Sixty Years of Working for Justice and Peace in the Valley
April 13th 4:00-6:30
160 Commonwealth Honors College Bldg; Events Hall East
Distinguished Lecture Series
on Social Thought and Political Economy
Co-sponsored with Commonwealth Honors College
Frances Crowe, former Director of Western Mass AFSC and Activist Extraordinaire
Frances Crowe was born in 1919 and found her calling as a political activist in the wake of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the past six decades she has been a leading activist in the Pioneer Valley, where she has played central roles in the anti-war, anti-nuclear, and anti-apartheid movements, among many other struggles. During the Vietnam War, she provided draft counseling for thousands of conscientious objector applicants, and she has frequently engaged in direct action, from climbing the fence of a nuclear submarine base and painting “Thou Shalt Not Kill” on missile tube casings (for which she served a federal prison term) to running a pirate radio station from her walnut tree in a successful effort to convince local radio stations to broadcast Democracy Now! At UMass, she was central to the campaigns to divest from South Africa and to ban anthrax research on campus. Her talk will cover many of these events, which are also recounted in vivid detail in her new memoir, Finding My Radical Soul.