Holiday Card Senders
I encourage readers to send holiday cards to political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. Such greetings comfort and strengthen the prisoner, and alert officials and prison personnel that people on the outside are aware of the incarceration. Such groups as Amnesty International, Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters League, and Veterans for Peace publish lists around the winter holidays. Of the hundreds of cards I received, I was I was able to smuggle out only the names of a few dozen. Here are
Steve Allen (December 26, 1921-October 30, 2000)- American television personality, radio personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, writer, and advocate of scientific skepticism. Achieved national fame as the first host of The Tonight Show, the first late-night television talk show, in September 1954. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Allen
Katherine Arnett (nee McCollin) (February 5, 1894, d. 1984). Associate Secretary of American Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1964; treasurer, CCCO. https://www.womeninpeace.org/a-names/2017/4/19/katherine-arnett
David Dellinger (August 22, 1915-May 25, 2004). influential AmericanLink radical pacifist and activist for nonviolent social change. Dellinger achieved peak notoriety as one of the Chicago Seven who were put on trial in 1968. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dellinger
Julius Eichel (January 2 1896-March 24,1989). Socialist, refused to register for draft in WWI, sentenced by court-martial to 20 years in prison, commuted after 26 months in various prisons, including Fort Leavenworth. Because of his refusal to work, he was chained eight hours a day so that his feet barely touched the ground. In 1942, at the age of 46, he was indicted on the same charge. The indictment was dropped on instructions from Selective Service System director, Maj. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/26/obituaries/julius-eichel-at-93-conscientious-objector.html
Richard Gregg (1885-1974). American social philosopher said to be
"the first American to develop a substantial theory of nonviolent resistance." Influenced the thinking of Martin Luther King,
Jr, Aldous Huxley, civil-rights theorist Bayard Rustin, and pacifist and socialist reformer Jessie Wallace Hughan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gregg_(social_philosopher)
Staughton and Alice Lynd met at Harvard Summer School in 1950 and married in 1951. He (b. 1925, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staughton_Lynd)
is a renowned historian and teacher, self-described “social democratic
pacifist” and “Marxist Existentialist Pacifist,” and the author of more
than 22 books. Alice Niles (b. 1930), a social activist and scholar,
became a draft counselor and trainer of counselors during the Vietnam
war, and later a lawyer, and is the author of several books, some
co-authored with her husband. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8OJRI9GNs4
Richard Matera (b. 1925), liberator of Buchenwald, poet, pastor, United Church of Christ. https://airandspace.si.edu/support/wall-of-honor/rev-dr-richard-e-matera
Peace News, pacifist magazine first published June 6, 1936 to serve the peace movement in the United Kingdom. From later in 1936 to April 1961 it was the official paper of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), and from 1990 to 2004 was co-published with War Resisters International. https://www.peacenews.info/
Jim Peck (December 19, 1914-July 12, 1993) American activist who practiced nonviolent resistance during World War II and in the Civil Rights Movement, the only person who participated in both the Journey of Reconciliation (1947) and the first Freedom Ride of 1961, has been called a white civil rights hero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Peck_(pacifist))
Gregorio Prestopino (1907-1984), an American artist, one of the major American painters who refused to reject the image, devoted his career to depicting the human condition, director of the MacDowell Colony, a lifelong association that profoundly influenced his art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorio_Prestopino
David Samas, one of the Ft. Hood Three, who refused to deploy to Vietnam the following year and subsequently sued that the war was illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_Three
George Willoughby (December 9, 1914-January 5, 2010), a Quaker activist who advocated for world peace, and conducted nonviolent protests against war and preparations for war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Willoughby_(activist))
