A note from 50 years later: The last line of this article was in fact prescient. Gwynn Oak was for me the first of about 22 arrests in various protests. The most recent, as part of an interfaith group challenging the President to act more vigorously on the climate crisis, was at the White House on March 21, 2013 -- -- almost fifty years after
In 1963, the county executive of Baltimore County who ordered our arrest was Spiro Agnew. (He was later Governor of Maryland and Vice-President of the USunder Richard Nixon. In 1973 he resigned that office in disgrace, charged with bribery and extortion during his tenure of all three offices.) In July 2013, the present county executive will join in celebrating the activists who ended
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Is the presence of the county executive an index to decent social change? Yes. But it is also true that today millions of Black Americans are in prison for nonviolent possession of marijuana -- a far higher percentage than whites who are imprisoned for the same offense, though researchers find that this "crime" is actually committed in about equal proportions in the two communities.An index of worsening racism.
I can't end this note without honoring the memory of one of my comrades in the arrest --- Carol Cohen McEldowney. In 1963 she had taken a year off from being a student at the University of Michigan, and then became my research assistant for that year. She was a member of the first generation of SDS --- Students for a Democratic Society --- and her example convinced me to join SDS, as probably its oldest member. It was she who called me on the evening of July 4 to ask me to post bail for some of those who had been arrested that day at Gwynn Oak --- the call that resulted in my deciding to join the protest
Carol went on to do powerful activist work in a neighborhood of poverty-stricken whites in Cleveland, to take part in an illegal antiwar visit by American activists to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and then to play an important part in the women's movement in Boston. She was killed in a car crash in 1973. HerHanoi Journal--1967 was published in 2007 by the University of
I have learned from sorrow after sorrow that no one can live to be 80 without grieving the deaths of dear friends and comrades. I have also learned that what they teach us is to mourn -- and to keep on keeping on -- and to keep on rejoicing in our activist work and in our memories of them. What have these 50 years meant for me, and for Gloria Steinem, as we kept living and working as activists? If you would like to rejoice with Gloria and me in our This is What 80 Looks Like celebration on Sunday, November 3 , please register NOW:
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