Norma Becker
1930-2006
Born in 1930, Norma Lee Pliskin Becker, the woman who grew up to be the peace movement’s organizer-in-chief, first wanted to be a ballet dancer. As a girl, traveling from her home in the Bronx to ballet classes in Manhattan, she expected to have a future in toe shoes. But she was also a child of progressive parents, and began planting her feet on a box on Burnside Avenue and making pro-union speeches. Soon the dream of being a dancer faded as the desire to change the world took hold.
At Hunter College, Norma studied to be a teacher and was involved in campus radical politics. She married early and had two children, Gene in 1952 and Diane in 1955. She first taught in a Hellenic school for children with mental disabilities, and then in Junior High School 143 in Harlem, eventually earning a master’s degree from Teachers College of Columbia University. She remained at JHS 143 for 33 years, constantly bucking both the education bureaucracy and the conservative teachers union.
Soon Norma realized that her response to the T.V. images of Birmingham—dogs let loose on the city’s children, the burned out-church where four girls died—had to be greater than simply contributing money to CORE (Congress for Racial Equality). So in the summer of 1963, under the auspices of the United Federation of Teachers, she and her two children boarded a bus for Farmville, VA. There Norma taught children in the daytime and adults at night in a Freedom School. The next summer, this time alone, she went farther south to work with the Mississippi Freedom School Project in Greenville, NC, just a short distance from Philadelphia, where civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney had been killed by Klansmen the previous month. Watching SNCC organizers train brave black teenagers to actively resist segregation, Norma got a lesson in nonviolence that would set the course of the rest of her life.
The growing war in Vietnam next captured Norma’s attention, touched her heart, and fueled her anger. A founder of the Fifth Avenue Peace Committee, she was a key organizer of one of the nation’s first major antiwar demonstrations of the era—a 10,000 strong march in New York City in 1965. In 1977, Norma helped found the Mobilization for Survival (Mobe), a national coalition that linked the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements. On one occasion, Mobe, with Norma as its chief organizer, brought nearly 100,000 people to Central Park for a rally.
Throughout her activist career, Norma’s spiritual home was always the “Peace Pentagon” on Lafayette Street. It housed the War Resisters League, which she served as chair from 1977 to 1983, and the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, where she was a long-time board member.
Nurturer and Challenger
Once, after a weekend of peace activities in New York City—a huge legal rally and a civil disobedience outside the United Nations—Norma sent flowers to the police captain with whom she had negotiated logistics. “It was the right thing to do,” she said. In many ways, Norma gave the peace movement its humanity.
She moved through life in a whirlwind of activity, believing that it was better to be active—about any potential calamity—than to remain still. When a new war or some other atrocity loomed, she got on the telephone to and beseeched every organizer she knew to do something: gather for a meeting, plan a vigil or demonstration, call people on our own lists. She knew that if she was urging other people to take action, she had to do take action herself, and do it first.
While she professed not to be a great thinker, and disliked organizing and putting her thoughts down on paper, Norma was an astute tactician and had one of the sharpest minds in the movement. Gesticulating with her ubiquitous knitting needles, she asked question after question during conversations and at meetings, hungry for information and new ideas. Ever the teacher, she challenged her comrades to be clear, properly informed, and realistic.
Norma’s personality met at the crossroads of Jewish mother and proto-feminist. She ran organizations as the best Jewish mother would run her family: with love, humor, food, a strong expectation that everyone would do what they were supposed to do, and a strong conviction that no one would let her down.
As a feminist, Norma took her equality with men for granted and considered her right to sit at their table automatic. For a long time, she was the only woman in a leadership role in the antiwar movement, sitting amid older white men who spoke as if they were channeling God’s own words. Nevertheless, after letting the men have their say, in a voice gravelly from too many cigarettes likely smoked to stoke her frustration, she spoke up with confidence. She found room to acknowledge the arguments she knew were ridiculous, to find common ground, and to suggest logical compromises.
Yet Norma did not relate to second wave feminism, which emerged during the war in Vietnam, with its women-only actions, communal processes, and carefully orchestrated efforts to ensure the equality and empathy. She was an organic feminist, and had already been working with, respecting, and listening to women for decades. Strong and assertive, Norma was also warm, caring, generous, and sensitive. She did not identify these as female qualities, but rather fully expected men to embody them as well.
No one was a better fundraiser than Norma. With humor, exuberance, and a total belief in the rightness of her cause, she asked, then begged, and finally guilt-tripped any gathering with more than a few people. Every basket she ever passed was filled, and, though she would never admit it, much of the money she collected was given because it was she who had asked.
Life beyond activism
Norma was by no means all revolution and no revelry, however.
If she knew how to throw a good demonstration, she knew how to throw a great party. The celebrations she hosted at her 68 Charles Street duplex in Greenwich Village were everything she wanted for the world itself: Joyous gatherings of people of every age, color, ethnicity, and sexual persuasion, dancing, talking, making political and personal connections, having great fun.
Norma’s home was a permanent hospitality suite not only for her children’s friends but for activists as well. Some stayed for a few hours, others turned her spare bedroom into a home away from home. She cooked tons of pasta, hosted countless meetings, mediated dozens of political and personal disputes, played matchmaker, comforted the lonely, and shared everything she had—material and emotional.
She knew it was essential to have a life besides the movement. She loved Hawaii and vacationed there often. But even more important for her was the time she spent with her daughter Diane and her husband, Steve, and with her son Gene, and his wife, Anita. And most important of all was her time with the grandchildren: Alicia, Sarah, Nick, and Katy.
Sadly, Norma’s last years were not as happy as they should have been. In 1986, she had to leave her Charles Street home, and with it, a way of living that had given her enormous pleasure. The next year, her mother succumbed to Alzheimer’s. Worst of all, in 1990, shortly after she retired from teaching, she lost her beloved Gene in an accident.
The terrible pressure of life in the movement’s fast lane could be held in check no longer, and Norma was unable to continue her activism or enjoy retirement. Periodically she attended rallies and went to the telephone to make her calls, which had figured so largely in her life as an organizer. She still offered an earful of ideas, but the tireless planning that had characterized her unique integrity was not possible.
Last winter, when Norma learned that she did not have long to live due to lung cancer, her mind again became clear. Choosing quality of life over quantity, she spent her final four months connecting with her family and friends: offering love and comfort to those who could not bear to say goodbye, and expressing gratitude for a full and exciting life. “Losing Gene was almost unbearable,” Norma told visitors as she reflected on her life, but “how many people do you know who have had a twenty minute private conversation with Fidel Castro!?”
Norma Becker died on June 17, 2006, just eight days after her last outing to, of course, the War Resisters League’s Annual Dinner.
Wendy Schwartz met the Becker family in 1968 when she became a WRL volunteer. One of her fondest memories is sitting with a group of women at Norma’s dining table, counting coins collected at a 100-degree demonstration against U.S. intervention in Central America and gossiping about everyone who wasn’t at the table.
