Dallas Peace Center - Communications Team

Wyatt Walker

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:27:43 -0400

Wyatt Tee Walker (born August 16, 1929) is a United States black civil rights leader. He worked with Martin Luther King and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. He was the third executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1960 and 1964 after John L. Tilley (1957-1959) and Ella Baker (1958-1960). In 1967 he became Senior Pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, New York. Since his retirement is 2004 he is pastor emeritus living in Virginia. Also a group of kids in Norfolk, Virginia performed a show entitled 'Walking with Walker" that turned Walkers life into a show in 2007.

William Coffin

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:26:59 -0400

Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (June 1, 1924 – April 12, 2006) was a liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist with international stature. He was ordained in the Presbyterian church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ.

In his younger days he was a superb athlete, a highly talented pianist, a CIA agent, and later chaplain of Yale University, where the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's social philosophy led him to become a leader in the civil-rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

He went on to serve as Senior Minister at the Riverside Church in New York City, and President of SANE/Freeze (now Peace Action), the nation's largest peace and justice group, and prominently opposed United States military intervention from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War. He was also an ardent supporter of gay rights.

Unidentified Stonewall Protester

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:26:03 -0400

The Stonewall Riots were a series of conflicts between LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) individuals and New York City police officers that began during a 28 June 1969 police raid, and lasted several days. They were centered at the Stonewall Inn and are widely recognized as the catalyst for the modern-day movement towards LGBT rights. Also called the Stonewall Uprising, Stonewall Rebellion, Stonewall Revolution or simply Stonewall, the clash was a watershed for the worldwide gay rights movement, as LGBT people had never before acted together in such large numbers to forcibly resist police harassment directed towards their community. Many also credit the events as igniting a movement to celebrate gay pride with events such as pride parades. The Mug Shot shown here is the only one survinging from the riots in the public record. In the years following Stonewall many people were able to have friends in the police department remove their records, or "lose" portions in order to protect their identity.

Rosa Parks

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:25:30 -0400

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist whom the U.S. Congress later called "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement".

On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first its kind, but unlike previous individual actions of civil disobedience it sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This movement turned Parks into an international icon of resistance to racial segregation and launched boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence in the civil rights movement. Parks eventually received honors ranging from the 1979 Spingarn Medal to a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall.

Ring Lardner Jr

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:24:57 -0400

Ringgold Wilmer "Ring" Lardner Jr. (August 19, 1915 – October 31, 2000) was an American journalist and Oscar winning screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses during the era of McCarthyism.

After the Second World War the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began an investigation into the Hollywood motion picture industry. In September, 1947, the HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named several people who they accused of holding left-wing views.

Ralph Abernathy

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:23:42 -0400

Ralph David Abernathy (March 11, 1926 – April 17, 1990) was an American civil rights activist and leader and a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Following King's assassination, Abernathy took up the leadership of the SCLC Poor People's Campaign and led the march on Washington, D.C. that had been planned for May 1968.

from Wikipedia.com

Jesse Jackson

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:23:05 -0400

Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. (born October 8, 1941) is an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as "shadow senator" for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to form Rainbow/PUSH. Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. is his eldest son.

From Wikipedia.com

George Bundy Smith

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:22:29 -0400

George Bundy Smith (born 1937, New Orleans, Louisiana) is a retired judge in New York State.

Smith grew up in Washington, D.C. and attended Phillips Academy, where he was the only African-American in the Class of 1955. He received an A.B. degree from Yale University in 1959 and an LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1962. In 1961, William Sloane Coffin invited second-year law student Smith to go to Montgomery, Alabama as a Freedom Rider. He and ten other Freedom Riders were arrested in the Montgomery bus station and convicted of breach of the peace; their convictions were later reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

Emma Goldman

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:20:53 -0400

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a labor leader known for her political activism, writing, and speeches. She was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers.

Goldman was imprisoned several times for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, she founded the journal Mother Earth.

In 1917, Goldman was sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested – with hundreds of others – and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life, and eventually traveled to Spain to participate in that nation's civil war. She died in Toronto on 14 May 1940.
From Wikipedia.com

Dr. King

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:20:13 -0400

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was a leader in the American civil rights movement.

A Baptist minister, he became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–6) and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957), serving as its first president. During this time he was arrested in Burminham Alabama and wrote the famous "Letter from a Burmingham Jail". His efforts led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. There, he raised public consciousness of the civil rights movement and established himself as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history.

David Dellinger

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:19:34 -0400

David Dellinger (August 22, 1915 – May 25, 2004) was a pacifist and activist for nonviolent social change, and one of the most influential American radicals in the 20th century. He was most famous for being one of the Chicago Seven, a group of protesters whose disruption of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago led to charges of conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting a riot. The ensuing court case was turned by Dellinger and his co-defendants into a nationally-publicized platform for putting the Vietnam War on trial. On February 18, 1970, they were acquitted of the conspiracy charge but five defendants (including Dellinger) were convicted of individually crossing state lines to incite a riot. Two years later, on 21 November 1972, these convictions were overturned by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals due to errors by US District Judge Julius Hoffman.

Dalton Trumbo

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:18:19 -0400

Dalton Trumbo (December 9, 1905 – September 10, 1976) was an American screenwriter and novelist, and one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film professionals who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 during the committee's investigation of Communist influences in the motion picture industry.
In 1947, Trumbo, along with nine other writers and directors, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an unfriendly witness to testify on the presence of Communist influence in Hollywood. Trumbo refused to give information. Although only convicted of contempt of Congress, he was blacklisted, and in 1950, spent 11 months in prison in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky.

Cindy Sheehan

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:17:22 -0400

Cindy Lee Miller Sheehan (born July 10, 1957) is an American anti-war activist, whose son, Casey, was killed during his service in the Iraq War on April 4, 2004. She attracted international attention in August 2005 for her extended demonstration at a camp outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch, garnering her both support and criticism.
from Wikipedia.com

Bayard Rustin

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:16:03 -0400

Bayard Rustin (March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American civil rights activist, important largely behind the scenes in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and earlier, and principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He counseled Martin Luther King, Jr. on the techniques of nonviolent resistance. Rustin was openly gay and advocated on behalf of gay and lesbian causes in the latter part of his career.

A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said: "The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated."
In 1942, Rustin assisted two other staffers of FOR, George Houser and James L. Farmer, Jr., and a third activist, Bernice Fisher as they formed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rustin was not a direct founder but was "an uncle of CORE," Farmer and Houser said later. CORE was conceived as a pacifist organization based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau and modeled after Mohandas Gandhi's non-violent resistance against British rule in India. As pacifists, Rustin, Houser, and other members of FOR and CORE were arrested for violating the Selective Service Act. From 1944 to 1946, Rustin was imprisoned in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where he organized protests against segregated dining facilities. During his incarceration, Rustin also organized FOR's Free India Committee. After his release from prison, he was frequently arrested for protesting against British rule in India and Africa.

Communications Committee Report -- January 2008

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:31:04 -0500

By Gene Lantz

If confession of ignorance is the first step toward wisdom, then the Communications Committee’s admission of our lacks and problems is probably the first step toward improvement.

The January 16 Communications Committee meeting admitted these lacks and problems:

1. We are not meeting our fund-raising potential

2. Our newspaper distribution is insufficient and too erratic

3. Our coverage of the peace movement is unnecessarily narrow

The all-encompassing solution is to energize our many talented members to take ownership of peace communications. Almost every activist knows someone who would buy an ad – at minimum a “business card” sized, camera ready, ad for $50. Almost every activist can take a bundle of newspapers to their favorite hangouts. Many of our members could help us procure a few indoor news racks. Many could contribute the information needed for expanded newspaper and virtual media coverage. All committee and team leaders are capable of submitting timely reports from their areas of expertise.