Born in Altheimer, Arkansas, Wally Nelson (1909–2002) grew up in a family of sharecroppers, then attended Ohio Wesleyan University. He got his fierce pacifism, he tells us here, not from politics but from his father’s mode of dealing with racial injustice: teaching his children that, in one of Wally’s favorite phrases, “there was only one race, the human race,” the implication being not only that blacks and whites belonged to the same race but that Americans and Germans and Japanese did too. (“Wally” rather than “Nelson” because I knew him—“Nelson” feels impossibly impersonal.)
Wally was already a committed antiwar activist when World War II broke out; he had participated in the national student “Strike Against War” campaign back in 1934–35. At first he registered as a conscientious objector, and spent a year in a Civilian Public Service Camp near Coshocton, Ohio (he later referred to the camps as “civilian public slavery”). But then he chose to withdraw from such cooperation with the government and walked out, receiving a five-year prison sentence and ultimately serving thirty-three months in the Cuyahoga County Jail and in federal prisons in Milan, Michigan, and Danbury, Connecticut. In the last institution he went on a 114-day hunger strike, enduring force-feeding for eighty-seven days. He also met his future wife Juanita in prison; she was then a reporter working on a story.
After his release in 1946 Wally participated in the first Freedom Rides; in 1948 he and Juanita helped found the Peacemakers; in the early 1950s he was the first national field officer for the Congress of Racial Equality. Much of Wally’s life after 1948 is recounted on page 334, in the note to his wife Juanita’s essay “A Matter of Freedom”; they were together from that year until his death, each supporting the other in their similarities and differences alike.
Unlike Juanita, he was not by temperament a writer, but he was a lively, engaging talker, gracious and fierce. The graciousness made the fierceness surprising; you kept thinking that someone so gracious would yield on some matter of principle, but Wally never did. What he said about Tiananmen Square is characteristic: “What happened in China last month was because you had people following orders.” Or, more generally: “I never accuse presidents of doing anything—we do it.” Deena Hurwitz and Craig Simpson interviewed him in his mid-seventies for their oral history Against the Tide: Pacifist Resistance in the Second World War (1984), and to their credit Wally spoke to them openly and with great force, focusing mostly on his upbringing and on his experiences during World War II.
I WAS quite taken with the Sermon on the Mount and trying to make Christianity something more than just going to church. This I got from my father, my one influence who believed very much that if you say you believe in a thing, you demonstrated it by doing it or attempting to do it. I got strong influences from my home not to think in terms of pacifism as such. No one knew anything about the word “pacifism” when I was a child, but the whole concept of love, of understanding that there is one family—the human race—I got that at home back in Arkansas in situations where I was being confronted in a most brutal way.
For example, as a child between the ages of eight and ten, I could be walking down the street with a playmate or two in a certain section of the city and someone would whistle. We’d look around and the street would be filled with guys on bicycles and running, and all of them teenagers. And here we were just kids. We’d start running, and they’d start chasing us, and they would catch some of us occasionally and beat us. Most of us would run home crying and hating, hating the whites and this type of thing. My father almost instinctively would be trying to give some consolation to his kids who faced this. What could he say? I think he was hard put to know what he could say. He would say words to remind us that these people were misguided, that we were all a part of the human race, and that we were required to love everybody, even those people who mistreated us. Then he would say, “even the whites, even the whites.” It was that type of preaching that affected me very much as I was trying to make up what it was I believed and which way I wanted to build my life. By the time I was seriously thinking about this, I’d accepted the thesis that there’s one race, the human race.
By the time the war came along, I was well enough along in my thinking that when I was invited to go and kill the Germans and Japanese, I knew I was being invited to kill my brothers and sisters. It was just as real to me to say, “OK, the Nelson family is a pretty bad lot, and we want you to take this gun and kill your family because they can’t get along, so we need to have peace, take this gun and kill your siblings and your mother and father.” Another thing, by that time, if I’d believed that violence solved problems and particularly that type of problem, I would have already been dead because I would have already gone out with a gun and started killing people. But it would have been people who I’d had personal contact with. But no one is going to write me from Washington or anywhere else and go “Hey, there’s a woman named Deena Hurwitz we’re disturbed with, and if we tell you what she’s done, you’d be disturbed with her, and go over there and blow her head off!” Uh, uh! None of this stuff! I will have to know you and you will have to have demonstrated to me, I would say, “Boy that woman is evil! Now I gotta do something about it!” Nobody but nobody is gonna tell me that I got enemies 100 miles away whom I have never seen, or never met, nor will I ever meet.
They had a system in the house where they put us: you walked into a cell, the guy way up at the head of the outside would hit something and all the doors would come together and lock at the same time. They couldn’t do that until every door was closed. So all the guys went in the cells, they all pulled the doors closed. I didn’t do anything to the door, so the guy hollered to me, “Close the door.” He didn’t call me by name, as a matter of fact, he didn’t know my name. Didn’t make any difference. So I didn’t do anything. He said, “Hey” and I still didn’t say anything. Now he didn’t want to walk down there, that was his position. These people like to use the least amount of energy, physical or otherwise. So he and another guy were up there, and they were about as far as that door from me, they were standing outside where they could operate this thing. But they couldn’t do it when the door to the cell I was in wasn’t closed.
Finally he said, “The guy that’s in the cell,” and he called out the number cell I was in. I stuck my head out the door and I said, “I don’t close jail doors.” “What’d you say?” “I said, I don’t close prison doors.” They opened that door and they bounced down there, boom, boom, boom, both of them came down there. He said something to me and I answered. He drew back to hit me, and the other man caught his arm. He was just so angry because he had to come down there, and that’s all he was angry about.
By the time I got to Danbury people knew I was coming. They knew I was a noncooperator, so they immediately took me to a place where they didn’t try to process me. When you’re a noncooperator, that’s when things happen to you. They don’t try to process you through all that rigamarole, they get rid of you as soon as they possibly can.
During my hunger strike, there was a change of wardens. The new warden came to see me real soon. He introduced himself, “I’m the new warden, I came to meet you and also I want to know what type of parole, what type of supervision will you accept?” I said, “The only thing I would accept, you open the door, and I’ll go home, and I will not come back to haunt you. That’s the only thing I would accept.” “Well, I thought you would say that.” He said, “I want you guys out of here. I got a beautiful program for my prison but I cannot do it with you guys sitting up here. I’m gonna see that you get out of here.” So, in a couple of months or so, they did release us.
Right next to the cell in Milan, Michigan was a young Nazi. He was in the German army, he was a lieutenant and they captured him. So he was a prisoner of war out in Arizona, broke out of camp, stole a car, and they caught him in some state somewhere across the country. They brought him to federal prison on the Dyre Act, which says that driving a stolen car across the state line becomes a federal offense. So he winds up in Milan, Michigan.
He was a Nazi Youth, he grew up with all the stuff they taught. This was their education, and this was what he grew up believing. He accepted Mein Kampf as being true. We discussed Mein Kampf, we discussed all types of things. It was very interesting that he could discuss this with me without feeling that he was betraying his Nazi beliefs. You see in terms of the ladder of human scale, I was on the bottom. In terms of the ability of human beings, you see, the person of black skin just had no ability at all. They were apt to be very violent from Mein Kampf’s point of view.
So we carried on, and I think that our conversations were somewhat consciousness raising for him, because we went into all these things. I didn’t accuse him of being a devil or anything like this, we just discussed various points. I tried to argue my point, to show him how unreasonable I thought such a policy was. This went on for days, this type of discussion. I do think that he was affected somewhat by our conversations, but we never got into any recriminations. Two people who thoroughly disagreed. There were some questions, perhaps, on his mind. This was someone who I had begun to appreciate and like as an individual because he was a very likable person even though he believed these theories.
It was a very good type of contact for me to have in that situation. He reassured me that he and anyone coming from that whole scene was every bit as human as anyone I’d known, just misled.
Finally I began to feel, I came to the conclusion that I was cooperating not only with my imprisonment, but by this time I was getting to know that prisons are very bad, that no one should be in prisons, I was very strongly against prisons by this time and I began to see that by feeding my body, I was helping them to keep my body there. And it came to me clearly that if they were going to continue to keep me in prison it was going to be their full responsibility to keep me there. They must keep me alive and everything, because I wasn’t going to participate. I notified the authorities of my decision and said, as of such and such a date, I was through with their ball game. “If you want the body to stay alive, it is absolutely your responsibility. I’m not going to maintain my body here in this prison. When you release me I will take responsibility for my body.” Now that became the most important decision I’ve ever made. It was the decision that really gave me insight into what freedom is. Because here I stopped being afraid of death. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was clear of what I was doing. I was clear of what could happen.
It was the most freeing decision in my life. I haven’t eaten in jail since, and I’ve been in jail many times since that time. I haven’t participated in trials or this type of thing. Whenever I’m dragged off to jail, it is the jail and court’s business when I get out. I don’t plan with people that I’m going to be out at a certain time. The only plan I have is that when they open the door I will leave. If they don’t open the door, I am here.
I’m through with power, I’m not interested in power, I’m not interested in helping people to attain power. One of my strongest criticisms of the so-called “black movement” is that they are into power. The women’s movement is into power; all these movements. But that’s not where it’s at. We’re not going to get one place until we get off this power trip and get on the human trip, stop jockeying for power and really try to become real human beings and support each other’s humanity.