especially since I the oppressed. I’ll just leave things into God’s hands. But here I’m confused about God, where is he now? I need him now. But just when do God put his hand into this thing? … God … can’t you see just what I going thru as a young man? If I sound as tho I’m beginning to doubt you, God, if there’s one, show me your face, don’t keep hiding your face from me, don’t put words into others’ mouths to explain to me about you… But yet God I haven’t thrown you completely out of my mind. So give me strength and courage to continue onward to things unknown, who knows what the tomorrows will bring.” (Deming p. 112-113).

Next week: we will tell the story of Bob Moses, an exceptional organizer and activist in the peace and civil rights movements.

“A follower of Martin Luther King Jr. might be buried at Wounded Knee.” https://www.indiancountrynews.com/…/887-a-follower-of-marti…
Cooney, Robert and Helen Michalowski (ed.). The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States. Peace Press.
Deming, Barbara. Prison Notes.
“Flash from Albany.” https://www.crmvet.org/docs/6312_cnva_albany2.pdf
“Nonviolence and Police Brutality: A Document.” https://www.crmvet.org/info/quebec_guantanamo.pdf

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For this week's Peace of History:
Let us continue honoring the legacies of Wally and Juanita Nelson. Last week, we surveyed some of the political movements, projects, and actions that carried Wally’s and Juanita’s respective brilliance across the country. This week, we will focus on how they lived as homesteaders in their later years, and how they influenced and inspired so many to live simply, happily, cooperatively, and consistently with pacifist values. We shall read some of the arguments the Nelsons themselves made in defense of their political convictions and their simplified lifestyle, as well as the words of friends, neighbors, and fans of these extraordinary individuals.

Wally is quoted as saying: “Nonviolence is the constant awareness of the dignity and humanity of oneself and others; it seeks truth and justice; it renounces violence both in method and in attitude; it is a courageous acceptance of active love and goodwill as the instrument with which to overcome evil and transform both oneself and others. It is the willingness to undergo suffering rather than inflict it. It excludes retaliation and flight.”
It is this expansive concept of nonviolence that proved to be a throughline in the lives of Wally and Juanita. In particular, the Nelsons’ belief in the “active love and goodwill as the instrument” for social transformation, as well as their “willingness to undergo suffering rather than inflict it” led to a successful radical rejection of the dominant economic system for decades. As US involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, in 1970, Wally and Juanita moved to Ojo Caliente, New Mexico to learn to be homesteaders. From Juanita’s memorial program: “...Juanita was intent on dissociating herself from an economic system that spawned injustice and war. She saw very clearly the connection between our modern lifestyles and war-making…Wally, who vowed he would never again have a hoe in his hand after the sharecropper days of his youth, needed some convincing. He could see, however, that Juanita’s vision of self-sufficiency was something totally different, and he acquiesced.” They learned to grow and preserve their own foods and live simply, with limited electricity and other “modern” amenities. In 1974, facing affordability issues, the couple relocated to Deerfield, Massachusetts upon the invitation of Randy Kehler and a Quaker-run school at Woolman Hill. There, with the help of old and new neighbors and friends, Juanita and Wally “...took apart and reassembled a cabin, had a well dug, and built an outhouse on the half-acre or so of land that the Woolman Hill community allowed them to use, as specified in a Memorandum of Understanding.”
Despite -- or perhaps because of -- their extremely humble lifestyle, Wally and Juanita were known for their happiness and love for their fellow humans. Race had no meaning to them, except to mean the human race. Randy Kehler, long-time friend and neighbor of the Nelsons, said of Wally, “He showed us how to lead a life of integrity and how to have the courage of our convictions. He demonstrated that you can choose to live a different way and achieve a level of happiness most people can’t imagine. He was a very happy man.” And with Juanita, according to Ed Agro, “[E]ach conversation began and ended with hugs and smiles.”
But their happiness did not necessarily mean they loved every part of their radical lifestyle. With clarity and humor, Juanita herself made reference to some of the sacrifices they’d had to make to follow what Wally referred to as “rightlivelihood” in a silly popular poem she wrote in New Mexico called “Outhouse Blues”:


Well, I went out to the country to live the simple life,
Get away from all that concrete and avoid some of that strife,
Get off the backs of poor folks, stop supporting Uncle Sam
In all that stuff he’s puttin’ down, like bombing Vietnam
Oh, but it ain’t easy, ’specially on a chilly night
When I beat it to the outhouse with my trusty dim flashlight --
The seat is absolutely frigid, not a BTU of heat…
That’s when I think the simple life is not for us elite.
Well, I try to grow my own food, competing with the bugs.
I even make my own soap and my own ceramic mugs.
I figure that the less I buy, the less I compromise
With Standard Oil and ITT and those other gouging guys.
Oh, but it ain’t easy to leave my cozy bed
To make it with my flashlight to that air-conditioned shed
When the seat’s so cold it takes away that freedom ecstasy,
That’s when I fear the simple life maybe wasn’t meant for me.
Well, I cook my food on a wood stove and heat with wood also,
Though when my parents left the South I said, “This has got to go,”
But I figure that the best way to say all folks are my kin
Is try to live so I don’t take nobody’s pound of skin.
Oh, but it ain’t easy, when it’s rainy and there’s mud
To put on my old bathrobe and walk out in that crud;
I look out through the open door and see a distant star
And sometimes think this simple life is taking things too far.
But then I get to thinkin’, if we’re ever gonna see
The end of that old con game the change has got to start with me.
Quit wheelin’ and quit dealin’ to be a leader in any band,
And it appears the best way is to get back to the land.
If I produce my own needs I know what’s goin’ down,
I’m not quite so footsy with those Wall Street pimps in town.
’Cause let me tell you something, though it may not be good news,
If some folks win you better know somebody’s got to lose.
So I guess I’ll have to cast my lot with those who’re optin’ out.
And even though on freezing nights I will have my naggin’ doubts,
Long as I talk the line I do and spout my way out views

I’ll keep on usin’ the outhouse and singin’ the outhouse blues.


Inspirations to multiple generations of peace activists, Juanita and Wally were beloved by distant fans and their closest neighbors to the end. After Wally passed away, Juanita suffered a stroke in late 2010, at which point the community they had cultivated took action to take care of her. Let us end with the last part of Juanita’s memorial program: "[Many] opened their homes to Juanita and cared for her as a beloved member of their families for the last four years of her life. Many friends and acquaintances visited and supported her during this time. The love and steadfast commitment that Juanita extended to others during her long life circled back to embrace her: a beautiful ending to an extraordinary, well-lived, remarkable life.”
Next week, we will take a look at Ray Robinson, a peace and civil rights activist who disappeared at Pine Ridge Reservation during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee.
“A Celebration of the Remarkable Life of Juanita Morrow Nelson"
Long, Tom. “Wallace Nelson, 93, pacifist and early civil rights activist,” The Boston Globe.
Nelson, Juanita. “Outhouse Blues”

https://nwtrcc.org/juanita-nelson-remembrance-and-apprecia…/

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For this week’s Piece of History:
We are celebrating Black History Month with stories of incredible yet under-acknowledged African-American activists in the modern peace movement. As we shall see, the history of the Voluntown Peace Trust overlaps with many of these important black peace activists. We begin with Wally and Juanita Morrow Nelson: civil rights activists, war tax resisters, and two of the co-founders of the Peacemakers -- one of the most quietly influential early peace organizations in modern United States history.

Wally and Juanita Morrow Nelson were each impressive figures in their own right, and they inspired countless people with their personal examples of simple living and refusal to participate in an unjust economy. They were patrons of organic farms, supporters of community land trusts, promoters of simple and peaceful living, and teachers of nonviolence. Together, they are sometimes known as two of the “grandparents” of the modern war tax resistance movement.

Wally Nelson was born in Arkansas in 1909 to a family of sharecroppers and a self-taught minister. After dropping out of high school to help support his family, he took a pledge of nonviolence with a Methodist youth group, which he tried to live by for the rest of his life. During WWII, Wally registered as one of 37,000 American conscientious objectors, but then walked out on the Civilian Public Service camp to which he was assigned, reasoning that his labor still contributed to the war effort. He and five others left for Detroit to work in service of a poor community there. He was later caught and incarcerated for three and half years, but never ceased his radical work, and in fact became an important figure in the desegregation of the federal prison system. It was in prison that Wally shared a cell with Chicagoan co-founder of CORE, Joe Guinn. It was also there that he met his future life-partner, Juanita Morrow, who was working as a reporter on prison conditions. In 1947, after leaving prison, Wally had participated in the Journey of Reconciliation rides sponsored by FOR and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the first “freedom rides” to test the 1946 Supreme Court decision to integrate interstate travel. Wally also became CORE’s first Field Secretary, effectively the national field organizer for workshops and actions in Washington D.C. and the country as a whole.

Juanita Nelson was just as impressive and committed to the peace movement. Born on August 17, 1923, Juanita had always been a person of principle and action. In 1939, due to her own frustration at the indignity of segregated train cars, 16-year old Juanita decided in defiance to try sitting in every car of the train she was riding with her mother on their way to Georgia. She did so without incident, except for a black porter concerned for her safety advising her to return to her original car. Four years later, as a student at Howard University, Juanita and a few of her friends were arrested for ordering hot chocolate at a “whites-only” drugstore. Shortly after her night in jail, Juanita began working for CORE, helping to desegregate a restaurant at the edge of campus in less than a week. Leaving Howard early in part for financial reasons, she returned home and found work as a reporter for a local newspaper. In her new work, she met Wally Nelson while doing a story about segregation in the jail.

After Wally left prison, he and Juanita began their lifelong partnership, joining the pacifist group the Peacemakers which had just formed. Their personal philosophies resonated with the group’s tenets of non-registration for the draft, war tax resistance, and nonviolence as a way of life. In 1950 they moved into an intentional community with other Peacemakers, including founders Ernest and Marion Bromley, in Cincinatti, Ohio. This caused tension among the neighbors, but this would not be the first time the Nelsons would defy the norm of segregation.

The Peacemakers, founded in 1948, took their inspiration from Gandhi’s example in India and other experiments in nonviolent peace and liberation movements around the world. They also rejected the organizational principles of many other pacifist groups. Juanita Nelson, one of the co-founders, said, “Groups or cells are the real basis of the movement, for this is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee.” These cells were typically organized as intentional communities, so that individuals could work together to change their lives into ones consistent with radical pacifist values.

The Peacemakers focused on small direct action projects and, starting in 1957, trainings in nonviolent action. Wally and Juanita had been giving nonviolent action trainings since the late 1940s, and so many of the Peacemakers’ trainings were personally led by Juanita and/or Wally Nelson, including the ones conducted in the summer of 1960 for the Polaris Action in New London, CT. The Peacemakers conducted numerous experiments in the complete integration of radical pacifism into one’s life, leading to a “living program” of draft and war tax resistance, personal transformation, and group participation in work to promote political and economic democracy. The group also initiated the first modern organized war tax resistance movement, and published the “Handbook on the Nonpayment of War Taxes.” Along with Ernest and Marion Bromley and Reverend Maurice (Mac) McCracken, Wally and Juanita Nelson are considered by many to be the grandparents of this movement. Decisions were made at an annual Continuation Committee meeting, and starting in 1949, The Peacemaker newsletter served as an important forum for letters, announcements, and personal accounts of radical pacifists for individuals and groups associated with the peace movement. For the first decade of its existence, up until the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) was founded, the Peacemakers were the most active nonviolent direct action in the nation.

Neither Juanita nor Wally ever wavered in their commitment to the pacifist movement. In 1957, Juanita and Wally briefly joined the radical pacifist Koinonia Farm in southwest Georgia to support their racial integration efforts. In an interview, Juanita recounted how Wally would take long trips to buy supplies for the farm when local businesses boycotted them for their integrated living policy. In 1959, Juanita was arrested in her home in Philadelphia for tax refusal. In contrast to many other activists of the time, who emphasized dignified, well-dressed appearances in the face of ugly violence and injustice, Juanita refused to change out of the bathrobe in which she had been arrested, saying, "Why am I going to jail? Why am I going to jail in a bathrobe? What does it matter in the scheme of things whether or not you put on your clothes? Are you not making, at best, a futile gesture, at worst, flinging yourself against something which does not exist? Is freedom more important than justice? Of what does freedom of the human spirit consist, that quality on which I place so much stress?" By one account, “Juanita Nelson was the first woman in modern times to be apprehended for war tax refusal,” although the government was never able to collect the money they claimed she owed.

Continuing to experiment with ways to divest themselves from what they viewed as an unjust economy, the Nelsons began homesteading, first in New Mexico from 1970 to 1974, and then in New England for the rest of their lives, where they became deeply influential in the local community. They were frequent visitors to the CNVA / Voluntown Peace Trust as friends and valued resource people. From the home that they and many friends built, with an outhouse and no electricity, the Nelsons continued their work, helping found the Valley Community Land Trust, the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters, and the Greenfield Farmers’ Market. They supported the development of other community land trusts started by their friends Bob Swann and Chuck Matthei through the Institute of Community Economics and Equity Trust. For their lifelong work to promote peace and justice, both Wally and Juanita Nelson received the Courage of Conscience Award from The Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA. Wally died at 93 on May 23, 2002. Juanita died on March 9, 2015 at age 91.

Next week, we will continue with stories of African-Americans whose involvement in the peace movement has been woeful undertold.

https://aaregistry.org/story/wally-nelson-a-committed-activist/
http://www.americancenturies.mass.edu/activities/oralhistory/nelson/index.html
https://www.crmvet.org/mem/nelsonw.htm
http://www.memorialhall.mass.edu/activities/oralhistory/nelson/bio.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20090207195509/http://www.peaceabbey.org/awards/cocrecipientlist.html
Cooney, Robert and Helen Michalowski (ed.). The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States. Peace Press.
Gross, David (ed.) "We Won't Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader." pp. 451-461

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For this week’s Piece of History:
Today is the 72nd anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination. Let us commemorate his extraordinary achievements by tracing exactly how his legacy came to influence so many social movements in the United States of the 20th century. One of the earliest places in the United States where Gandhi’s ideas took root was East Harlem. Several of the members of this particular community went on to become leaders in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1950s, 60s, and beyond.

Founded in 1940, the Harlem Ashram was an attempt to unify Gandhi’s teachings of satyagraha (“action based on truth”) and ahimsa (“action without violence”) with the Christian pacifist tradition. The founders, Ralph Temlin and Jay Holmes Smith, were two white men who had formerly served as Methodist missionaries in India. There, they had each been deeply inspired by the Gandhian movement -- so much so that they were both expelled from India by the British government for refusing to cease their pro-independence work. Back in the United States, they continued work in nonviolent direct action, eventually forming the Ashram in Harlem specifically in order to organize with local black leaders. Together, they all worked to build a multiracial community to exploring ways of using nonviolent action against racial injustice.

As the members of the Ashram organized community groups like the Non-violence Direct Action Committee, some African-Americans began to develop an understanding of how to apply the lessons of the Indian experiment in nonviolence to the struggle against Jim Crow.

One influential member of the Non-violence Direct Action Committee was Krishnalal Jethalal Shridharani, a veteran of Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March and interpreter of Gandhi’s teachings for over ten years. Shridharani’s work culminated in his book War Without Violence, reaching a wide audience in the United States and becoming invaluable to spreading Gandhi’s message. Early nonviolence trainings in the United States were developed using War Without Violence. More than giving just a detailed explanation of Gandhi’s philosophy, Shridharani also gave sharp criticism to the messianic interpretation of Gandhi so common in American pacifist circles at the time. For many Americans of the time, Shridharani was instrumental in demystifying Mahatma Gandhi from a modern-day Hindu Jesus to a strategic revolutionary leader of a mass movement.

As history shows, the Harlem Ashram became an incubator of American Gandhism and the civil rights movement. Here, future leaders cut their teeth doing work like helping black newcomers from the South find housing, investigating police violence during strikes, desegregating the local YMCA, and creating a credit union run by and for African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other minorities who made up most of the East Harlem neighborhood. Ruth Reynolds, a strong supporter of the Puerto Rican independence movement, stayed at the Ashram. So did Pauli Murray, who would become prominent at the nexus of civil rights and the women’s movement. Bayard Rustin, whose outsized influence in the peace and civil rights movements has only recently come to the fore, lived nearby and visited frequently while working for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). James Farmer, who later became a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) along with Rustin, and then a leader of the 1961 Freedom Rides, received his first trainings in nonviolent direct action at the Harlem Ashram. Farmer, however, was one of several who would ultimately leave the Ashram due to disagreements with the ascetic nature of the commune.

Although the Harlem Ashram closed in 1948, one could vigorously argue that the Ashram was incredibly successful in so far as it trained and inspired some of the first Americans (many of them African-Americans) in Gandhian nonviolent direct action. Some of those same Americans then went on to refit the practice into the American context and spread it across the country. It is worth noting that though Gandhi’s teachings have been applied in multiple social movements over the years, none have been more successful or well-known as the American civil rights movement -- in part, perhaps, due to some of the civil rights leaders’ early critical engagement with, training in, and practice of Gandhian nonviolent direct action at the Harlem Ashram.

The Voluntown Peace Trust shares significant history with the Harlem Ashram. Ralph Temlin served as a resource person at the 1960 nonviolence training in New London, which Barbara Deming wrote about (see our post from 11/7/19). Ruth Reynolds was close to the Community for Non-Violent Action (CNVA), from which VPT got its start. Marj Swann was trained in 1942 in the same nonviolent methods that James Farmer and others learned and continued to develop at the Harlem Ashram. Gandhi called his autobiography, My Experiment in Truth. The people of the Harlem Ashram continued this experiment by bringing Gandhian methods to the American context -- and while we honor their work, it is far from over, and so we must continue to experiment with the power of nonviolent action.

As we move on to Black History Month, we will continue to highlight lesser-known but vitally important African-Americans who helped change the course of history.

For more information on the Harlem Ashram, watch the first part of the “Roots of Nonviolent Direct Action Training” video from the War Resisters League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jprdqKEBGvU&t=790s

Additional reading on the Harlem Ashram can be found at the following source links:
https://www.christiancentury.org/…/harlems-experiment-inter…
http://corenyc.org/nycore.htm
http://www.elegantbrain.com/…/v…/king/phil_gandhi_black.html
http://www.peacehost.net/HarlemAshram/dekar.htm
http://www.thebritishtoastrack.com/gandhi-and-america/

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On this week’s Peace of History:
We celebrated the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday, but his message and example cannot be limited to a single federal holiday, nor to any one speech, nor to the sanitized stories we tell to children in our schools. The importance of his vision would still be vast if his work had been completed; as it stands now, with so much of his work left unfinished in a world on fire, the value of Dr. King’s message has reached a new kind of urgency.

No single speech of Dr. King can encapsulate his message, but in the one he delivered on April 4, 1967, Dr. King revealed a deeper, wider analysis of racism as part of an interconnected system of oppression. Delivered to an audience of over 3000 at Riverside Church in New York City exactly one year before his assassination, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” is widely considered his most controversial speech: his most emphatic denunciation of American military involvement in Vietnam, and of war in general. It was in many ways a watershed moment: the culmination of years of philosophical development and lived experience that had been transforming the Reverend for years -- a process that turned him from a reformer to a revolutionary.
It is no wonder, then, that Dr. King devotes much of the beginning of the speech to justify his delivery at all. He appeals not only to conscience and faith, but also to practicality. Repeatedly, the Reverend explains the hypocrisy of using violence for good, how a society that prioritizes war cannot also prioritize racial and economic justice, and how the combination of racism and capitalism feeds poverty, which in turn feeds military recruitment, which then feeds war:
“[The young gang members of Chicago and Cleveland] asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government[...]
And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such[...]
So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”
This broader analysis shows how Dr. King’s understanding of justice had expanded beyond the silo of civil rights to include an end to militarism and war, as well as to include the leveling of economic, social, and political power. It was only after achieving some victories in the struggle to end Southern segregation that Dr. King realized that he was integrating his people into “a burning house.” Indeed, according to historian David Garrow, Dr. King would say to his staff that he “didn’t believe that capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism.”
In “Beyond Vietnam,” the Reverend continued with his analysis of the relationship between capitalism, imperialism, and war, warning that “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Dr. King attempted to connect the revolutionary American values of self-determination and independence to the revolutionary efforts of colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to throw off their colonial masters and establish their own nation-states -- while pointing out that the United States had now flipped to the side of colonizers, exploiters, and reactionaries:
"Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
Dr. King’s understanding of racism as a part of a greater, interconnected system of oppression was spurred on by a few factors. A lesser known attempt by Malcolm X to reach a mutual understanding just before his death in 1965 seemed to retune Dr. King’s ears to the unique problems in the North. So, too, did a new generation of young, dissatisfied African-Americans calling for “black power” and their explorations of how to achieve it. And then, of course, the urban riots of 1967 added a whole new urgency to the persistent crisis of economic injustice.

By the later 1960s, that path Dr. King was walking may have become less clear even to himself, but only because his vision had recently expanded, and needed time to adjust focus. Still, he walked, holding fast to his belief in the Promised Land of justice, and firm in his conviction that the manner by which one moves is as important as the destination -- only through radical nonviolent struggle can we transform our world into one of true peace and justice.
Let us catch up to this trailblazer, and then let us surpass him, continuing not only his work, but also the continuous broadening of his vision. Like Dr. King, at times it will be difficult to see the path. But let us share his conviction, and continue on, for:
“These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every [person] of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest[...] We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”


Vincent Harding. Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient hero. Orbis Books, 1996.

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclope…/beyond-vietnam

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/…/documen…/beyond-vietnam

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On this week’s Peace of History:
Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, and some of us will have next Monday off in his remembrance. Dr. King’s legacy is vast, almost mythic, but like most of us, Dr. King’s own analysis of nonviolence, racism, war, and nuclear disarmament developed with the encouragement of others..

The first thing that must be stated is that it was not Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but Coretta Scott King who was first and foremost active in the anti-war and anti-nuclear arms movements, long before she met Dr. King. While a student at Antioch College (class of ’51) Coretta met Marjorie Swann through their mutual work with the NAACP. Marj and Bob Swann and their children lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the late 1940s and early 1950s as Bob pursued his interest in alternative economics. Coretta had many interests in common with Marj, who was already involved in the Civil Rights (Marj was a charter member of Congress of Racial Equality in 1942) and Anti-War movements (a pacifist, she worked for the National Committee on Conscientious Objection during World War II and joined the Peacemakers in the late 1940s). They stayed in touch throughout their lives.

After WWII, Coretta Scott -- along with other soon-to-be prominent women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Shirley Chrisholm, Ertha Kitt, and more -- was a part of a new generation of African-American women joining groups like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and Women Strike for Peace (WSP). Although Martin was familiar with the nonviolence movement when they first met, it was Coretta who helped him connect racism, colonialism, and war as all part of the same problem. Coretta also seemed to have inspired his commitment to nonviolence -- while he was still considering the concept as merely a strategic tool, she had already adopted nonviolence as a way of life.

Last week’s post highlighted a pivotal meeting between the great organizer Bayard Rustin and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The conversations the two had that evening in 1957 seemed to have reaffirmed the values of Coretta, and further advanced Dr. King’s understanding of nonviolence. Indeed, Bayard Rustin and Coretta Scott King worked alongside each other in the anti-war movement. In June 1965, both served as featured speakers at one of the first protests against the war in Vietnam, urging the crowd of 18,000 to nonviolent action and leading a march through New York City. Throughout the 1960s and beyond, both were some of the most important anti-war organizers, vigorously arguing that the racism that fuels violence within the United States is the same racism that fuels violence the United States perpetrates outside of its borders. They connected the black liberation movement in the South to the anti-war movement in the North, and trail-blazed the path that Dr. King would follow in his last years. As early as the spring of 1965, to an audience at Howard University, Dr. King publicly denounced the war in Vietnam. Afterward, he told reporters, “War had always been a negative concept, but nuclear weapons made it totally unacceptable.”

Next week, we will closely examine Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most famous antiwar speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” which he delivered in 1967. Until then, we will leave you this week with a quote from that famous speech:

'I am convinced that [...] we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values[...]

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood[…]

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.'

Vincent J. Intondi. African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement. Stanford University Press, 2015.

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/beyond-vietnam
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam

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In this week’s Piece of History:
As we approach Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, let us examine one particularly important advisor to the famous civil rights leader: Bayard Rustin, a man best known for his association with the younger minister, but whose long and prolific involvement in peace and justice movements started well before King’s political beginnings, and who continued the work long after King’s death.

Raised by his grandmother, who was a devoted Quaker and member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Bayard Rustin was introduced to nonviolence as a child. Earlier in his career, Rustin joined and worked for various peace and racial justice groups, including the Youth Communist League before they shifted priorities in 1941, the Fellowship for Reconciliation (FOR) which sent Rustin to India to learn Gandhian principles in 1948, and War Resisters International and the War Resisters League (WRL), for which he served as Executive Secretary from 1953 to 1965. For a man so relatively unknown today, when one looks into the recent history of civil rights and peace movements, Bayard Rustin shows up at many of the most famous moments:

• the establishment of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), of which he was a co-founder in 1942;
• the Montgomery Bus Boycott, during which Rustin introduced Dr. King to a deeper understanding of the Gandhian practice of nonviolent resistance;
• the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was created upon Rustin’s proposal to Dr. King in 1956, and for which Rustin helped organize the first meeting in 1957;
• the co-founding of the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) in 1957, and the consequent importation of the circular peace symbol from the U.K. in 1958, as written about last week;
• and of course, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, for which he was one of the main organizers as deputy director.

But those snapshots only offer a glimpse into the man’s extensive career, and offer little about the complex life behind these moments. The 2003 film Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, the centennial celebration of his birthday in 2012, and the posthumous awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2013 have all helped shed light on his remarkable life. Rustin was instrumental in not just the civil rights movement, but also in the labor rights movement, in the gay liberation movement, and in the anti-nuclear weapons movement (both domestically and internationally), among so many more diverse but interrelated activities. Much of Rustin’s involvement in the civil rights movement and other organized efforts, however, was purposely downplayed at the time and until recently for his open homosexuality.

One lesser known story about Rustin and Dr. King is worth sharing here. In 1957, when Rustin went to Montgomery, Alabama for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he happened to visit Dr. King in his home along with a few others. King had heard of Rustin: although Rustin’s sexual orientation was known and regarded somewhat suspiciously by King and other leaders, the older organizer’s reputation as a skilled strategist seemed to outweigh his perceived flaws. At King’s home, as the reporter Bill Worthy was about to sit in a chair, Rustin had to warn him that he was about to sit on a gun. In fact, since racists bombed Dr. King’s home the year before, King held several firearms in his home for self-defense. Although King had a passing familiarity with Gandhi, at this time, he was relatively ignorant of the late Indian leader’s broader philosophy of self, society, and social change. That night, Rustin and King conversed at length about Gandhian principles and the strategic and moral strength of nonviolence. Rustin explained that the inconsistent application of Gandhian teachings, even in self-defense, could only spell hypocrisy and hurt the movement. By the next morning, Bayard Rustin had convinced Dr. King to remove all guns from his home, and to fully commit himself to the practice of nonviolence -- a decision that would shape the rest of the young minister’s life.

Next week, we will celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- with a post on Wednesday instead of Thursday in order to fall on his birthday. With the troubling military actions our government has recently taken, it will be worth revisiting how King seamlessly connected the internal racial and economic violence of the United States with colonialism and war exerted internationally.

https://wagingnonviolence.org/…/revisiting-rustin-on-his-c…/
https://www.theguardian.com/…/martin-luther-king-guns-pacif…