| ||||
| ||||
| | | | |
| | | | |||||
 | |||||
 | |||||
 | |||||
| | | | | |
 | |||||||||
 | |||||||||
The racially charged ’60s were just beginning the day Professor Michael True walked into his North Carolina College classroom for the first time. As he gazed at the rows of students in front of him, he felt a surge of apprehension. Every young face he saw | |||||||||
Michael True | |||||||||
| | | | | | | | | |
was black. Even though he had championed civil rights, this was his first real immersion in African-American culture. At age twenty-eight, and fresh out of graduate school, he wondered if he would be up to the challenge. He didn’t know it at the time, but the merging of his teaching and early activism would set him on a path of no return. In years to come, he joined the two in bold and unusual ways in his home and in many corners of the globe. In the process, he suffered the scorn of foes, colleagues, and neighbors, as well as the discomfort of prison. Michael’s interest in peace and justice had developed slowly. His father and two older brothers served during World Wars I and II, respectively, and he spent six months in the military during the late ’50s. Although his immediate family wasn’t politically active, his grandmother worked among the poor in Oklahoma City in the ’30s. “Grandma’s commitment to the poor had a profound affect on me,” he said. “Perhaps that’s why I was so drawn to Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement. As a matter of fact, it was the Catholic Worker newspaper that stimulated my interest in social change movements when I began reading it as a grad student at Duke University. “While I was at Duke, I saw racial prejudice all around me. In public places, whites and blacks used separate water fountains and toilets. A couple that lived across the hall from us in our duplex apartment was very prejudiced. Their father, the owner of the duplex, once threatened to shoot Sarah Boykin, the black woman who cared for our children. “Blacks were only allowed to sit in the balcony of movie theaters, known as the ‘crows’ nest.’ I joined other students from Duke and elsewhere to protest this policy. Black students, aware of the example of Martin Luther King and others on the Freedom Rides, were the principal organizers of the demonstration. They were impressive in their commitment to nonviolence. We carried signs calling for the integration of the movie theater while police lined the streets. Appointed demonstrators stood on alert at every corner to discourage any violent provocation. “During this brief experience with nonviolent direct action, I learned effective strategies from the students, who were imaginative, brave, and intelligent in carrying out their plans. I learned on my feet—not only at my desk—what nonviolence is all about. It was a life-changing experience.” Upon moving his family to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1965, Michael trained as a draft counselor and helped young men facing conscription make informed decisions about their futures. In April of 1970, he spent ten days in jail with students from Clark University for antiwar demonstrating at a local draft board. “While a handful of us were in jail at the Worcester County House of Correction, the U.S. bombed Cambodia. At that point, two hundred sixty more Worcester citizens committed civil disobedience in an effort to close down the local draft board. After the killings at Kent State University, daily demonstrations involving students from the city’s ten colleges, along with local citizens, turned Worcester into a major center of antiwar activity.” The True home in Worcester became a place for extraordinary guests to call. On any given day, well-known peacemakers, in town for talks and conferences, sat at the True’s kitchen or dining room table. Some familiar faces belonged to Daniel and Philip Berrigan, poets Denise Levertov and Robert Bly, David McReynolds of the War Resisters League, and Russell Johnson of the American Friends Service Committee, to name a few. Other visitors included Ammon Hennacy, “the one-man revolution,” and Dorothy Day, who grew to admire Michael as much as he admired her. Occasionally, young men, AWOL from the Army, would stop by for military counseling or to ask someone to drive them to Canada. The spacious three-story New England house also became a covert headquarters for an “underground church” made up of antiwar protesters and Catholic activists. On Sunday mornings, twenty or so clergy and laity gathered in the True living room. This “floating parish” was part of Michael’s life from 1968 to 1978. All this political activity around the True home provoked criticism from neighbors. “I often wrote to the local newspaper criticizing the draft and American foreign policy, particularly towards Southeast Asia,” Michael recalled, “and the constant comings and goings of students and activists made our neighbors uncomfortable. Occasionally, even the children’s teachers said hostile things to our kids or asked, ‘What is your father up to now?’ One woman accused us of making a ghetto of the neighborhood because we invited black people into our home.” These years were demanding and formative for Michael, his wife, Mary Pat Delaney, and their six children. Having a father who studied, taught, and wrote about key figures in the peace movement, led their oldest daughter, Mary Laurel, into active participation in demonstrations and civil disobedience against the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. Michael constantly felt pulled to live on two parallel paths. One took him through the halls of academia as a peace study educator, advocate, and author of articles and books on peace and social justice. The other path led him into the streets, the halls of Congress (to testify against the draft), and occasionally to jail. Sometimes, the two paths intersected uncomfortably with each other. “Blending activism and academia often gets one into trouble with both,” Michael commented. “Academicians accuse you of not being ‘scholarly’ and activists accuse you of selling out to the establishment. A sustained movement for social change, however, must include a close association between study, research, and activism at every level. We have much to learn about effective strategies for social change from the tradition of nonviolence in the U.S. over the past three hundred years, as well as from Tolstoy, Gandhi, and others around the world. “In a culture of violence, a teacher must recognize the structural violence in American education. To make the classroom nonviolent—that is, non-authoritarian—I believe we need to respond to students’ needs and interests. That takes a lot of work. Activism sometimes exposes the limitations of the campus, which some academicians regard as a haven or asylum from the larger community. Similarly, scholarship and research provide valuable insights for activists. Learning on the street as well as in the classroom made me more attentive to the conflicts between the values I profess and the way I live from day to day. “When I proposed starting college peace studies programs, colleagues of mine thought I was crazy. Armed with Ph.D.’s earned from Catholic Universities during the height of the Cold War, faculty members were resistant to Peace Studies as an academic discipline and actually thwarted the efforts I made. In spite of considerable student interest, they accused me of trying to make activists out of the students. They called the courses we developed ‘nonacademic.’ Instead of providing a major or minor in Peace Studies, we were locked into offering occasional introductory courses. However, over the years, that situation has changed considerably through our sustained efforts. By 1999, there were some three hundred colleges nationwide offering majors in Peace Studies.” Michael has associated with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, for over thirty years. Raised a Catholic, he celebrates that “Catholics have made a significant contribution to the peace movement.” However, in 1995, he became an active member of the Quaker Society of Friends because Quakers are, in his words, “the true pioneers of nonviolence in the U.S.” He particularly values their emphasis on meditation, their focus on peace, and their awareness of “God in every person.” “My experience living and teaching in China, North Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, India, and Bangladesh allowed me to become more familiar with Asian religious traditions. Subsequently, I couldn’t help but view Catholic ritual as narrowly Eurocentric, authoritarian, and exclusionary. I found it increasingly difficult to identify with the assumptions and top-down management of the institutional church, as well as its preoccupation with the belief rather than with faith and practice.” Two teaching experiences, in particular, left an indelible impact on Michael. The first of those took place when he was teaching in China during the democratic uprising that began at Tianamen Square in the spring of 1989. “During my first night in China, I stayed at a university in Shanghai as students prepared banners and speeches for a huge demonstration the following morning. On the way to the train station for the six-hour journey west to Nanjing, we drove through huge crowds that filled Shanghai streets. Arriving in Nanjing, I joined one hundred thousand demonstrating students blocking the streets around the university. “These students had learned effective nonviolent strategies on their feet. It was all very moving for me, watching and being there, as history was made. The demonstrators rocked the world and impacted their culture through their bravery and persistence in the face of great adversity.” The second experience occurred while Michael was a Fulbright lecturer in India in 1997 to 1998. He taught American literature at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar, and nonviolence at the Centre for Gandhian Studies, at the University of Rajasthan. His time in India coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, and he met many of Gandhi’s disciples and witnessed the consequences of his example and legacy. Michael’s sojourn into Gandhi’s homeland was one of many intense associations with past and present peacemakers. “I’m inspired and excited by the peacemakers I meet and write about because they have stood against injustice and for humane values against enormous odds. Knowing them puts me in touch with the best people in the world. They are heroes and heroines for me as I try to understand the relationship between personal transformation and social change, as well as to learn peace from within and without.”
Since his retirement from full-time academia, Michael has focused on political activism, along with speaking and traveling. In October of ’98, he was one of eleven peace activists arrested for trespassing at Raytheon Electronic Systems in Andover, Massachusetts, a manufacturer of U.S. weapons used in the Gulf War against Iraq. In his testimony before the court, Michael spoke of the effectiveness of civil disobedience in ending slavery and promoting the rights of women, people of color, and workers. Found guilty, he and the other activists performed community service as an alternative to jail. In 1996, the Consortium for Peace Research and Development (COPRED) named Michael “Peace Teacher of the Year.” In 2000, he received the Peace Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
1. What has impressed you, or been difficult for you, in your cross-cultural experiences? 2. Who is one of your peacemaking heroes or heroines? Why? 3. What forms of segregation are taking place around you? 4. Would you want to have a teacher who is a social activist? Would you want your child to have one? Why or why not? 5. It has been said that we are at the beginning stages of peace education, much like the bow and arrow stage was a beginning stage for the military. To advance our knowledge and skills, do you believe peace education and nonviolence should be taught in schools? Why or why not?
Resources for Reflection and Action: An Energy Field More Intense Than War: The nonviolent tradition and American literature, by Michael True (Syracuse, NYC: Syracuse University Press, 1995). This book is about the literature of the United States and its social and political history. It centers on writers who imagined or projected a culture somewhat different from the one that has emerged. Their hopes and efforts are part of a complete story about what is and what might have been—as well as about possible choices for the future. True believes that the literary artifacts associated with a refusal to kill deserve more attention and reflection than historians and social scientists usually award them. To Construct Peace, thirty More Justice Seekers, Peacemakers, Michael True. (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1992). Ordinary People: Family life and global values, by Michael True (Maryknoll, NYC: Orbis Books, 1994). Writing from his own family experiences, True explores how global values—a commitment to the Earth and a spirit of solidarity with others—can take root in the home. True shows how ordinary people can practice peace, nonviolence, social justice, and community in their families and in the world. Out of print, available from Growing Communities for Peace. Phone: 800-211-3971. Website: www.peacemaker.org. Language and Peace, by Anita Wenden and Christina Schaffner. (Harwood Academic Publishers, Website: www.gbhap.com.). This book argues that language is a factor to be considered together with social and economic factors in any examination of the social conditions and institutions that prevent the achievement of a comprehensive peace. It calls for peace educators to include critical language education into their curricula and describes an approach for doing so. Love in Action: Writings on nonviolent social change, by Thich Nhat Hanh (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1993). Nhat Hanh speaks in the tradition of Gandhi, King, and the Dalai Lama of the need for mindfulness, insight, and altruistic love as the only sustainable bases for political action. Peace Calendar. (Available from Syracuse Cultural Workers, Box 6367, Syracuse, NY 13217. Phone: 315-474-1132. Fax: 877-265-5399). Helps you keep abreast of important dates and events for promoting peace and nonviolence. Guide includes talking points and activities for grades K12. Includes extensive resources and a revised list of progressive educational organizations and publications. Peacebuilder Partnership, 1819 H Street NW, Suite 1200, Washington, DC 20006. The Peacebuilders mission is to promote a systems approach to peacebuilding and to facilitate the transformation of deep-rooted social conflict. Receive the Peacebuilder newletter through membership. Phone: 202-466-4605. Fax: 202-466-4607. Website: www.imtd.org.
| ||
| | |