David Hartsough's Lifelong Nonviolent Pilgrimage

The first demonstration David Hartsough organized was at the Nike missile site near his home in Pennsylvania. Although he was only 14 at the time, the FBI placed him under surveillance for organizing this nonviolent protest.

On Thursday, August 26, David Hartsough will be given the prestigious Clarence B. Jones Award for Kingian Nonviolence by the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. The first award was bestowed on Andrew Young; David is receiving the second.

David is a long-time friend of Pace e Bene, and Rivera Sun and Ken Butigan will be part of the ceremony at USF. The event will take place beginning at 11:30a.m. Pacific /2:30p.m. Eastern. You can register for the live Zoom presentation here.

In honor of this special occasion, we are reprinting a 2014 interview conducted by Terry Messman and originally published in Street Spirit, where it appeared in two parts: here and here. Messman is working on a book of interviews of nonviolent change-makers for Pace e Bene Press.

Street Spirit: Looking back at a lifetime of nonviolent activism, can you remember the first person who helped set your life on this path?

David Hartsough: Gandhi. My parents gave me Gandhi’s book, All Men Are Brothers, on my 14th or 15th birthday. And Martin Luther King who I met when I was 15.

Spirit: Why was Gandhi’s All Men Are Brothers such an inspiration?

Hartsough: Because he said that nonviolence is the most powerful force in the world, and he believed that, and he practiced it. His entire life was made up of his experiments with nonviolence, his experiments with truth. He took nonviolence from being kind of a moral, theological, philosophical idea, and showed it could be a means of struggle to liberate a country.

That was a great model for me that nonviolence is not just morally superior to killing people, but was a more effective way of liberating people. Also, his belief that all people are children of God. We are all one. We’re not black versus white, Americans versus Russians, good guys versus bad guys. We’re all brothers and sisters. I took that seriously and that’s what I believe.

Spirit: What was your first involvement in a social-change movement as a young activist?

Hartsough: When I was 14, there was a Nike missile site near where I lived in Philadelphia. This was when people were hiding under their desks in school or going into air raid shelters to try to be safe when we had a nuclear war — which is absolutely ridiculous. So I organized other young people to have a vigil at this Nike missile site over Thanksgiving. We fasted and we walked around with our picket signs in front of the place, and that’s where my FBI record started.

Spirit: How do you know this protest was on your FBI record?

Hartsough: I got my FBI records back in the 1970s. The records said: “David Hartsough, son of Ray Hartsough, organized a vigil at the Nike missile site.”

Spirit: That is despicable. They didn’t have anything better to do than investigate a kid who is concerned about peace and nuclear war. Why did you get involved at such a young age?

Hartsough: Well, the American Friends Service Committee, at that time, had programs and seminars for high school students in Washington, D.C., and in New York at the United Nations. My dad was working with the AFSC and with the people running these seminars where I met other young people from around the country that shared the vision of working for a just and peaceful world.

That felt very empowering to me that I wasn’t alone, and nourished my young heart that this is what I wanted to do with my life.

Present at the Dawn of the Freedom Movement

Spirit: How in the world were you fortunate enough to wind up in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott? You were there at the very birthplace of the civil rights movement.

Hartsough: My dad worked at AFSC as the Peace Education secretary, and he would take people like A.J. Muste and Bayard Rustin speaking at churches all across the Northeast. He would often bring those speakers back to our home afterwards. So during the Montgomery bus boycott, my dad organized speaking tours for Ralph David Abernathy. [Abernathy was a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. and an organizer of the bus boycott.]

When he brought Ralph to our home in Pennsylvania, Ralph told us this was the first time he had ever dined in a white home. He was telling us about the boycott, and Ralph said to my dad, “Why don’t you bring your boys down to Montgomery?”

So during spring vacation of 1956, that’s what we did. We saw up front the injustice and the oppression people faced.

On the way there, we stopped at Koinonia community, an inter-racial community in Georgia, and in the room where we slept, there was a bullet hole in the wall from a week earlier. That’s the way people were treating folks who were living inter-racially. So that was my introduction.

Then Ralph took us around Montgomery, and we saw one of the churches that had just been bombed, and the pews were all in splinters, and the cross was hanging on its side.

But people were getting up an hour earlier to walk to work every day, and people had caught a vision of a world that could be very different and were willing to struggle nonviolently. And they supported each other.

We went to the prayer services that happened every night. We saw the car pools, and we saw the police arresting people for having an “illegal transportation system,” just for giving people rides. But people found the courage to face that violence and oppression.

Spirit: When you witnessed the racism and violence people faced simply for organizing a bus boycott, what affect did that have on you at age 15?

Hartsough: Well, it was much more than just reading Gandhi. This was a form of struggle where a whole community of people supported each other in working toward a vision of justice. They did not give up and were willing to suffer for it. Even when their churches were bombed, they still maintained their love and nonviolence and human dignity.

Spirit: What a gift that was for a young person to be around Ralph David Abernathy at the very beginning of the struggle for civil rights. Did you also meet Martin Luther King on this trip?

Hartsough: Yes, we met Martin Luther King and came to a meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was essentially made up of the pastors of all the black churches and one white church involved in the bus boycott.

Martin Luther King introduced me and my brother Paul to the whole group. He said, “These young boys have come down from Pennsylvania to see our struggle and support us.” That was quite amazing, although I had no idea in 1956 that he was going to become this extraordinary figure who was going to help transform America.

Spirit: You got to meet my all-time heroes — the people who launched the bus boycott, and triggered the entire Freedom Movement. What else do you remember about meeting Dr. King?

Hartsough: Well, he seemed older to me, but he was really very young. He was 26 or 27. He was very congenial, even though we were just these young kids from out of town. He showed us his understanding and support and welcoming and friendliness.

I think, even at that time, the other pastors were realizing that this guy was a gift from God. And the way he was conducting the meeting, it wasn’t a rush job, like, “I know just what to do.” Instead, he was gathering the ideas and suggestions and concerns from everybody, and then helping them find a solution, and helping to build that movement to be the effective movement that it became.  I met Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Alabama, during the Montgomery bus boycott.  
 

The Spirit of Martin Luther King

Spirit: When we visited King’s first church, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, a couple years ago, I saw the impact that visit had on you. What did it mean to find yourself walking inside King’s church again, an entire lifetime after you had first visited it in your youth?

Hartsough: I remembered how inspired I had been at the very beginning, inspired by this man and this movement, and then seeing it develop into a powerful movement that helped transform this country. That movement not only challenged racial injustice, but challenged militarism and poverty and economic injustice. And I was some part of that, and I took part in the Poor People’s Campaign.

But my feelings had changed from being inspired to now feeling reverence for this man’s life and the struggle that he had given important leadership to, even being willing to risk his own life to help transform this country.

I remembered something King had said once in a church basement where there were 35 people. He said, “We have the power in this room, if we mobilize it, to totally transform this country.” He believed that, and he was able to help inspire other people to believe that and act on that belief.

Spirit: King really was a prophet — a gift from God who delivered the ultimate challenge to the powers that be. What can we learn today from his example in building a movement to overcome injustice?

Hartsough: Well, first, like Gandhi, he was taking the idea of nonviolence and really making that an effective means of struggle. King looked at the system of segregation and horrendous injustice in the United States, and applied the theory and practice of nonviolence in the struggle for the liberation of black people in the United States.

Many Americans now do not really understand how destructive it was that in the mid-1950s, at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, black people could not ride on the buses, could not drink at water fountains or go in the bathrooms, and could not stay in the motels. Children could not play in the parks. If you tried to register to vote in some of the deep Southern states, you could get lynched or fired from your job or find a burning cross in front of your house.

The United States talks about terrorism now, but black people in the South experienced a lot of terrorism from a very early age, starting back centuries ago and into the 1900s and through the 1960s.

So, in the face of that terror, and in the face of all that fear and injustice and hatred and discrimination, Martin Luther King helped people in the South find the courage and the determination to struggle nonviolently. I experienced that in Alabama in the spring of 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott. It just really challenged me to the core that nonviolence and the method that King was using in Montgomery was a method that could be used to help transform this country.

I was also inspired by the gunshot fired into the Koinonia house in Americus, Georgia.

Spirit: Why in the world would it inspire you to see a gunshot that had been fired into the house you’re staying in?

Hartsough: Well, it showed how deep the system of injustice and racism is in this country. They were willing to shoot into a house where they didn’t know the people, but those people believed in integration and brotherhood. They were saying that they were not going to live by the Southern mores that we must be separate.

So partly inspired by King and the Koinonia inter-racial community, and partly inspired by Bayard Rustin, I decided to go to Howard University, which was an all-black university at that time.

Spirit: How did Bayard Rustin influence you?

Hartsough: I got to know Bayard when I was a young kid. He was a man with a vision. He’d been in federal prison for two years as a conscientious objector during World War II. He was the person that, perhaps more than anybody else, influenced Martin Luther King to deepen his understanding and his practice of nonviolence in the struggle for justice. He was a good strategic thinker, always very clear, and lived by his principles.

Bayard was black, he was a pacifist, he was gay, and he was a Quaker — just about everything where society could say, “Well, those are second-class citizens, and un-American” [laughing]. He was all of those things, and he was proud of it.

He understood the importance of building a broad-based, powerful movement. He organized the famous March on Washington in August of 1963, bringing together the largest demonstration that had ever happened at that point in Washington.

And I could actually talk to Bayard Rustin at key times in my life as a young kid when I was wondering if I should go in this direction or in that direction.

 

The First Sit-ins for Civil Rights

Spirit: What did attending Howard University mean to you?

Hartsough: I really felt it was a step towards integration. My dad actually knew the president and vice-president of Howard, both of whom were friends of Gandhi. Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard, was a very close friend of Gandhi. William Stuart Nelson, the vice-president, also was a student of Gandhi, and he taught my first class on nonviolence at Howard Divinity School.

Spirit: How did you get involved in civil rights sit-ins while at Howard?

Hartsough: I started at Howard in the fall of 1959. In February 1960, when four students sat down at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, we at Howard University felt we should do something. So immediately after the four students were arrested in Greensboro, we started picketing at the Woolworth’s store near Howard.

We did some research and found that everything in Maryland and Virginia was segregated. Even African ambassadors to the United Nations traveling on the main highway in Maryland could not eat at the segregated restaurants. So we decided we would sit in at lunch counters in Maryland to challenge the segregation laws.

Usually within a very short time, they would close the lunch counter and call the police, and we would be arrested, put in handcuffs and taken to jail. We’d spend the weekend singing freedom songs in jail, go to court Monday morning and go back to class on Monday.

American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell lived in northern Virginia and was threatening violence to anybody who challenged the segregation laws there. In June 1960, we decided we had to challenge that law in Virginia.

We did some additional nonviolence training, then went to the People’s Drug Store, a chain store. We sat down at the lunch counter and it was closed immediately. The owner refused to serve us, but didn’t have us arrested because he didn’t want the publicity. So we actually ended up sitting there for two days, and it was the most challenging two days of my life.

Nazis and White Supremacists

Spirit: What happened? And did the American Nazi Party ever get involved?

Hartsough: People came out and would spit at us in the face. They put lit cigarettes down our shirts, and others punched us in the stomach, sometimes so hard that we would fall on the floor, and then they would kick us.

The American Nazi Party did come with signs saying, “Is We or Is We Ain’t Equals,” and a picture of an ape. They were yelling white supremacist nonsense and telling us to go back to Russia. Each time we were attacked we would try to respond in a nonviolent, peaceful way. It was very difficult.

Spirit: Given that much violence and hostility, your very lives were in danger.

Hartsough: Towards the end of the second day, I was reading from the Sermon on the Mount: love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. A guy came up behind me and said, “You [expletive], if you don’t get out of the store in two seconds, I will stab this through your heart.”
His face had the most terrible look of hatred I’ve ever seen, and in his hand was a switchblade, a half-inch from my heart.

I realized I had two seconds to decide if I really believed in nonviolence. But we had had a lot of practice for these kinds of situations. So I looked him in the eye and I said, “Friend, do what you believe is right, but I’ll still try to love you.”

It was quite miraculous. His face had been contorted with hatred, but his jaw began to drop and the hand holding his knife began to drop to his side — and he left the store. To me, at the age of 20, that was a pretty powerful experience.

Nonviolence is not just a morally superior way of relating to people, but it’s probably the only thing I could have done and come out alive.

But then we did something even more challenging. There were about 500 people outside the store with rocks who were threatening violence. We went to the front door and read a statement that we’d written appealing to the religious and community leaders in Arlington, Virginia, to use their influence to integrate all the eating facilities in Arlington. And this is the hard part: We said that if nothing changes, we’d be back in a week.

Spirit: You were surrounded by hundreds of hostile people. How many of you were actually taking part in the sit-in?

Hartsough: About 12. Some friendly media people got us out of there alive. Their cars were right outside the door. When we crossed the bridge back into Washington, D.C., it was like entering the freedom land, and getting away from all that. We literally shook in our boots for the next six days at the idea of having to find the courage to go back and do that again.

On the sixth day, we got a phone call that the religious and community leaders had met. They went and talked with the business leaders and had gotten a commitment that within 10 days, the eating facilities would be opened (desegregated) in Arlington. And they were!

Spirit: This sounds like it was a major turning point in your life. Was it?

Hartsough: At the age of 20, this was the most important lesson of my whole life.

Spirit: How would you describe the lesson you learned?

Hartsough: When you see an injustice or violence or something terribly wrong, you can curse the television set or the president. Cursing the television doesn’t help very much.
But instead, you can find some other people that share your vision of a just society, and who are committed to nonviolence in addressing that injustice, and have the courage to change it.
Those are the alternatives we have. We can do nothing. We can get depressed and let the world go to hell. Or we can find others that share that vision and commitment and work with them.
So, to me, that was a life-changing experience, and that’s the reason I’ve been involved in nonviolent movements and actions ever since.

Many of the people that were part of these demonstrations in Virginia and Maryland became key people in SNCC, and were part of the Freedom Rides where the bus riders were beaten and buses got burned up, and the Mississippi Summer voter registration drive. So we were all cutting our teeth during these first sit-ins.
 

Reading the Names of the War Dead

Spirit: King and other civil rights leaders began speaking out against the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. Didn’t you also become deeply involved in the anti-war movement at this time?

Hartsough: I was doing peacemaking work in my job with the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). Starting in the mid-1960s, FCNL asked me to be their lobbyist to try to stop the Vietnam War. My work was to interact with Congress and interact with peace movements around the country, including the Vietnam Moratorium.

Quakers started reading the names of the war dead every Wednesday to the Congress, and they were arrested for doing that. I was arrested at these protests. After about four weeks of being arrested, I went to Rep. George Brown from Southern California. He was a very good person. [Editor’s Note: Rep. George Brown, a Democrat from L.A., was a Quaker and a strong advocate of civil rights and peace.]

I said, “George, we’re reading the names of the war dead at the Congress and they just throw us in jail. Is there anything you can do to help us?”

He was a typical-looking Congressman with a big cigar, and he sat back in his swivel chair and said, “Yeah, I’m going to join you. And I’ll write a letter to every member of Congress telling them that I’m joining you and inviting them to join you.”

He wrote the letter, and the next day, we had four members of Congress reading the names of the war dead on the front steps of the Capitol. So when we were all arrested, the congressmen kept reading the names of the war dead because they had congressional immunity. They got through the whole 40,000 names of American war dead, or whatever it was at that point.
Within a week or two, Look Magazine had a picture of every American that had been killed in Vietnam. And then people in the peace movement were reading the names of the war dead all over the country, at federal buildings and at post offices, inspired by what we had done. It was a small step to try to help build that movement. Our actions gave courage to Congress people and then other congressional representatives became involved.

 

David helped build the shacks that made up Resurrection City in Washington, D.C. They had to build boardwalks between the shanties because the heavy rains left the encampment mired in mud. Photo by Henry Zbyszynski

Arrested at Resurrection City

Spirit: While you were working against the Vietnam War for FCNL, Martin Luther King began speaking about the need to resist racism, militarism and poverty simultaneously, a vision that culminated in the Poor People’s Campaign. Were you involved with the Poor People’s Campaign while at FCNL?

Hartsough: I had followed the civil rights movement very closely, of course. When King got the Nobel Peace Prize, he stopped in Washington, D.C., on the way back from Norway and met with President Johnson. He said, “Mr. President, we need a voting rights bill.”

The president essentially said, “I agree with you Dr. King, but we just passed the civil rights bill, and you’ve got to wait. It’s going to take a few more years.”

So King didn’t waste any more time in Washington. He went south and helped organize the voting rights campaign. That mobilized the conscience of the nation and within several months, we had a voting rights bill. Here I was a lobbyist in Washington, but that taught me that real change doesn’t come from the top down – it comes from the bottom up.

Because of that, I was even more inspired by King and the power of nonviolent movements. So when he had the vision of the Poor People’s Campaign, my paying job was still lobbying to try to end the war. But on weekends, I had offered to do nonviolent trainings of people that were going to participate in the Poor People’s Campaign. Also, we were building the shacks, the shanties where poor people would live in Washington, D.C.

Spirit: Amazing! You actually helped build the wooden shacks that made up Resurrection City?

Hartsough: Yes, on the weekends we built the shacks with plywood and two-by-fours. We actually were building them on the grounds of a church on the edge of town, and then they were all going to be taken by truck to the Capitol.

When the organizing for the Poor People’s Campaign began, King was speaking quite often at gatherings where hundreds of people would come from all over the country. It was just so very moving. I really had a feeling that we could transform America.

Spirit: It seemed like the entire Freedom Movement had been building up to this moment — a showdown with the federal government to end poverty.

Hartsough: I felt this was going to bring this country to its senses and build the kind of nonviolent people’s power that would mean that the power structure was going to have to address these issues.

As you know, it was a very, very rainy spring and summer in 1968. So the shanties were often in two or three feet of water, and we had to build boardwalks so people wouldn’t get mired in the mud.

Spirit: So Resurrection City became mired in the mud, and far worse, everyone was shocked and demoralized by King’s murder. It’s amazing that people were able to carry on with the campaign at all.

Hartsough: Yes. But each day, a whole bunch of people from the Poor People’s Campaign would go and try to meet with Congress, and with people from the Health, Education and Welfare Department, and with various government agencies, trying to encourage them to do what needed to be done about poverty, housing and jobs.

They developed a list of demands and walked from Resurrection City all the way down to the Capitol grounds to deliver these demands to Congress, trying to fundamentally address the poverty and injustice in this country. But when they got to the Capitol grounds they were all arrested — hundreds of people.

Quakers were having a conference up in New Jersey at the time when they heard about the arrests. They decided that this is King’s last dream and vision of transforming this country, and when people nonviolently take their list of demands to Congress, they are arrested and thrown in jail. So we’ve got to do something. We can’t just be sitting around here talking.

So several people from this conference, including Steve Cary, one of the most principled and courageous voices in the AFSC, went down and had a Quaker meeting for worship at the exact place where people had been arrested at the Capitol grounds. They brought a list of their demands and tried to walk up to the Capitol — and then we were arrested.

Spirit: I know Steve Cary was a major inspiration to you, and to many other Quakers as well. What role did Cary play in getting Quakers to abandon their own conference to risk arrest with the Poor People’s Campaign?

Hartsough: At the time, Steve Cary was the acting executive secretary of the national American Friends Service Committee. He was just a very thoughtful, courageous spokesperson who articulated the Quaker values of reverence for every human being and courageous struggle to fight injustice and war and militarism. And he walked his talk.

Steve Cary was the head of AFSC programs in Europe after the Second World War when AFSC was awarded the Nobel Prize for its humanitarian work in post-war Europe. Europe had been devastated and AFSC got lots of Americans to go in and rebuild and get food to children.

So after the mass arrests of people from the Poor People’s Campaign, Steve Cary led us in holding a Quaker worship in front of the Congress. Then we took the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign to Congress, and we were all arrested and spent two weeks in jail.

Spirit: Many AFSC activists and Quakers worked with the civil rights movement through the years, so it seems fitting that they would end up in jail as part of King’s last campaign.

Hartsough: We spent the next 14 or 15 days in the top floor of the D.C. jail, together with the hundreds of people from the Poor People’s Campaign from all over the country. In addition, there were hundreds of people, mostly black, that had been picked up off the streets in the riots after King had been assassinated. People were thrown in jail with very little evidence of what they had done, and none of them had been given a chance to go to court. And essentially, their story had not even gotten out to the public.

One of the things we did after we got out of jail was to share with AFSC and the broader public that all of these folks had been sitting in jail since April 4. And they were still in jail in June! So that was the beginning of AFSC’s pretrial justice program where they were really challenging that whole unconstitutional practice. You have a fundamental right to appear before a judge before being thrown in jail and left to rot for months.

Spirit: In looking back, how would you now measure the significance of the Poor People’s Campaign? What did it mean to you and what did it mean to the country? And what effect did King’s assassination have on this vision?

Hartsough: Well, in the Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King was calling not just for an end to segregation, and not just an end to the Vietnam War and militarism, but a transformation of this country so there would be economic justice for every human being.

It was a brilliant and strategically thoughtful campaign to bring poor people from all over the country to Washington to camp out and nonviolently get in the way of business as usual until our government listened to the people and committed itself to ending poverty and injustice, and committed itself to developing real democracy and respect for every human being in this country.

Unfortunately, he was assassinated before that could happen, but his staff and those of us who were left did our best to try to put together the Poor People’s Campaign. Many of us had been psychologically wounded by his assassination, and it was nowhere near as powerful as it could have been if he’d been here with us. But I do believe that the assassin may have killed King, but didn’t kill his dream and his vision of justice for all.

For me personally, it was very important that I didn’t stand aside and say, “Well, good luck to these people that are trying to carry out King’s last campaign.”

It was vital to be a part of it and to see courageous people from all over this country, from all backgrounds and all colors, standing up nonviolently and speaking truth to power in the halls of Congress and in the Justice Department and the White House and all over Washington.

To be in jail with hundreds of these people in that nonviolent struggle was a great experience for me. Some people think that the worst they can do is put you in prison. Yet it is really a privilege to be in prison with other people of conscience who are willing to put their lives on the line for justice. And getting to know people across the division lines of class and race and economic background is very important in strengthening our own sense that we’re all brothers and sisters, and we’re all children of one God. It sustains us and strengthens our commitment for the long struggle ahead.

Boat Blockades of War Shipments

 Spirit: You were involved in many actions during the struggle to end the Vietnam War. One action that really stands out is the People’s Blockade of ships transporting weapons to Vietnam.

Hartsough: Around Christmas in 1971, a season when we’re thinking about the life of Jesus and his teaching to love one another and love our enemies, the United States started a major bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. So now we were bombing major cities with children, women, old people, hospitals and schools.

Many of us in Philadelphia in the Movement for a New Society decided that we had to do something more than just get out with a sign and protest. We had to somehow put our bodies between the bombs and the men, women and children they were killing in Vietnam.

We found that there were bombs and munitions being shipped from the Leonardo Naval Weapons Station in New Jersey. So we scouted it out and found that napalm, anti-personnel bombs and all kinds of munitions were being shipped from Leonardo. We were able to recruit 26 canoes with 52 people, two in each canoe, and we decided to go out and try to block a ship called the USS Nitro.

As we paddled out along the piers, the anti-personnel bombs and crates of napalm were just stacked high, ready to be loaded onto the ships. A military policeman yelled at us over his loudspeaker that we would be charged with criminal conspiracy if we didn’t leave this area, and could get 20 years in prison. We shouted back that 20 years would be terrible, but nowhere near as bad as the death and destruction that would be caused if these bombs reached their destination. And we kept paddling.

We were actually able to get out in front of the ship each day for seven days. On the sixth day, some of the sailors we met told us it was leaving at 6:00 the next morning. Not only the hold of the ship, but all the decks were stacked 20 feet high with these crates of bombs and munitions.

We got out there the next morning, and were paddling hard to stay right in front of the boat. As they lifted anchor, seven of the sailors jumped off the ship into the ocean and then joined our blockade.

Spirit: Oh my God! Did they climb into your canoes?

Hartsough: They tried to, but the military police grabbed them and put them back on the ship. But we had called the media, so the New York Times and the national television stations were there in their helicopters. So it was on the evening news, not only our blockade but also the seven sailors jumping ship. The seven sailors were then jailed in the brig.

The news went all across this country and around the world, and the sailors told us later that when their ship went through the Panama Canal, word about the sailors on the USS Nitro jumping ship had spread to navy and military people all over the world, and the guys on the other ships gave them fists of solidarity and peace signs.

Spirit: So the ripples from this action had spread very far and very quickly. Did it spark other acts of resistance?

Hartsough: My feeling was that our actions had given these Navy sailors the courage to do what they knew was right to do, and their courage, in turn, gave courage to a lot of other soldiers in the U.S. military, and that was a beginning of a strengthened resistance within the armed forces to carrying out the terrible death and destruction in Vietnam. Our blockade spread from Leonardo, New Jersey, all up and down the East Coast and the West Coast of the Untied States. The national board of the American Friends Service Committee actually decided to support and endorse the People’s Blockade and to support AFSC staff working on it.

Spirit: That was an incredible step into civil disobedience for AFSC to take. Were you part of the AFSC at this time?

Hartsough: Yes, I was on AFSC’s Nonviolent Training and Action Committee at the time. Robert Levering and several of us that were part of that committee heard that there were also ships going from Norfolk, Virginia. So we went to Norfolk, and there was an aircraft carrier called the USS America that was preparing to leave for Vietnam. Aircraft carriers are massive. I had my nine-foot sailboat, so we organized a blockade down there with canoes and our small sailboat.

They were very uptight as the USS America prepared to take off for Vietnam, and the military police came and capsized our canoes and sailboat. Then Navy frogmen came after us, grabbed us out of the water and took us on their ship. They put us in handcuffs face down on the ship with guys with guns pointed at us while the aircraft carrier sailed out to sea. It was a little bit scary.

Another ship came with a water cannon when all these sailors were up on the deck of this aircraft carrier. Many of them were giving us signs of support and verbal encouragement. We thought the water cannon was going to be directed against us, but it was directed against the sailors.

Spirit: They blasted the sailors with the water cannon just because they were cheering you on?

Hartsough: Yes, because they were cheering us on! Next day, the Norfolk newspapers had a big photo of this massive aircraft carrier with our little boat in front of it. The ship was called the USS America, so the headlines said, “America Defeats Peace Flotilla.” America was standing tall again! They had defeated the enemy.

Spirit: You mentioned earlier that the AFSC national board supported peace blockades around the country?

Hartsough: AFSC members in both Northern California and down in Southern California were actively involved in helping organize blockades on the West Coast. In the Bay Area, it was called the Carrier Project, an official AFSC project. The AFSC board had decided it was willing to commit civil disobedience and support nonviolent resistance to the endless tragedy in Vietnam.
Up in Bangor, Washington, activists actually camped out along Puget Sound at a place where they could see the ships coming. They had a flotilla ready to go out and try to block naval ships, day or night. One of the guys, a very gutsy, courageous fellow, got right in front of a moving ship and it actually pushed him for a quarter of a mile in his boat. [Editor’s note: George Walker, a Navy vet, put his kayak right in the path of the USS Joseph Merrell. The USS Merrell finally sailed right over his small kayak and dunked Walker into Puget Sound.]

Facing Arrest as a Family

Spirit: A photo in your new book shows you and your wife Jan Hartsough being arrested with your two young children. What happened at that protest?

Hartsough: In 1971, Quakers who were very distressed about Nixon’s continuing this horrendous war in Vietnam decided to have a Quaker meeting for worship in front of the White House. About 250 Quakers sat down on the sidewalk in front of the White House. My wife Jan and I and our two young children, Peter and Heidi, were sitting on the sidewalk with all of the Quakers, and the police interrupted our worship service and ordered us to leave or be arrested.

Nobody left, and people like Steve Cary, who was the associate executive secretary of AFSC, were there with us. All the other Quakers except my family were arrested. They apparently didn’t think it was good publicity to arrest this family with young children. So here we were, sitting on the sidewalk after everyone else had been hauled away in jail buses, and the D.C. chief of police came over and implored us to leave, saying that if we were arrested, our children would be taken away and put in juvenile hall.

We told him that we certainly love our children, but we also love the children of Vietnam, and we’d be happy to leave if our government commits to stopping the bombing of Vietnam. He spent about half an hour trying to convince us to leave, and then placed us under arrest in a police car. He took us to a police station in Georgetown and let us out behind the police station — smart P.R. on his part.

The Washington Post and AP and UPI had photographs of the police chief leaning over our family, trying to convince us to leave. The photo and article went out across the country, so many of our friends sent us photos from local newspapers all across the country. Those photographs are in our kids’ baby books.

Spirit: Was it a hard decision for you and Jan to risk arrest with two children?

Hartsough: I think a lot of people say that when you get married and have a family, you have to leave your values behind, and your concern about the rest of the people in the world. But we’re still a part of the human family, and people who get killed or maimed or imprisoned in another part of the world are also part of our family. So we’re not willing to give up our values just because we have children.

Spirit: David, when were you hired as staff organizer for the American Friends Service Committee in San Francisco?

Hartsough: I was hired in 1973 to be part of the Simple Living Program. My wife Jan and I shared the staff position. Then I began the AFSC Nonviolent Movement Building Program in 1982.

Spirit: As an AFSC staff, how did you become involved in the massive protests at the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor in the late 1970s and early 1980s?

Hartsough: In the Simple Living Program, we were concerned that nuclear power was promoted as a way to have endless consumerism and endless energy.

Spirit: Consumerism fueled by radioactive plutonium.

Hartsough: Yes, without any thought of an environmental future for our world. So when the Mothers for Peace in San Luis Obispo came to the American Friends Service Committee around 1976, they were struggling to stop this nuclear power plant being built in their backyard. They had tried everything legally possible to stop it and the government didn’t care.

So they asked if we could help build a nonviolent movement to try to stop the Diablo Canyon Power Plant from going into operation. Our AFSC Simple Living Program decided we would support their struggle and help them build a statewide movement to stop that plant.

About 30 different groups from all over the state formed Abalone Alliance to stop nuclear power and the Diablo Canyon reactor, and to promote alternative energy.

We had about 100 people trained as nonviolent trainers, and AFSC played an important role in helping build that movement. AFSC published “Decision at Diablo Canyon,” a very well-researched booklet about the dangers of the Diablo Canyon plant being built on an earthquake fault. AFSC also put together the nonviolence training manual.

The movement was also successful in stopping the nuclear plant up in Humboldt County, and the Rancho Seco plant near Sacramento.

The Abalone Alliance

Spirit: Were you arrested for civil disobedience during Abalone Alliance’s campaign to shut down Diablo Canyon?

Hartsough: Yes, in 1977 and again in 1978, I was arrested. The first year, in 1977, there were 47 people arrested, and the next year, more than 470 were arrested. We’d multiplied our numbers by 10 times. And then, in 1981, when the license was finally granted, nearly 2,000 people were arrested at Diablo Canyon.

In 1981, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this was the safest nuclear reactor in the world as it gave its approval for Diablo Canyon to go into operation. And here were hundreds and hundreds of us sitting in jail down at Diablo Canyon feeling we’ve done everything we can, and what more can we do?

Then somebody threw a newspaper over the fence of our exercise area at the jail, and one of the engineers at the plant had gone public that the blueprints for the seismic support for the cooling systems of one of the reactors had all been put on backwards.

So it took Pacific Gas and Electric another couple years to retrofit all of that and they had to spend another couple billion dollars before it could go into operation. That plant — built with the cooling systems in one of the reactors totally wrong and totally unsafe — is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called the safest nuclear reactor in the world!

So we were not successful in stopping that plant, but I think our resistance at Diablo Canyon and the resistance at Seabrook, where AFSC also played a very important role, and Three Mile Island, where Quakers were very involved, helped send a message to our government so that no new nuclear reactors were licensed in the United States for about 30 years. And California passed a proposition saying no more nuclear power plants until they found a safe way to store nuclear waste — which they’ve never found.

Spirit: Abalone Alliance not only raised public consciousness about the dangers of nuclear power, it also educated people about how to build nonviolent movements. The actions at Diablo Canyon helped build an anti-nuclear movement that went on to organize opposition to nuclear weapons at Livermore Laboratory.

Hartsough: Yes, all these actions raised a lot of public consciousness. All of that grew out of this movement. And many, many of the people that were involved in the Diablo Canyon struggle have continued to be involved in the movement ever since.

Photo: Protesters kneel in prayer and block the road into Livermore Laboratory in resistance to the nuclear weapons designed there.
 

Blocking the Holocaust Laboratory at Livermore

 Spirit: A large number of Abalone Alliance activists went on to help spark the Livermore Action Group in the Bay Area. Why did you decide to become involved in the Livermore protests?

Hartsough: Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are very connected. It seemed to be a very logical next step in the struggle. Dr. John Gofman, who had been the head of biomedical research at Livermore Laboratory, was one of our speakers at our rally in San Luis Obispo against Diablo Canyon.

Gofman made that connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and how dangerous nuclear power was. And I had been involved in the struggle for nuclear disarmament and the efforts to try to stop nuclear testing for all of my life.

Spirit: Beginning at age 14 when you protested the Nike missile plant.

Hartsough: Yes, and then when I was 18, I went on the walk from Philadelphia to the United Nations in 1958 when we asked all nations to stop nuclear weapons testing. That was the year when four Quakers risked their lives trying to sail the Golden Rule into the nuclear weapons testing area of the Pacific Ocean.

That motivated many of us to walk from Philadelphia to the United Nations — about 100 miles — calling for an end to nuclear weapons testing. When we got to New York, we had about 500 people marching down the streets to the United Nations. At the time, it was the largest peace protest I’d ever seen in my life [laughing]. It was very inspiring.

Spirit: The anti-nuclear movement may have started small but it would ultimately lead to far larger demonstrations at Livermore Lab and all over the nation.

Hartsough: Livermore was the place that had developed the hydrogen bomb, the MX warhead and the neutron bomb, which could kill all the people and leave the buildings intact. So I was absolutely delighted when people in the Bay Area decided to begin a campaign to convert the Livermore Laboratory from building the next generation of nuclear weapons to doing positive peacetime research.

Spirit: Thousands of people were arrested for blockading that holocaust laboratory. The Livermore actions were a very dramatic confrontation with the federal government.

Hartsough: That’s right. And when more than a thousand of us were in jail in 1982, and again in 1983, the authorities used fear as a means of trying to control us. But I think most of us had overcome that fear and we were willing to spend two weeks in jail or whatever it took to try to help turn the arms race around.

Instead of being afraid while in jail, we used that time to organize workshops and trainings. People shared their life stories and Dan Ellsberg taught us everything he knew about nuclear weapons development. It was a massive teach-in! I organized a strategy game using civilian-based defense as a nonviolent means of defending a country. So we became much stronger through that time in jail.

The authorities finally realized that their system of intimidation and fear through holding us in jail was not working. They decided it was a poor use of their money to give us free room and board to do workshops to strengthen our movement [laughing].

Spirit: We found out later that we were nearly bankrupting the city of Livermore because of the massive costs of imprisoning thousands of people, and the huge court costs.

Hartsough: That’s why in subsequent years, after they arrested us they would never even bring charges because they realized it’s not going to stop us.

Spirit: The nuclear arms race was so massive, and the military-industrial complex so powerful, that many thought resistance was futile. Yet those who actually stepped forward and resisted the arms race found great new levels of hope.

Hartsough: What our government wants us to do is to just sit back and either support or silently condone all of the horrendous things they do, including developing nuclear weapons which could put an end to life on earth.

Having people who are willing to speak out and get in the way of the arms race through blocking the entrances at Livermore Lab is the kind of thing we had hoped the German people would do during the Third Reich in Nazi Germany. They could have said, “Enough is enough! Stop this madness!”

And here at Livermore, we had thousands of people who were willing to do that. And this resistance was also happening at Los Alamos Laboratory and the Nevada Test Site, and all over Europe. A massive movement arose in Europe and at Greenham Common in resistance to Cruise and Pershing missiles. It was and is an example of nonviolent people’s power saying no to the madness that our government was trying to inflict upon us. And that gives me hope.

The Pledge of Resistance

Spirit: Many anti-nuclear activists soon began working with the Pledge of Resistance to oppose U.S. military intervention in Central America. What role did you play in forming the Pledge

Hartsough: After many of us had experienced the horrors of the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, we felt that we had to do something even deeper to try to stop the killing. Under Reagan’s presidency, his number-one foreign policy objective was to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua by supporting the Contras’ attacks.

So we formed the Pledge of Resistance, which organized thousands of people all over the country who signed a pledge saying if the United States escalated the wars in Central America, we would do nonviolent direct action to protest the atrocities the U.S. government was inflicting.

For several years, we were carrying out actions every time Congress voted more money for these wars, and when the United States blockaded the ports of Nicaragua, and when the Jesuit priests were murdered and the nuns were killed in El Salvador. We would have actions where hundreds and hundreds of us would be arrested.

Here in San Francisco, we shut down the Federal Building a number of times during those years, and there were protests at federal buildings and military bases all over the country.

Spirit: Your Nonviolent Movement Building Program played a key role in supporting the Pledge in the Bay Area.

Hartsough: Our program supported Ken Butigan to work on helping develop the Pledge of Resistance. You and I organized nonviolence trainings for the Pledge, and trained nonviolent trainers. That played a very key role in helping influence the nonviolent spirit and tone of the actions.

We funded the Pledge of Resistance nonviolent training handbook and it became a manual for people all around the country. [Editor’s note: Ken Butigan and Terry Messman were members of AFSC’s Nonviolent Movement Building committee and co-authored Basta: No Mandate for War. A Pledge of Resistance Handbook.]

Spirit: How would you analyze the effectiveness of the Pledge of Resistance?

Hartsough: A lot of people that were involved in the Pledge around the country came out of the religious community. Somebody in the White House said at one point, “We could go ahead and overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua if it weren’t for these Christians.” Meaning the Pledge of Resistance!

We were a formidable force. Every time our government did anything to escalate these wars, they would have people doing sit-ins in Congressional offices, shutting down federal buildings, and marching in the streets, and they’d have to put hundreds of people in jail. That was a real problem for them.

I think the Pledge was an example of American people who were in touch with their consciences, and were willing to put their freedom on the line, and spend time in jail if necessary, to speak out against the horrors that our government was involved in. We desperately need that spirit again as we resist wars in the future.

 Photo: David and his parents, Ray and Ruth Hartsough, before being arrested for blocking a weapons train at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, 1988.
 

Nuremberg Action

Spirit: How did you become involved with Nuremberg Action Group in blocking shipments of weapons to Central America from Concord Naval Weapons Station?

Hartsough: Brian Willson, Charlie Liteky and members of Veterans for Peace had fasted on the steps of the U.S. Capitol for 40 days to try to stop Congressional support for the wars in Central America. Brian Willson then went on one of the veterans’ peace action teams to Nicaragua.
When he came back, he was in tears at what he had seen in Nicaragua. The Contras had come across the border to attack communities in Nicaragua, including children’s nurseries, cooperative farms and medical clinics. He said, “We’ve got to do much more to stop this.”

Spirit: It’s interesting that military veterans led some of the first protests. The Nuremberg principles were established during the trial of Nazi military officials and  leaders accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.

Hartsough: Yes. We called these actions Nuremberg Actions because we felt we were upholding not only God’s law, but international law: the Nuremberg principles. So indiscriminately killing innocent men, women and children in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala are crimes against humanity. And to do nothing in the face of those war crimes is to be complicit in those war crimes. So we were upholding international law by trying to stop these arms shipments.

Spirit: Why did the veterans for peace choose the Concord military base to begin upholding the Nuremberg principles?

Hartsough: Concord Naval Weapons Station was a major shipping point for munitions to Central America, so in 1987, we decided Concord was the place where we needed to hold a blockade. On June 10, 1987, Russ Jorgenson, Dorothy Granada, Wendy Kaufmyn and I were arrested for sitting on Port Chicago highway and blocking the first munitions truck at Concord. We spent the weekend in jail.

Then people held a vigil at the Concord base every single day of the entire summer. Brian Willson decided that starting on September 1, 1987, he would begin a fast and block trains carrying munitions. He had written to the Navy and to the press that the government had a choice to either stop the arms shipments to arrest them and take them to jail, or run over them.

Spirit: So Navy officials had advance notice that Brian and others would be sitting on the train tracks.

Hartsough: There were three veterans that decided to block the trains on September 1. We had an interfaith worship service and a press conference and then sent a delegation to tell the Navy again that we were going to be blocking the trains. About 11:30 in the morning, after the worship service, the train started moving towards us.

We had a big banner across the tracks saying, “Stopping the War Starts Here: Nuremberg Actions.” I was in front of the group looking at the two guys on the train and I was yelling at the top of my voice: “There’s people on the tracks. Stop the train!” The train actually hit my arm and knocked me down, just outside the tracks.

Instead of slowing down, the train was picking up speed as it approached Brian Willson and Duncan Murphy and David Duncombe sitting on the tracks. Duncan and David jumped off the tracks. Brian was sitting on the tracks with his legs crossed and the train ran over him. I could see Brian being smashed from one side to another and the train was grinding up his body, with blood spurting everywhere.

As the train passed by, I found one of Brian’s severed legs with a shoe and went running toward him. There was a big hole in his head, so I put my hand over the hole to try to hold the blood from gushing out. His wife of 10 days, Holly Rauen, was a midwife and had medical training and she was able to put a tourniquet around his leg to stop the blood flow.

The Navy ambulance came and I said to them, “Take this man to the hospital. He’s dying.” And they said, “We’re not allowed to.”

Spirit: That is so heartless. It makes you sick. They were just following orders, like the original Nuremberg defendants.

Hartsough: So somebody had to run to a pay phone, and it was another 23 minutes before another ambulance came. None of us thought we’d ever see Brian alive again. He went through many hours of surgery. Bones throughout his body were broken, his skull had been fractured, and there was a big hole in his head. One leg was gone and the other had to be amputated.

Luckily after that surgery, he was still alive. When I went to see him in the hospital, he had bandages all over his whole body, and bandages around his face so I could only see his eyes. He was not only alive, but his commitment to nonviolence and his commitment to continuing the struggle at Concord had intensified, if anything.

We had decided to have a rally that Saturday to recommit ourselves to stopping the trains and stopping the arms shipments. I asked him if there was anything he’d like to say to the rally, and I recorded his statement.

Brian said, “We have to continue this struggle because these bombs are killing people in Central America, and as soon as I can get out of the hospital, I’ll be back there with you.”

We had 9,000 people out there at Concord the next Saturday, including Jesse Jackson and Joan Baez and Rosario Ortega, the wife of Daniel Ortega.

We now know it was a decision in Washington, D.C., not to stop the trains, but to essentially scare us into stopping our actions against the war.

Spirit: Instead of stopping Nuremberg Actions, the Navy’s assault on Brian Willson outraged people, and inspired them to come out in more massive numbers than ever before.

Hartsough: Exactly. For close to three years, the Nuremberg Action Group had people blocking the trains and the trucks every day. Sometimes they would have to arrest two busloads of us to get us off the tracks so they could run their trains and have their war and keep killing people in Central America.

Spirit: Brian Willson beat all the odds and not only survived, but dedicated his life to working for peace and justice.

Hartsough: He has spent the rest of his life acting on that belief that we’re really all brothers and sisters. And he was a very inspiring example to people all over the world that there are Americans that care enough about the death and destruction that our government is causing that they’re willing to put their lives on the line to try to stop it.

Spirit: Hasn’t he become a hero to people in Nicaragua and Central America?

Hartsough: Yes, to people in Nicaragua and throughout Latin America, and people in Israel and Palestine, and many other countries. He was invited to come everywhere.

They wanted to meet this person who really acted on his belief that American lives aren’t more important than everybody else’s lives, and we have to speak out to stop this madness — not just with words, but with our bodies.

Brian Willson’s Dance of Defiance

Spirit: One of the most inspiring things I ever saw was on the 25th anniversary of Nuremberg Actions. Brian returned to the Concord base to speak out for peace, then he danced on his prosthetic legs on the same railroad tracks where he had lost his legs.

Hartsough: Governments have the power to throw us in jail and shoot at us and intimidate us, but they don’t have the power to kill our spirits, and they certainly didn’t kill Brian’s spirit. Our actions at Nuremberg were an example of what people all over this country can do, and have a responsibility to do, if we’re to stop our government from fighting one war after another, and causing misery around the world.

Spirit: Can you remember back to what you felt the very first time you visited Brian in the hospital right after he was run over by the train — but before all that inspiring stuff happened with 9,000 people gathering in solidarity at Concord?

Hartsough: It was horror, especially that first day when this had just happened. Here we were still at the tracks, and our dear friend had been taken off to the hospital and was presumably going to be dying. Brian and I had talked about doing that first action together, and up until that morning, I was planning to be on the tracks.

But we had an agreement that anyone who would block a train or truck had to go through a nonviolence training first. There were a bunch of people out at the tracks who wanted to block a train, and I was the only person there who could do a training. So I agreed not to block that first train, but to do a nonviolence training and then we would block the next train.

Brian and I had been two of the people that had envisioned and planned and organized this. So I felt tremendous responsibility that I had caused this guy’s death. Then, when I found him alive — and his spirits were very much alive even though he was all in bandages and without his legs — there was tremendous joy in my heart that he had survived this.

This developed a very close kinship between the two of us. I realize how, every day since then, Brian has had to suffer. He has suffered from not having his legs, and he had to suffer the physical and psychic pain from that train hitting him. So I’ve wanted to be supportive of him in every way I can. And we’re obviously very, very dear friends. It’s inspiring to me to know somebody with as much love in his heart as Brian has for all the people in the world.

Arms Broken by Police at Concord

Spirit: It can be costly to resist war crimes. The Concord police also began using torturous pain holds to remove nonviolent demonstrators from the tracks.

Hartsough: Yes. Three of us had our arms broken by police using pain holds in November of 1987 — Rev. David Wylie, Jean Bakewell and I. I was kneeling on the tracks when the weapons train was approaching, and the sheriff’s deputy told me I had to get off the tracks because the train was coming. I said, “I’ll be happy to get off the tracks when you stop shipping arms to kill people.”
So he grabbed my arm and began twisting it, and when it got so painful I had to get up and start walking with him. I walked about 20 feet, and he said, “This is to make sure you get off the tracks next time.” Then he gave my arm another twist and broke it. I went unconscious.

Spirit: Didn’t the three of you win a lawsuit that barred the police from using these pain holds

David and his parents engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at Concord Naval Weapons Station.

Hartsough: It was not just pain holds, but they were breaking bones. The ACLU decided to sue them and it was finally settled out of court because the government didn’t want to go to trial. But they agreed to give $50,000 to cover our medical expenses. I gave my part of it to Witness for Peace and Peace Brigades International. The most important part of the settlement was an agreement on the part of the Sheriff’s Department in Contra Costa County not to use violence against nonviolent demonstrators.

The Occupy Movement

Spirit: You went on several marches with the Occupy movement in Oakland and San Francisco, and you also helped organize forums where the issue of nonviolence in Occupy was debated. On a march to the Port of Oakland, you said that Occupy was the most remarkable movement you had been involved in. Why did you think that then, and what do you think of its significance in retrospect?

Hartsough: I think the Occupy movement was a tremendous outpouring of people throughout this country in resistance to the terrible inequality of this nation. Instead of a democracy of, by and for the people, we have a plutocracy — a government of, by and for the rich and the corporations. In hundreds of cities across the United States, people tried to stop business as usual, and demanded that our country get back to its basic values and principles.

I think like all other social movements, in order to have a chance, you have to build a mass movement, and you have to be willing to put your lives on the line, blocking the banks and challenging the corporations that are stealing our democracy. And you have to keep marching even if the police say it’s illegal. And all that was happening. And the spirit among the people that were part of that movement was absolutely overwhelming. It did bring together homeless people and students and old people and labor unions and religious communities. I think we had tremendous potential and I hope we still do.

Spirit: How do you understand the swift rise and sudden fall of Occupy?

Hartsough: I think the federal government decided it was a threat to have tens of thousands of people marching and camping out in the parks and challenging the unjust institutions so dramatically. So they decided to come down very, very heavy on the Occupy movement. Partly, it had gotten to be winter and people were cold and wet and tired. I think it was a weakness, if you will, that we allowed ourselves to be intimidated by the government repression and the violent tactics by the police when they cleared the encampments and arrested people.

Fear and repression is the Achilles’ heel of any movement, and almost all governments will use fear as a way of controlling people. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the understanding and commitment to realize that was what the government was doing, and not let them get the upper hand.

But I think the Occupy movement does continue to live and those people have not just disappeared. Occupy people are challenging foreclosures around the country. They’re still there and working in many smaller, less visible ways. I still think a powerful nonviolent movement can be resurrected and turn this country around.

Twenty thousand students in Kosovo march nonviolently toward their former university demanding the right to study there.

Arrested in Kosovo

Spirit: Tell me about the events that led to your working with activists in Bosnia and then your arrest in Kosovo.

Hartsough: In 1996, I went to Bosnia with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and that was right after the shelling of Sarajevo had ended. We saw literally hundreds of cemeteries all over Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, all with fresh graves from that war.

In Kosovo, more than 90 percent of the people were Albanians, and they were being ruled by less than 10 percent of the people who were Serbs. It was an apartheid country. Many Albanians had lost their jobs, and could not study in the university. Instead of getting guns and turning to armed struggle, they were choosing nonviolent means to challenge that oppression and that apartheid regime.

So I decided to go there and I met Adem Demaci, who had spent 29 years in prison, very much like Nelson Mandela. He was the head of the human rights commission there. I met students that were challenging their exclusion from the university. I met political prisoners, women’s organizations and teachers. I spent a couple months with them and they were all saying they were facing an apartheid regime.

They told me that Kosovo was an explosion waiting to happen, and they wanted to form a more active and assertive nonviolent struggle. To do that, they needed international people to come to Kosovo and be present with them to make it safer. They asked me to find international people to come and help them engage in nonviolent struggle. When I went back to Kosovo with a small group of American students in the spring of 1998, hundreds of thousands of people were marching in the streets — everything from young families with their babies in strollers, to old people with their canes. Yet, the massive protests barely got any publicity in the rest of the world.

I began doing nonviolence trainings of the students, which they had asked for, and the next day, all five of us Americans were put in prison, and we got major publicity for our arrests around the world. It was kind of ridiculous because hundreds of thousands of people marching nonviolently were ignored, while five internationals who got arrested for trying to support these folks got all this publicity.

Spirit: How long were you held and what were conditions like in the jail?

Hartsough: We were sentenced to 10 days in jail, but after the third day, there had been so much publicity around the world that they came to the jail and took us to the Macedonian border and stamped in our passports that we couldn’t come back for ten years. We used the publicity to try to bring attention to the nonviolent struggle in Kosovo and the need to support it.

The conditions in jail were terrible. It was very cold, and there was no heat. They had shaved our heads. There were a hundred rules posted on the wall and the first rule said: “Obey all the rules.” It was pretty harsh and inhumane.

Then, in 1999, when some more ethnic cleansing had started, President Clinton went on international television and said we have two choices: We can look the other way and do nothing, or we can go in and start bombing. From my perspective, neither of those alternatives are acceptable. We had a third alternative, which our country and the world had refused to take, and that was to support the nonviolent struggle. That was a terrible lost opportunity. If we had done that, I think we had a good chance to help make that transition to a more democratic society happen peacefully, rather than through a horrendous war. The hatred that exists now between people in Kosovo and the Serbs will last for generations. And that’s what happens in every war.

The Nonviolent Peaceforce

Spirit: Is that what led to your work with the Nonviolent Peaceforce?

Hartsough: That experience was the impetus to start the Nonviolent Peaceforce. I realized we needed hundreds of trained, nonviolent peacekeepers — courageous people that could go to Kosovo or anywhere there was a nonviolent struggle to help support those folks to successfully challenge oppression.

In the spring of 1999, the Hague Appeal for Peace was happening in the Netherlands where 9,000 peace activists from all over the world came together to look at how we could end war. So a number of us who were at the Hague Appeal committed ourselves to building a global nonviolent peace force. We started a two-year process of sharing this vision with people from other parts of the world. Then, in 2002, we held our founding conference in Surajkund, India, outside of Delhi, and started the Nonviolent Peaceforce, with peace activists from 49 countries present.

We now have a couple hundred trained international peacekeepers that can go into conflict areas at the invitation of local peacemakers, and help protect civilians that are being killed or injured in conflicts. About 80 percent of the people that die in wars and armed conflicts are civilians, many of them children. We’re also there to protect human rights workers and local peacemakers whose lives are endangered.

We have been in Sri Lanka. We’re presently in Mindanao in the Philippines where there has been a decades-long struggle between the government military and the Muslim community. We’re also in South Sudan which is in tremendous upheaval right now, and we’re starting a project in Burma where there are still some major conflicts.

Spirit: What was your role in developing the Nonviolent Peaceforce?

Hartsough: Mel Duncan and I were seen as the cofounders of the Nonviolent Peaceforce. We were seen as the people who really took this vision and continued to reach out to people all around the world to help bring this vision into being. I was the strategic relations director and was responsible for reaching out to organizations and groups all around the world.

We wanted the Nonviolent Peaceforce to not just be a group of North Americans. We wanted this to be truly a global force of people from all over the world. Both our decision-making body and our volunteers on the ground are really a mixture of people and races and nationalities from the whole world.

Spirit: This idea seems to build on the work of groups like Witness for Peace and Peace Brigades International.

Hartsough: Yes, I had worked with Peace Brigades International and Witness for Peace, and saw that nonviolent peace teams can have a very important impact, and we wanted to expand this. Gandhi first envisioned a Shanti Sena, or nonviolent army, so this idea has been kicking around for a long time. And it was very exciting to actually find the people in different parts of the world who wanted to realize this vision of Mahatma Gandhi.

Today, the United Nations and many friendly governments are beginning to understand the power of nonviolent peacekeeping as an alternative to armed peacekeeping. Our hope eventually is to have this seen as an alternative to war and violent intervention.

Peace Delegations in the Middle East

Spirit: Have you led peacemaking delegations to countries in the Middle East?

Hartsough: I have led two peace delegations to Iran, and one to Israel and Palestine in the last four or five years. Bush called Iran part of the Axis of Evil, and these countries were seen as the ultimate enemies. So what we were really doing was just getting to know the Iranian people as people. When you know people, it’s very hard to think about killing them or blowing up their society.

We met with members of Parliament and religious leaders and all kinds of people in the country, and then came back to share their stories. Iran has not started a war with another country in 200 years. The United States overthrew their democratically elected government in 1953. [Editor: Iranian Prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in 1953 by the United States in a coup after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry.]

The U.S. also shot down a civilian airliner and never apologized for that. We have troops and bombers surrounding their country, and yet we see them as a threat to us. That reality motivated us to try to stop a war with Iran, and to get our nation to resolve its conflicts at the negotiation table, not on the battlefield.

Spirit: What happened on your peace delegation to Israel and Palestine?

Hartsough: Scott Kennedy and I led a delegation to Israel and Palestine in 2009-2010. What most influenced me is that, similar to Kosovo, there is a very broad-based movement, especially in the West Bank, where Palestinians have been challenging the wall, and challenging their apartheid system where they are treated as second-class citizens.

They have been resorting to nonviolent struggle, but unfortunately, Israel has not responded very positively to that nonviolent struggle. And there are also many Israelis that are very committed to justice for Palestinians, and are actually joining in weekly nonviolent demonstrations across the West Bank. It is important to try to bring this to light for the rest of the world.

This is a nonviolent movement where, week after week, people are marching to the walls that are separating their communities from their fields, and they are being tear-gassed and shot with rubber bullets. And there are Israelis from the religious community called Rabbis for Human Rights that are supporting them and acting in solidarity with them.

Israel is using massive bombing and a total blockade and locking the borders so people can’t get in or out — all in an effort to try to find security. It is exactly the opposite of what is needed. The only real peace that can be created there is a peace where there is a sense of justice, and where every person is respected for their religious beliefs and nationality.

Seeking A World Beyond War

Spirit: It is fascinating to me that, after a lifetime of being involved in many idealistic campaigns for peace, instead of becoming more “practical” or “realistic,” you are now involved in perhaps your most utopian campaign of all — a World Beyond War. Is there any real hope of abolishing warfare?

Hartsough: It’s called World Beyond War: A Global Movement to End All Wars. The overwhelming numbers of people in the world do not benefit because of war, and are suffering because of war. Our governments continue this anachronistic practice of fighting wars because that’s how they think they’ll get security.

We know that wars are not working. Wars are bankrupting us. Trillions of dollars are being wasted on wars and preparation for wars. And that forces the governments to cut funds for every social program and from schools and environmental programs and parks and homeless programs and low-income housing and programs for the elderly and children.

Spirit: How are peace activists building this movement to abolish war?

Hartsough: We have over 4,000 people who have signed a Declaration of Peace. [This is available at www.worldbeyondwar.org.] We have 68 countries where people have signed the Declaration of Peace. People who have signed this declaration are committed to not engage in or support wars of any kind and to work nonviolently to end all wars.

We have committees that are working on strategy, fundraising, outreach, nonviolent training, and the use of social media. We have people doing the research to document that wars are not working and that there are viable alternatives to war right now. The campaign is still in its initial stages. We have to do a tremendous amount of education not only among peace people, but all the groups that could benefit by ending war.

Ending war is possible if the people of the world realize that those of us who want peace are the massive majority, and we have to force our governments to listen to us. We need to challenge our governments to stop this nonsense, and if they don’t listen to us, we will engage in massive nonviolent resistance.

Spirit: You have recently written a book about your lifetime work for peace and justice. What can you tell us about it?

Hartsough: My book is Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist. It shares my experiences with nonviolent movements over the last 60 years. I think that we all need to be inspired by the stories of people that have been engaging in nonviolent resistance around the world.

Hopelessness is maybe our greatest enemy. So people end up feeling disempowered, and that there’s nothing we can do to change things. In this book, I’m trying to challenge that sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. The status quo wants us to believe that we’re powerless and that we’re nobodies.

But people in the Philippines, in Liberia, in Eastern Europe, in Tunisia, in Egypt, and in many other parts of the world understand that they’re not powerless, and that nonviolent struggle is the most effective means to challenge oppressive governments. This book shares my own experiences with nonviolent movements that have made an enormous difference in changing the world.

The Three Most Inspiring Movements

Spirit: In light of your involvement in countless social-change movements, what are the three movements that you found to be the most inspiring?

Hartsough: I would say the Civil Rights movement in this country, the Occupy movement, and the movement against the Vietnam War.

Spirit: Why do these three movements stand out as the most extraordinary?

Hartsough: During the movement to end the Vietnam war, communities all across this country — churches and labor unions, university and high school students, women’s groups — decided that the war in Vietnam was a lie and was killing millions of people in our name and with our tax dollars, and they were going to have to stop it. That same commitment is what we have to create again in the World Beyond War movement today.

The Civil Rights movement started with one woman, Rosa Parks, in Montgomery, Alabama. It started with four students in Greensboro, North Carolina. Both of those actions were sparks that ignited people all over the South, and then eventually people all over the country, to stop the insanity of segregation and second-class citizenship. People put their own lives on the line to create a society that could truly be called a just and democratic society. Those sparks ignited a whole movement of thousands of people willing to risk arrest and violence.

The Occupy movement was a real sign of hope. Occupy was the most recent of these movements and, again, it was sparked by people at the grass roots of our society. People saw a totally serious flaw in our society. They saw that the government is really being controlled by the rich and the corporations while ignoring the well-being of the people. We’ve got to take back our government for the people and the Occupy movement was trying to do that. It was inspiring that so many people left their comfortable homes and went out on the streets and acted to get this country back on track.

David Hartsough’s book, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist, is available from PM Press, local bookstores, or Amazon.