by SCLC

Editor’s Preface: Following upon the victory of the Montgomery bus boycott (December, 1956), the nonviolence organizer Bayard Rustin had the idea of convening a meeting of black leaders in order to create an organization that would carry on the nonviolent struggle for civil rights. This 1957 SCLC brochure, reproduced here as a pdf file, and our most recent discovery in the War Resisters’ International archive, is a vivid reminder of how central a role Gandhian nonviolence played in the US civil rights movement. Indeed, one of the major contributions of both SCLC, and Martin Luther King, Jr., was to synthesize Gandhian nonviolent civil resistance (satyagraha) with Christian nonviolence, as the quote below extracted from the brochure illustrates. This essential synthesis not only permeates the brochure, but also is the main theme of Martin Luther King’s ground breaking spiritual classic, Stride Toward Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). JG

Poster courtesy scholarblogs.emory.edu

“The basic tenets of Hebraic-Christian tradition coupled with the Gandhian concept of satyagraha,
or truth force, is at the heart of SCLC’s philosophy.
Christian nonviolence actively resists evil in any form.”  SCLC

On January 10, 1957, more than 100 Southern leaders gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, to share and discuss their mutual problems of the Southern struggle. By unanimous agreement, the body voted to form a permanent organization that would serve as a coordinating agency for local protest centers that were utilizing the technique and philosophy of nonviolence in creative protest. Two months later, close on the heels of the successful Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, SCLC came into being in New Orleans, Louisiana. Martin Luther King, Jr., was elected president.

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by Richard Moses

Image courtesy radionomy.com

Editor’s Preface: This 1970 radio play is our most recent discovery from the War Resisters’ International archive. The notations on the manuscript credit the 1960s Methodist publication Motive Magazine, a highly regarded literary journal. Moses seems to have written for it, and they may have had a hand in producing the play, but we have not found any evidence that they published it. An Invasion bears obvious comparisons with the popular, Peter Sellers film The Mouse that Roared, released in 1959. Richard Moses was a Quaker and on the Board of Friends Journal. Please see the link to the pdf of the original and the reference note, at the end. JG

ANNOUNCER: (More or less ad lib) In just a few minutes, ladies and gentlemen we shall be going on the air. When I raise my hand, may we have absolute silence? (Looks at watch; raises hand) This is the American Broadcasting System bringing over its regular network, short wave stations and affiliated foreign stations, a speech by the President of the United States. With the attack on Hawaii yesterday and the impending invasion of the West Coast by the armed forces of Stonia, the President has cancelled all scheduled appointments to bring this message to the people. The President will be introduced by Mrs. Joan Alden, chairman of the White House Nonviolent Strategy Board. Mrs. Alden…

ALDEN: The hour for testing is at hand. Twenty years ago our nation decided that the thousands of years in which violence had failed to establish peace or justice was a costly experiment best ended. We have been prepared through schools, and churches, newspapers and radio for defense through nonviolence. We have tested ourselves domestically in areas of race relations, industrial problems and the like. The entire people have committed themselves and are ready to die in the faith that all men are brothers.

As you know, the American government has attempted unsuccessfully to arbitrate the differences between the countries of Pan Costia and Stonia concerning freedom of the Pacific seas. When two years ago, war broke out between these countries, we immediately stopped all exports to them with the exception of food, medical supplies, and other non-war materials. This meant, among other things, termination of a trade agreement to supply Stonia with 60 billion gallons of crude oil annually. The decision, strongly protested by the Stonian Ambassador, was reached upon the advice of our Congressional Peace and Economics Committees.

Read the pdf of the complete article here: An Invasion of California

Reference: IISG/WRI Archive Box 398: Folder 3. We are grateful to WRI/London and their director Christine Schweitzer for their cooperation in our WRI project.

by Terry Messman

“The feminism that I believe in is a defense of all life. Not only women, not only the earth, but all together. It’s all reweaving the web.”   Shelley Douglass

Jim and Shelley Douglass demonstrating for peace in Birmingham, Alabama.

Street Spirit: Concern for the rights of women, both in society and in the peace movement, was always a part of Ground Zero’s message to the larger movement. Can you describe how feminism and women’s issues became interwoven with Ground Zero’s peace work?

Shelley Douglass: Well, you have to remember that Ground Zero — and Pacific Life Community, which preceded it — were founded on the idea that nonviolence was a way of life. So it wasn’t just a political type of resistance campaign against Trident. It was an attempt, and is an attempt, to learn a new way of living where things like Trident are not necessary any more. In order to do that, you have to have justice, because the point of the weaponry is to defend things that are unjust or structures that are unjust. So equal rights for women was part of the basis of what we were doing.

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by Terry Messman

Jim and Shelley Douglass with Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, c. 1980; courtesy thestreetspirit.org

Street Spirit: I just read John McCoy’s new biography of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, A Still and Quiet Conscience [Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2015]. He is such an inspiring man, but it was shocking to learn about the horrible indignities he suffered for speaking out for peace. Could you describe your impressions of the archbishop when he came to peace demonstrations at Ground Zero?

Shelley Douglass: He’s the kind of person you would never think was an archbishop, you know. You would never think of him as an archbishop or anybody with any power. I mean he’s just this guy, not particularly well dressed. When we knew him, he just seemed like this old guy and he was bald and had kind of a kindly persona. He listened a lot, and didn’t do a lot of talking.

I think that the first time I met him I was in jail. We had gotten arrested for committing civil disobedience and Jim and one other person in our group were both doing a fast. I don’t remember why the archbishop came to visit us in jail, but people were concerned about Jim’s safety, basically. I don’t know who got him to come, but he came, and even though he didn’t look or act like an archbishop, because he was the archbishop, the jail gave him a special visit. And they put Jim in a wheelchair and wheeled him down, and there was the archbishop!

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by George Lakey

Woman protesting Thai coup, June 2014; photograph courtesy wagingnonviolence.org

I first encountered Gene Sharp when he was a young man in jeans and sneakers, working in a research institute affiliated with the University of Oslo. Not guessing that he would become a mentor of mine, I met him because one of my Norwegian professors sent me to him. Gene had already served time in a U.S. federal prison for draft resistance and then joined the War Resisters’ International [WRI] Peace News staff to report on activism in the United Kingdom. Now he was in a small cubicle with a typewriter, analyzing the Norwegian resistance to Nazi German occupation during World War II. A half century later, in 2011, Foreign Policy would list Gene among the 100 most influential thinkers in the world.

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by Ammon Hennacy

Cartoon by Art Young, The Masses, 1917 and in Hennacy’s autobiography; courtesy wikipedia.org

Editor’s Preface: In the mid-1950s New York City was in the grips of a civil defense hysteria over fears of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Mandatory civil defense drills were instituted, wherein at the sounding of the alarm New Yorkers had immediately to rush to one of the designated shelters, such as a nearby subway station. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker were among the first to refuse to comply and among the first to be arrested. Ammon Hennacy (1893-1970) was a Christian anarchist and pacifist and a great friend of Dorothy Day. He later founded the Joe Hill House of Hospitality in Salt Lake City, Utah. Those who knew Hennacy often commented on his wry sense of humor, readily seen in what follows. This unpublished article was found in the War Resisters’ International archive, which we are researching. Please consult the notes at the end for further information about Ammon, links, and acknowledgments. JG

In the spring of 1955 I saw in the paper that according to a new law there would be an air raid drill on June 15th and all were supposed to take part or suffer a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $500 fine. I phoned Dorothy Day, editor of the Catholic Worker and said we must get ready to disobey this bad law, for “a bad law is no better than any other bad thing.” She suggested that I contact other pacifists, so I phoned Ralph De Gia of the War Resisters League. We got in touch with leaders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, so when the time came we had 28 at the City Hall Park, and I spoke on television about our coming civil disobedience.

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by Gertjan Cobelens

“Free Prisoners” poster art courtesy www.wri-irg.org

In the first article of the first postwar issue of The War Resister, the journal of the War Resisters’ International, Herbert Runham Brown offers us a look into what might be described as the WRI’s covert operations [see previous posting below].  In his “Buchenwald and Dachau” (1), Runham Brown not only provides a deeper insight into what the WRI considered to be its role in the world, he also highlights some instances of personal courage in the best Gandhian tradition and sheds new light on the fact that, right from the start, the WRI harbored no illusions about the nature of the Nazi regime. And finally, in passing, his article also challenges the discredited reputation of a Dutch Quaker.

From its inception, WRI has never limited itself merely to an intellectual opposition to war. Equally important was their role as what might be termed a “trade union” for war resisters in general and conscientious objectors in particular. Much of the day-to-day activities were focused on providing legal and moral support to conscientious objectors and on putting moral and legal pressure on governments to release convicted war resisters or reduce their sentences. What is much less known, and what is mostly lacking from Devi Prasad’s otherwise comprehensive study, War is a Crime Against Humanity: The Story of the War Resisters’ International (2) is the story of WRI’s “covert operations” and the lengths to which it went to secure the safety of its members. Runham Brown’s article bears witness to this side of WRI’s concerns, as do the 150 or so files in the WRI archiveon the refugees whom the WRI helped to escape Nazi Germany, (3) and as well the War Resisters’ International “Pool Scheme”, a system set up in conjunction with the British Home Office to maximize the number of refugees the WRI helped flee Germany.

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by H. Runham Brown

Dachau Memorial Sculpture by Nandor Glid; courtesy commons.wikimedia.org

Editor’s Preface: It was only in the aftermath of World War II that War Resisters’ International could begin to tell the story of its wartime clandestine operations to free conscientious objectors imprisoned in Germany or German occupied territories. They wasted no time. The official German surrender came on 7 May 1945, and this article appeared in the summer of 1945 in the WRI official publication. Please see the pdf file for the full article, and the notes at the end for further information. JG

When after the last war the French Government deported their War Resisters to French Guiana (Devil’s Island) it took the War Resisters’ International seven years to trace and bring some of them home. But it was more than seven years before we could tell that tragic story of Devil’s  Island. Now it is twelve years since our German and Austrian comrades began to find their way into Buchenwald and Dachau Concentration Camps. At last the story can be told.

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by Narayan Desai

Demonstrators protesting peacefully, Harlem, July 1964; photo courtesy newyorknatives.com

Editor’s Preface: The background for this letter is the Harlem riots of July 1964. A fifteen-year old black youth, James Powell was shot three times by a white police officer, the second bullet killing him. Powell was standing at the time in the midst of a group of friends. There were at least a dozen witnesses; his death sparked six consecutive nights of rioting, spreading that summer to several other cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago. At the time of writing the letter Desai was acting secretary of Shanti Sena, which he’d helped to found, and Bayard Rustin was one of the most eminent leaders of the U.S. nonviolence movement. The letter is dated, 6 August 1964, when the riots were still raging, and was sent from Mandal Rajghat, the Shanti Sena headquarters in Varanasi, India. Please see the Reference and Editor’s notes at the end for further information and acknowledgments.  JG

My Dear Bayard,

I have just read with great interest reports about the Harlem riots in Newsweek and Peace News. The Newsweek report gives more information while the Peace News article poses certain problems. Before giving my comments on the problems posed in Peace News, let me express my heartfelt congratulations for the part that you and James Farmer played during these incidents. You must have received many letters of congratulations for the Washington March as it was an obvious success. But a peace worker alone knows how greatly he needs to be congratulated for an effort where he has not achieved such clear-cut results. I really think you have done a great job at Harlem.

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by Terry Messman

“The destruction of creation and its creatures is done in the name of profit, convenience, and wealth. The truth is that capitalism is poison, and we are its victims.”   Shelley Douglass

The path of nonviolence is a lifelong journey that leads in unexpected directions to far-distant destinations. One of the most meaningful milestones on Shelley Douglass’s path of nonviolence came on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 16, 1983, when she walked down the railroad tracks into the Bangor naval base with Karol Schulkin and Mary Grondin from the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.

As the three women walked down the tracks used to transport nuclear warheads and missile motors into the naval base, they posted photographs of the atomic bomb victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — a prophetic warning of the catastrophic consequences of Trident nuclear submarines. The photos revealed the human face of war, the face of defenseless civilians struck down in a nuclear holocaust. The women continued on this pilgrimage deep into the heart of the Trident base, until security officers arrested them an hour after they began.

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