Suchergebnisse

Quaker peace activist Dorothy Hutchinson joined a fast against nuclear weapons testing at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) headquarters during Mother's Day weekend in 1958. Supporting the crew of the Golden Rule, then in jail in Honolulu for sailing into a nuclear testing zone, the fasters demanded a meeting with AEC chairman Lewis Strauss. The protest helped the Golden Rule's message resonate with the political culture of the day. Hutchinson's activism combined successfully the pragmatic peace activism of the years between the world wars with the direct action protest born from the existential angst of the nuclear age.

Incorporating a peace perspective into teaching history requires hands‐on activities that expose students to the craft of the historian. Research into the legacy of the Nobel Peace Prize, debates on issues of war and peace, and oral history interviews have proven to be productive methods for engaging students. Remaining open to the experiences of students themselves is essential to creating a classroom where students and teachers can learn about making peace.

Martin Luther King's 1965 call for "People of all Nations" to impose economic sanctions on South Africa grew from his experience with active nonviolence in the American civil rights movement. King worked with the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) to oppose apartheid. Initially, both ACOA and King looked to the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa as an exemplary use of nonviolence in opposition to racial segregation. The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, which prompted the South African antiapartheid movement's turn from nonviolence to armed struggle, created a quandary for American advocates of nonviolence. King and ACOA responded to this dilemma by advocating the transnational application of sanction and boycott. Thus, a new form of solidarity developed in which opponents of apartheid outside South Africa used nonviolence to help create ways for peoples of all nations to express their opposition to racism.

The antiapartheid activism of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) employed active nonviolence within the context of an internationally supported liberation movement. As the struggle against the white racist regime in South Africa intensified, the strategies of the AFSC's South Africa Program staff and South African Friends (Quakers) diverged. Because of the AFSC's involvement in the movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, its ideological emphasis shifted from relief work to pursuit of peaceful justice via action based on liberation pacifism in the 1970s and 1980s. The AFSC's South Africa Program reflected this change. South African Friends and the AFSC staff clashed over differing definitions of nonviolence. Critics in the United States opposed the AFSC's support for economic sanctions. The controversy around the AFSC's South Africa Program emcompasses debates about race relations within an antiracist social movement, the relationship of first world pacifists to armed third world liberation movements, and the role of pacifist witness in a transnational liberation struggle.