March-April 1999:
Thinking About David's Retirement
David McReynolds: Socialist Peacemaker, by Paul Buhle
Thinking About Retirement, by David McReynolds
Activist News: Student Sit-Ins, Jill Boskey
WRL News: NC Lovefest, New Locals, DWOP Lives
Activist Reviews (Grace Paley; Johnny Got His Gun)
Homepages:
War Resisters League
Nonviolent Activist
Activist News
Student Sit-Ins Beat Sweatshops
Officials at three major U.S. universities yielded early this semester to student
pressure against university complicity in sweatshop abuses, in each case after
students staged sit-ins in college offices. Students were demanding that products
bearing college names and logos be labeled as to place and conditions of manufacture
to discourage licensing of sweatshop-produced goods.
In North Carolina, after a 31-hour occupation of the University president's office Jan. 30 by 21 Duke University students, protesters and Duke administrators agreed on a plan to help insure that apparel bearing Duke's name and logo is not made in sweatshops. Two days later, in Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Chancellor David Ward agreed to student demands that Wisconsin adopt to a plan similar to the one adopted at Duke. And in Washington, DC, a Feb. 10 sit-in at Gerogetown University resulted in an agreement that, students said, would essentially un-license manufacture of Gerogetown logo products by companies that have not disclose where the products are made by Feb. 12, 2000.
Collegiate licensing is a multi-billion dollar business. University and college administrations sell companies like Nike the right to put their school logo on clothing, banners, coffee mugs and other paraphernalia, many of which have been manufactured in offshore and U.S. sweatshops. During the 1997-1998 academic year, students across the country began to pressure administrators to adopt codes that would either guarantee that workers manufacturing such products be paid a living wage (not just the legal minimum in the countries where the items are produced), or at a minimum mandating disclosure of where and under what conditions such products are manufactured. During the summer of 1998, students on a number of campuses founded a new anti-sweatshop organization, United Students Against Sweatshops. During the same period, one of the biggest brokers for licensing agreements, the Collegiate Licensing Company, created a much weaker code than students were demanding and secured White House backing for their code. When Duke, Wisconsin and Georgetown administrators proposed to adopt the company's code, students organized the sit-ins in protest. At all three schools, the sit-ins produced anti-sweatshop agreements stronger than the White House-approved code the universities had intended to adopt.
-Labor Alerts/Campaign for Labor Rights
Vermont
Votes "No Nukes"
Vermonters at 33 town meetings across the state
March 5 called on the United States and all other nuclear weapon states to "secure
on an urgent basis a nuclear weapons abolition treaty."
The votes against nuclear weapons came during Town Meeting Day, an annual civic tradition in the state that has been called the "most democratic forum in the United States." While the Town Meeting Day votes do not carry the weight of law, the forums have been hailed as a measure of public opinion on important policy questions.
At 39 town meetings across the state, Vermonters debated, among other issues, whether to urge the United States and other governments to negotiate a treaty that includes an "early timetable for the elimination of nuclear weapons in a manner that is mutual and verifiable among all nations." At 36 of the town, voters said "yes."
"This is a clear message from the hills of Vermont for abolition of nuclear weapons," said Joseph Gainza, coordinator of the Vermont Program of the American Friends Service Committee.
Gainza said that the effort to have the nuclear weapons question considered during Town Meeting Day was organized by the Vermont Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, of which AFSC is a founding organization. The campaign is part of an international network of more than 1,100 organizations working to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to eliminate those that already exist.
Antinuclear weapons activists in Vermont and elsewhere have expressed concern regarding the Clinton Administration's nuclear policy. Last year the president stated that nuclear weapons remain a "cornerstone" of U.S. military planning.
Proponents of abolition point out that the United States and other nuclear weapon states are already legally obligated to work toward the elimination of their nuclear arsenals, citing the July 8, 1996, finding by the International Court of Justice that "there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith, and bring to a conclusion, negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control."
Gainza noted that the article voted on by 39 Vermont towns echoes the Court's findings in both its sense of urgency and its call for effective means to verify compliance.
Several towns passed the article either unanimously or, in the words of several town coordinators, "overwhelmingly." In two towns where the article was defeated, it failed by five and seven votes.
Vermont organizers plan to be back at town meetings next year when they hope to bring the number of towns voting for abolition to 200.
-AFSC-Vermont
Marching for Mumia
Amidst
international controversy stemming from the killing of West African immigrant
Amadou Diallo, organizers of Millions for Mumia held a press conference Feb. 24
at New York's Center for Constitutional Rights to announce the next stages of
their campaign and to denounce calls from the Police Benevolent Association to
disrupt a planned rally at Town Hall scheduled for Feb. 26. "It's an outrage that
the PBA would do this at a time when the entire city is outraged over the brutal
police slaying of Amadou Diallo," said Monica Moorehead, an organizer of Millions
for Mumia which is building a mass demonstration in Philadelphia on April 24.
The Town Hall event was to feature actor Ossie Davis, writer E.L. Doctorow, activists
Pam Africa and Rafael Cancel Miranda and comedian-activist Dick Gregory.
Other participants in the press conference included long-time radical attorney Leonard Weinglass who offered a sober assessment of the legal prospects following last October's rejection of an appeal for a new trial by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Mumia's case will go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will likely send it to Federal District Courts for review-a process which has been expedited by the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Law. Weinglass also criticized the PBA for its campaign supporting Mumia's execution, particularly its placing a full-page ad in The New York Times. "This is the first time The New York Times has accepted an ad calling for someone's death and they accepted it without comment." Adding a hopeful note, Weinglass said, "Mumia has never won in a Pennsylvania court and never lost in a Federal court."
Simultaneous press conferences were held in more than a dozen U.S. cities and overseas in Paris and Toronto.
-Chris Ney
Jill
Boskey, 1947-1999, Veteran of Many Struggles
The life of a much-loved
and multi-talented fighter for peace and equality was cut short when longtime
New York activist Jill Boskey died of breast cancer Jan. 3. She would have been
52 on her next birthday.
By starting young and never stopping, Jill packed an extraordinary intensity of activism into her too-short life, beginning with the resistance to the Vietnam War in her student years, going on to the forefront of the women's and lesbian and gay movements, then becoming a lawyer and founding a disability rights law firm.
Born in Newark, NJ, in 1947, Jill was first moved to action in the first place by the Vietnam War, like many of her generation. An early member of Students for a Democratic Society and the antidraft movement while at school at Cornell University, she moved to New York City after graduating. She became a typesetter for the Guardian, at the time the paper of record of the Left, then started her own typesetting firm. She was arrested for the first time at a 1969 protest, at which she announced that the night before she and four other women had destroyed registration records at a local draft board. (She also said that they had removed the "I" and "A" keys from the board's typewriters, making it impossible for the draft office to classify young men 1-A.)
By 1971 Jill had become involved with the burgeoning women's movement, and that year she moved to Baltimore, where she became one of the founders of the feminist publishing company Diana Press. Several years later she came back to New York and attended the new law school of the City University of New York, a school that was committed to teaching pubic interest law; Jill was among its first graduating class in 1986. She became a staff attorney and then managing attorney for a legal services disability rights project, eventually co-founding with her own resources the Center for Disability Rights Advocacy in New York. During the last 12 years of her life, Jill was involved in many class action lawsuits on behalf of the disabled, the elderly and immigrants. She also trained other lawyers in disability law and wrote training manuals on the subject. She was a contributor to a recent edition of the Practicing Law Institute's New York Elder Law Handbook.
All through those years, whatever front Jill was fighting on, she remained a member of the War Resisters League. In the three years just before her death, from 1996 to 1998, she served on the League's Executive Committee. Along with the rest of the movements to which she contributed so much and the family and friends who loved her, we mourn her loss.
Hopi
Leader Dies in Arizona
Thomas Banyacya, Hopi leader and pacifist,
died in Arizona Feb. 6 at the age of 89. Banyacya was imprisoned for almost six
years during World War II as a draft resister and nonregistrant. (He was one of
the WWII resisters interviewed for WRL's 1984 calendar, Against the Tide: Pacifist
Resistance in the Second World War.)
In 1948 the Hopi Elders appointed him tribal spokesman. He spent the next five decades spreading the message of peace to the people of the world that became known as the Hopi. He traveled around the world lecturing to international audiences about the Prophecy and received an honorary doctorate from Antioch College.
In addition to his international work, Banyacya helped and supported many religious and political efforts in the Western Hemisphere. He belonged to various Native American organizations and served on the advisory board of the Native American Rights Fund. Banyacya believed that most of the problems of modern society were linked to an attachment to the world of material comforts, and that greater spirituality would promote human survival in spite of wars, violence and natural disasters. Thomas' life was an inspiration to many because of his dedication to the ancient wisdom of the traditional indigenous cultures and the sacredness of the land.
-Sarah Shapiro
WAR
RESISTERS LEAGUE