August 7th is Linda Thurston’s birthday. She would have turned 65 this year. Linda Marie Thurston, WRL’s much loved Operations Coordinator, passed away suddenly in late May 2021. We held a celebration of her life last August. And we continue to honor and remember Linda in many ways...
During my research of WRL's history, every now and then a little gem pops up, thanks to the continuing digitization of old magazines and newspapers, not to mention new student theses and books by historians. One such item dates to the earliest days of WRL.
In July 1926, when not yet three years old, an attempt was made to smear the League during a congressional hearing. That hearing centered on a bill seeking to prohibit the Army from teaching military courses in public schools.*
...So life went on at The Farm, hosting peace camps, attending public meetings about Pantex, doing lectures about nukes, planting and watering trees, hosting pilgrimages passing through like Pastors for Peace and Bike Aid, following nuclear weapons truck convoys into and out of Pantex as part of a nationwide bomb truck route mapping project, publishing The Farm's news magazine.....
I first heard of War Resisters League some time in the mid to late 1980's as I was getting involved in protesting the Pantex nuclear warhead assembly plant, from whence comes EVERY finished U.S. warhead, located northeast of where I lived: Amarillo, TX......
In the late 1980s it seemed there was no end to the AIDS crisis and increasing homophobia across Reagan-era America. The Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Bowers v. Harwick upholding Georgia’s sodomy law led more than half a million LGBTQIA+ folks and allies to converge on Washington, DC from October 8-13, 1987 for what would become a series of historic events.....
Sixty years ago, the United States had 16,000 military personnel in Vietnam propping up the increasingly brutal South Vietnamese regime headed by Ngô Đình Diệm. Within six years the number of U.S. troops would escalate to over a half million, resulting in almost 60,000 U.S. combat deaths and more than a million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian deaths.
As the Golden Rule continues its voyage up the East Coast, it is sailing into cities with historic connections. It is now in Philadelphia, home of crew member George Willoughby, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and so many Quaker supporters. Onto New York, home of the War Resisters League office which provided staffing and organizing.
