Popular films aren’t usually known for promoting peace. There’s a lot of focus on big action sequences in the wide release movies that studios hope will become summer blockbusters, especially when superheroes are involved. In 1987 and 2007, two WRL Peace Calendars sought to highlight movies that promote peace and justice. WRL’s interest in movies…
After leaving 5 Beekman Street with a very light load—courtesy of the FBI theft—WRL and its peace group mates moved to 339 Lafayette Street at the western edge of the East Village. (For the story of WRL’s pre-Lafayette Street homes, see Home Is Where WRL Is: A History of WRL’s Offices, Part I: From a…
In our 100 year history, the WRL national office, surprisingly, has had only a few locations in New York City. Each was unique in its own way. WRL was first located in Jessie Wallace Hughan’s apartment. The founder of WRL, she brought into the fold activists from a variety of progressive organizations. Soon there were…
October 7th, One Year On One year ago today, a new phase in the generations-long conflict in Palestine began. A brutal assault by Hamas fighters from the occupied Gaza strip, killing hundreds of people and taking many hostage, has been met with a year, and counting, of genocidal violence from Israel against Palestinians in Gaza,…
War Is a Crime Against Humanity: Stop the Violence Immediately in Israel-Palestine
Between 1989 and 2002, Larry Gara produced four “radical quizzes” for WRL’s Nonviolent Activist to encourage everyone to learn about our radical past. The first, “A Radical Quiz,” was published in the September 1989 issue. Gara, a professor at Wilmington College in Ohio, a WWII resister, and a long-time WRL member, wrote an introduction for…
Not much time goes by in political discourse without some mention of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place 61 years ago this week. It was the largest gathering for civil rights of its time, with an estimated 250,000 people attending. Martin Luther King, Jr. made his “I Have a Dream”…
When I was growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, the War Resisters League would have their National Committee meetings hosted by a different local group every summer. Always a WRL local affiliate, it meant that we got to go somewhere else around the country. As a kid, these meetings ended up feeling like vacations….
In 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum unveiled a radically scaled back exhibition that glorified the bombings, prominently presenting Enola Gay (the Hiroshima bomber) as if it were a holy relic.
The original draft text of the exhibit had been an even-handed history and evaluation of the August 6 and 9, 1945 bombings. But caving to howls of the American Legion and conservative members of Congress, the Smithsonian deleted all criticisms of the bombings and presented a sanitized version without graphic images of the destruction. Instead, they highlighted how the plane was restored, showed photos of machinery, interviews of the Enola Gay crew, and stressed how “the bombings were necessary” to save American lives.
Consequently, WRL with other peace groups formed the Enola Gay Action Coalition to prepare for protests at the opening, as well as to create our own exhibit “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 50 Years of Nuclear Terror”—as an answer to the Smithsonian’s crude attempt at censorship and historical revisionism….
On September 4, 1978 WRL members launched simultaneous disarmament demonstrations on the White House Lawn in Washington, DC and in Red Square in Moscow, USSR. This creative—and maybe rash—action was the brainchild of WRL staffers, notably Jerry Coffin and Lynne Shatzkin Coffin. I was honored to be tasked to lead the Washington contingent. (See Steve Sumerford’s…
It was a few minutes before midnight on August 27, 1963, when I arrived by train from my home in Scarsdale, NY, at the 125th Street train station in New York City and walked half a dozen blocks to the Harlem office of the Congress of Racial Equality, known as “CORE,” with a ticket to board…
During the Vietnam War era, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. Of those, 16.3 percent were Black. Of Vietnam combat troops, 23 percent were Black. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to the Vietnam War as a white man’s war, a…
WRL’S Continental Walk took place during the U.S. bicentennial year. WRL was also active with the anti-establishment July 4th Coalition, which highlighted the American Revolution’s unfinished business to create a just and equal society. More than 30 organizations made up the Coalition, and 40,000 joined the march and rally in Philadelphia, led by Native Americans…
In Spring 1972 People’s Blockades sprang up around the country. Their goal was to prevent munitions from leaving U.S. ports for Vietnam. One target of the blockade was Earle Naval Ammunitions Depot, located in New Jersey on Sandy Hook Bay, with multiple types of actions involving several pacifist organizations and more than a hundred activists….
How can you portray 100 years of nonviolent resistance to war and the causes of war? If you’re the 100-year-old War Resisters League, you create a traveling exhibit and book based on the exhibit chock-full of photos and stories reflecting that century of activism. Arnie Alpert gives a taste of the book and exhibit and…
The 2008 War Resisters League calendar, Salaam, Shalom, Solh: Nonviolence and Resistance in the Middle East and Beyond stands out for me as one of the most substantial pieces of activist literature that I’ve helped to create. More than an event program or handout, I had to compile enough stories for 52 weekly entries. The…
Where there is war, there are also people who bravely and conscientiously refuse to participate. That is true in the Ukraine, in Israel, in the US, and around the globe. International Conscientious Objectors Day, observed on the 15th of May, is a time to promote the right of conscientious objection and to support those who…
As students demonstrate in support of Palestine and a ceasefire in Gaza on university campuses across the U.S. and beyond, this week’s WRL 100th History blog looks back at the student actions of May 1970. On May 1, student strikes broke out around the country following Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and grew after the May…
With the slogan “If the government won’t stop the war [in Vietnam], we’ll stop the government,” the largest mass arrests in U.S. history – 13,500 – occurred in May 1971 as hundreds of autonomous affinity groups from around the country converged on Washington, DC. On May 1, a couple days before the action, more than…
It’s been more than 50 years, but I still remember the ITT demonstration as one of the most creative and dramatic WRL actions of that furiously turbulent time in the antiwar movement. It was also one of the most fun. My family and I lived on Staten Island at the time, and I was charged…
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