Transmitting Visions: Peace People Learn from Pioneers

• In Event: OHA Poster Session and Project Bazaar

Abstract

Since 1985, I’ve recorded, transcribed, and published in four books over 500 interviews with Catholic Workers and others active in the peace movement over the last 55 years. If and when they move from the activism of “saying no” with vigils and marches to the “acting no” of nonviolent direct action, those I interviewed are almost always inspired by someone who has gone before them and often suffered jail and prison terms for their work for peace. Sometimes those who respond know the pioneer personally and are recruited, as it were; sometimes they have heard the pioneers speak; sometimes they have only read accounts of the resistance. Once in a while the someone who moves them to action is well known, such as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, but often it is simply someone like themselves, frustrated with the failures of democracy and determined to act in a personalist way to change the system, or at least to say that the system won’t change them. This poster presentation will present photos, quotations, and trajectories to trace these lines of influence, concentrating on actions to thwart the civil defense drills of the Fifties, the great anti-nuclear events of the Eighties, and the Plowshares actions which continue to remind citizens of the peril the US nuclear arsenal presents to the world. Three handouts will be available to those who visit the exhibit: longer quotations from the interviews, brief biographies, and a bibliography.

Author

• Rosalie Riegle, Saginaw Valley State University Emerita