Giants for whom nonviolence was no game

I skim a daily email of headlines from the Los Angeles Times (a surprisingly good newspaper which I would recommend to anyone interested in California doings.) Today this picture and squib occupied the section that publication calls "From the archives."

James Peck of New York who was on one of the two Freedom Rider buses is attacked at the bus station in Birmingham, Ala. ...The other bus was burned in Anniston, Ala., en route to Birmingham. (Underwood Archives / Getty Images)

On May 4, 1961, the first Freedom Ride—a political protest against the segregation of interstate bus travel in the South—began as a group of white and Black Americans departed Washington, D.C., on buses bound for New Orleans.

Along the way, the Freedom Riders encountered violence, most severely in Alabama. On May 14, upon stopping outside Anniston to change a slashed tire, one bus was firebombed and the Freedom Riders were beaten.

After arriving in Birmingham, the second bus was similarly attacked and the passengers were beaten. In both cases, law enforcement was suspiciously late in responding.

Jim Peck never entirely recovered from that beating, though his cracked skull and smashed face never stopped him. I knew him a little in New York City in the early 1970s when he was a fixture at the War Resisters League office, around the corner from the Catholic Worker where I was part of the community. He seemed a quiet man who labored doggedly in a corner, mostly on encouraging resistance to paying taxes for war.

Yet the unassuming Peck was a giant in the broad struggle for justice. In the 1930s, Peck agitated for labor rights; during World War II he was imprisoned for refusing the draft; in the 1950s he campaigned against the Cold War nuclear arms build-up; in the 1960s, he opposed America's Vietnam incursion as well as struggling for civil rights; in the 1970s, he joined campaigns against nuclear energy and militarism in all its forms. Reading his Wikipedia entry is exhausting, but I highly recommend it. His was a life well lived. It is a catalogue of costly witness -- assaults, beatings, jailings and unfailing commitment. The entry says he was arrested some 60 times for acting on his convictions -- I suspect that may be an undercount.

What stands out about Jim and the other giants of the 20th century American nonviolent left who he worked alongside -- AJ Muste, Bayard Rustin, Barbara Deming, Dave Dellinger, Grace Paley, Joan Nestle, David McReynolds -- was that their agitation was not performative. This was no game. Splashy, yes! Theatrical, yes! Aggressive, yes! But above all rooted in a willingness to risk and experience personal material and physical sacrifice to embody principles greater than themselves. They were at odds with their society and country. They could not live any other way.