Conversations are a crucial component of WRL work, conversations about specific nonviolent strategies, about how racism and sexism affect our decisions (sometimes when we don’t realize it), even lively discussions about brewing beer or whether the anarchists or the socialists will win a WRL softball game. So it seemed singularly appropriate for the WRL anniversary issue that Kimber Heinz, our national organizer in 2013, published the deeply personal conversation she had had with two long-time WRL leaders (and long-time friends), Mandy Carter and Joanne Sheehan. (Disclosure: The issue also contained a cogent review by WRL and Veterans for Peace stalwart Ellen Barfield of my 2013 book, Crossing the Line.)
Mandy Carter first came to WRL West through nonviolent civil disobedience as part of Stop the Draft Week back in 1965. She was impressed with the number of gay men on the staff, the diversity in ages, and the strong women with whom she worked. Among her many contributions was organizing WRL’s 50th anniversary gathering in California in 1973.
Joanne Sheehan came to New York a few years later, first working on defense for the draft board raids, thus meeting WRL folks who shared the building on Lafayette Street with other an- tiwar groups. She soon gravitated to WRL and tax day protests, then became a member of the Executive Committee (now called the Administrative Coordinating Committee), and today serves as New England staff, coordinating nonviolent trainings and a host of other projects.
One thing that struck me in this deeply contextualized conversation was Mandy saying, “I’ve got to bring all of who I am to the table.” For Mandy and for all of us, part of that means telling our stories to each other, something I value immensely as an oral historian and something we need to spend more time doing whenever WRL folks get together. In this interview, Mandy and Joanne do just that, sharing their backgrounds and what drew them to WRL. I didn’t know, for instance, that Mandy grew up in an orphanage, or that Joanne used to be a Roman Catholic.
I think bringing who we are to the table means more than letting people see all of us, though, and it’s something I see shining through this interview and through the entire issue. WRL volunteers bring their whole selves to the work. They don’t just put in the hours, they live the life. So we see Joanne and Mandy working to subvert the tyranny of structurelessness that so plagued movements in the ’70s and saving the 1976 Continental Walk for Disarmament and Social Justice by winning participants to a more participa- tory process.
As Matt Meyer and Judith Mahoney Pasternak wrote in “Ninety Years of Resisting War,” their historical survey for the an- niversary issue, WRL’s longevity may be based on its ability to combine “a principled radical vision with an understanding of the need for tactically reformist organizing efforts.” What began in WRL as an emphasis on individual acts of non-compliance has grown into a vibrant radical community that sees the value of strategic organizing and grass-roots coalitions.
This sense of bringing our whole selves to the work shines through the anniversary issue, especially in the photos, some by David McReynolds who, since 1956, has given his whole self to WRL (including but not at all limited to 39 years on the staff, from 1960 to 1999). I remember his telling me how, in 1960, WRL turned the anti-civil defense drill witness of a few Catholic Workers into a full-fledged protest that filled City Hall Park and finally forced the demise of the civil defense drills. Meyer and Pasternak nicely summarize that event but neglect to point out that it was WRL strategic planning that led to real change.
As someone who loved to poke around in old issues of the first WIN, I resonated with the “From the Archives” sidebars in this anniversary issue and with priceless quotations from WIN as well as from Liberation and WRL News. An interesting sidebar was the flyer for the Women’s Pentagon Action on November 16, 1980. The late poet-activist Grace Paley, one of the organizers for that action, told me in an oral history interview: “The guys were so mad at us. Said we were taking people away.” She told them. “Oh no! There will be more people in WRL than ever before.” And there were, this time with women in leadership and staff positions.
Until 2004, I lived in the hinterlands of Saginaw, Michigan, and when I first started noticing WRL, through tax resistance and the anti-war toys campaign, I didn’t realize that women in New York and San Francisco had to fight to make a feminist perspective part of WRL practice just as we did in the Saginaw Valley Peace Watch. Now I’m on the WRL National Committee and a contributing editor of WIN and I’ve learned that eliminat- ing racism and sexism are still hugely important to WRL’s work and also that we have to be ever alert so that those tasks remain central to our practice.
In 1976, the first WIN published George Lakey’s “A Manifesto for Nonviolent Revolution,” and Lakey wrote a reasoned reflection on the manifesto for this anniversary issue. In the manifesto, he defined the five stages necessary to bring about a truly nonviolent revolution: conscientization, building organization, confrontation, mass noncooperation, and parallel government. In assessing the dream and demise of several mass movements since the manifesto’s publication, including the Battle of Seattle, Occupy, and the Arab Spring, Lakey pointed out the difference between participatory tactics and participatory strategy, which is “putting tactics in a sequence that leads to victory.” He then calls for radicals to study the successes of reformers, who, to him, appear much less self-absorbed and able to turn tactics into strategies for victory.
In my work on the National Committee, I need to keep that in mind as we design and implement WRL’s program and work with our grassroots networks. It’s all too easy to get caught up in our singular successes and fail to carry them on to the next step. Lakey calls us to remember that “the police are the enforcers, not the deciders” and to get out of our radical boxes and “mobilize cross-class coalitions.” In its new Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), WRL is doing just that: building coalitions with populations targeted by militarized police and addressing the decision-makers who target them by weaponizing their police and emergency response teams with Pentagon surplus.
Yes, WRL volunteers and staff bring all of who they are to the table, and the anniversary issue both recaps 90 years of these contributions and points to the promise of the future as we live out our mission, not only to nonviolently resist all wars, but to eliminate the “causes of war, including racism, sexism, and all forms of human exploitation.”
