I usually spend holidays one of two ways. I either work the whole day tying up loose ends or do something totally unrelated to my job, which deals with topics I think we can all agree can be a bit grim at times — nuclear proliferation, curbing the global arms trade, opposing US military aid to repressive regimes, reducing the Pentagon budget, and other important and necessary objectives that can feel like steep uphill climbs at this moment in history.
But this year, on Juneteenth — the anniversary of the freeing of the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, a full two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation — I decided to take a different approach, neither business-as-usual nor enforced leisure time. Instead, I went for a walk and spent some time reflecting on the historical connections between the Black Freedom Movement and the movements for peace and disarmament. I approach the topic with a sense of humility, since I am still learning the history of the two movements and how they have interacted over the years.
The best place to start in understanding the ties between the black freedom and peace and anti-nuclear movements is Vincent Intondi’s essential book, African-Americans Against the Bomb.
One key point among many in Intondi’s book is how Coretta Scott King’s activism for peace has been underappreciated. As Intondi notes, she inspired Dr. King’s anti-nuclear stance through her work with numerous peace groups, beginning during her time as a student at Antioch College and continuing through the 1950s and 1950s.
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For example, Coretta was active with Women Strike for Peace, representing them at a 1962 conference in Geneva that called for a worldwide ban on nuclear testing. In its first major action, the group organized a Nov. 1, 1961 strike in which over 50,000 women marched in 60 cities under the banner “End the Arms Race, Not the Human Race.”
In an essay for Arms Control Today, Kathy Crandall Robinson provides a capsule history of Women Strike for Peace, including their integral role in stopping above ground nuclear testing.
Coretta Scott King and Bayard Rustin are just two of many civil rights activists who spoke out against war and nuclear arms races.
Then there’s Bayard Rustin, a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin was a Quaker who did two years in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II and served as executive secretary of the pacifist War Resisters League from 1954 to 1965. As Intondi notes in his book, in the middle of the US civil rights movement, Rustin traveled to Ghana to join protests against French plans to test a nuclear weapon in the Sahara. And in 1959, Rustin joined an Easter weekend march from London to Aldermaston, the site of a British nuclear weapons facility. All of this occurred before Rustin played a central role in organizing the March on Washington.
Coretta Scott King and Bayard Rustin are just two of many civil rights activists who spoke out against war and nuclear arms races. We have much to learn from their courage and commitment — and their ability to link issues in an organic fashion, in which the focus on one does not detract from attention to the other.
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More recently, in keeping with the theme of how struggles for freedom intersect with efforts to prevent nuclear war, Jasmine Owens has done some immensely important writing on what it means to promote nuclear abolition, which she sees as “rooted in the traditions of slavery abolition.” One thread of her argument is that nuclear weapons are embedded in systems of oppression, and we can’t expect to eliminate them and keep everything else the same, as she notes in an essay for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“Nuclear abolitionists understand nuclear weapons to be related to other oppressive systems — such as white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy — that reinforce each other at the expense of life on Earth, and that are all products of collective individual actions. Nuclear abolition calls for both self-transformation and the systemic transformation of society.”
As the examples of Coretta Scott King and Bayard Rustin demonstrate, some of the most important work for peace and disarmament comes from outside of Washington. In this respect it is important to recognize the role of communities that have suffered the consequences of the development and use of nuclear weapons. They have been central to the fight to limit or eliminate these potentially world-ending weapons, from nuclear blast survivors from Japan (hibakusha), to victims of radiation from US nuclear tests in New Mexico and the Marshall Islands. Communities that have been subjected to the devastating health effects of nuclear testing have pressed for compensation, even as they educate the broader public about the dangers posed by nuclear weapons even when they are not used in warfare.
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One such organization, led by Tina Cordova and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, is leading the fight for inclusion of New Mexico and other excluded communities in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). Their work is highlighted in Lois Lipman’s hard-hitting new documentary First We Bombed New Mexico.
Another critical movement for change that strengthens the call for peace and disarmament, in part by stressing the life and death impact of our distorted budget priorities, is The Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. The campaign draws inspiration from the work begun by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. before his death by an assassin’s bullet in April 1968.
Repairers of the Breach and the Kairos Center launched the new Poor People’s campaign, and Reverends William Barber and Liz Theoharis co-chair it. The campaign was organized to “confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.” The network has assembled a “Poor People’s Moral Budget” that underscores the degree to which runaway Pentagon spending and tax cuts for the rich are a theft from the poor and a driver of escalating inequality.
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As campaign co-chair Reverend Liz Theoharis notes in her new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (coauthored with Noam Sandweiss-Back), leadership in movements for social change often comes from people in communities that suffer the brunt of the inequalities built into our current political and economic system:
“At this time of existential concern, when so many of us feel a deep sense of insecurity and are asking big questions about how we can change things for the better, it is important to learn from the people who have organized, who are organizing, in the many abandoned and forgotten corners of this country. Although the history books often tell a different story, many of this country’s most significant, positive changes have emerged from the bottom of society, with ripple effects that have ultimately yielded broad social benefits.”
In keeping with the spirit of Reverend Theoharis’s book and a parallel report by Kairos Center analysts Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, “A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis,” the Kairos Center has launched a “Survival Revival Organizing Tour” that highlights programs of mutual aid that poor communities are engaging in to survive this moment of extreme austerity and points out that they can be a pillar for a new surge of social justice activism.
What the report calls “extensive survival organizing” has thus far remained “on the margins of the social justice movement landscape.” Care-focused networks hold together thousands of communities but scantly receive the attention they deserve. Lack of attention or not, there is the chance to link “projects of survival,” the report argues, into a movement of “poor and dispossessed people” capable of elevating serious demands of the government and US society.
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All this is now occurring against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s second coming, a development that has put every movement for social change on its back heels, wondering how best to push back against the barrage of harmful, reckless policies coming out of Washington. The turnout of large numbers of demonstrators for democracy on June 14 and the growing unpopularity of the president’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” — an attempt to make devastating cuts in the social safety net while jacking up the Pentagon budget and seeking trillions of dollars in tax cuts — are signs of hope.
Still, however the larger movement for democracy plays out, the peace and anti-nuclear movements have work to do. The best way forward is to build bridges between the peace movement and other struggles for social change. Initially this will involve a good deal of listening and relationship building. And the goal should not be to get organizations working on other life and death issues to switch gears and make disarmament their primary focus. It should be to create a resilient network in which mutual trust prevails, and groups can come together at key moments to push specific issues.
To do this, the culture of the peace and arms control movements will have to change. Arguing among one another won’t work, but the movement could engage in a respectful dialogue about strategy. There will always be different approaches stemming from different perspectives and skillsets. The movement doesn’t want to abandon its strengths, but it does want to make new connections outside of its usual circles.
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Groups should work from their strengths, whether that involves deep expertise on arms control, documenting the health effects of nuclear radiation, estimating the human consequences of a nuclear conflict, engaging in track two diplomacy with counterparts in other nuclear-armed nations, pushing to cut spending on nuclear weapons, grassroots organizing, or getting behind a global push to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. Parallel approaches will entail moments of overlap in which groups across the board can support incremental measures to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict and open the way to further steps on the path to disarmament. Any change that makes nuclear war less likely is well worth the effort.
But one thing is clear: without building power outside of Washington, the best ideas in the world will fall by the wayside, displaced by the power of money, special interest lobbying, and militarist ideology that drive current US policies on nuclear weapons. One key element in building power is making room for new voices and new leadership, even as everyone continues to benefit from the experiences and expertise of an older generation of experts, advocates, and activists.
The challenges before the world can seem overwhelming, but if we proceed with a sense of genuine community our chances of success will improve. Part of community building must include learning together from past efforts to end the nuclear arms race and the existential danger it entails, even as we craft new tactics appropriate to today’s political, cultural, and media environment, which is far different from what prevailed during prior surges in anti-nuclear organizing.
Top photo: Coretta Scott King at the Democratic National Convention, New York City (Warren K. Leffler/Wikimedia Commons)
