Jackie Hudson, nun who believed in nuclear disarmament, dies at age 76

 by Amy Phan

August 5, 2011

POULSBO, WA — Jackie Hudson, a Poulsbo-based Dominican nun who spent decades demonstrating in support of nuclear disarmament, died at Harrison Medical Center on Wednesday. She was 76.

Hudson died from a type of blood cancer, according to the Kitsap County Coroner's Office.

She was diagnosed in June, said Sue Ablao, who has demonstrated in favor of nuclear disarmament with Hudson since the 1990s.

The two started managing and living at the Poulsbo-based peace organization Ground Zero for Nonviolent Action Center two years ago. The center organizes educational events and nonviolent protests focused on nuclear abolishment.

Hudson organized and led Ground Zero's nonviolent events, connecting with nuclear disarmament groups around the country.

Her activism landed her in federal prison three times, according to her brother, Frank Hudson.

"But I could not be prouder of her. I have always looked up to her and her stand on things and her willingness to put her life on it," Hudson said in a phone interview from his Michigan home.

The two grew up in a Catholic household in Central Michigan and attended Catholic schools.

Jackie Hudson surprised her family when she decided to become a Dominican nun when she turned 18. No one knew she was that serious, he said.

She received music training from the VanderCook College of Music in Chicago, then went on to teach music in her hometown for 30 years, Frank Hudson said.

During that time, her brother said, she began reading about global warming issues and learned how nuclear production contributed to the problem.

So she quit teaching music to participate in nuclear disarmament events in Michigan. Although small in size — Hudson was only 4 feet and 10 inches tall — she did not back down, her brother said.

In 1990 in Michigan, Hudson was sentenced to six months in jail for her involvement in a protest. In another Michigan incident, on an Easter Sunday, Hudson and other activists spray-painted "Christ lives, Disarm" on empty bunkers, according to Ablao.

"A lot of people respected her commitment and thoughtful concern on issues," Ablao said. "She was very action-oriented and at the same time, acted with deep discernment and thought."

Ablao has family in Bremerton, and she and Hudson decided to move there in 1993 after Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan closed. Wurtsmith had been home to nuclear-armed B-52 bombers.

The two wanted to move to Bremerton because there was opportunity to continue their nuclear disarmament education, Ablao said.

Hudson found work as a driver for Kitsap Transit for about six years before she retired, according to Ablao.

The two continued to organize nuclear disarmament events out of their house until the Ground Zero Center building opened two years ago.

Hudson's cancer diagnosis came just weeks after her most recent run-in with the law.

In July 2010, Hudson and 13 other protesters trespassed onto Department of Energy property in Tennessee, gathered in a circle, prayed and sang. The group was charged with trespassing in May and was awaiting sentencing in prison when Hudson's health started deteriorating.

Authorities eventually dropped her charges and let Hudson return back to Poulsbo, according to Ablao.

Hudson's death comes within days of Ground Zero's events to commemorate World War II atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"Her death was a big shock to all of us. I think (her death) will renew and rededicate myself this weekend for this long struggle to abolish nuclear weapons," said Leonard Eigar, a Ground Zero member.

A celebration of Hudson's life is planned for 1:30 p.m. Aug. 13 at the Ground Zero Center in Poulsbo, located at 16159 Clear Creek Road NW.

Original source: http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2011/aug/05/jackie-hudson-nun-who-fought-for-nuclear-dies-at/

Kip Tiernan, Rosie's Place Founder, Dies at 85

Photo by  Bill Brett, Boston Globe

by Bryan Marquard

Kip Tiernan, who founded Rosie’s Place, the nation’s first shelter for homeless women, and whose persistent, raspy voice echoed from the streets to the State House as she advocated for the poor, died of cancer Saturday, July 2, 2011, in her South End apartment.  She was 85.

Usually clad in a canvas hat and work pants, a cross and a skate key dangling from a leather strap around her neck, Ms. Tiernan helped create an A-to-Z of agencies that assist the disadvantaged in Massachusetts. By example, she also inspired so many people to try to ease suffering that, directly or indirectly, she may have touched more lives of the poor in the Commonwealth than anyone else in the past four decades.

“Every day of her life she lived for social justice, and the lives she saved were untold,’’ Mayor Thomas M. Menino said. “She always said that someday we will stamp out homelessness, but until that day we have to make sure everyone understands that a homeless person could be one of us. She was a very special person, and there’s a big hole in our lives today because Kip’s not here. This nation is going to miss Kip Tiernan because of her fight for social justice.’’

Along with Fran Froehlich, her partner in advocacy for more than 35 years, Ms. Tiernan founded, helped found, or was a founding member of a number of agencies and panels, including Boston Health Care for the Homeless, Boston Food Bank, Community Works, Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, Finex House, Food for Free, John Leary House, My Sister’s Place, Transition House, the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, and Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission.

The range of suffering was such that “sometimes you think there aren’t any tears left,’’ Ms. Tiernan told the Globe in 1988, “and you find yourself sobbing.’’

Strong words were her response more often than tears, however. Drawn by faith to her calling, she brought unconditional love to each encounter with the homeless, and she didn’t hesitate to criticize the powerful if they backed what she believed were unfair policies or tried to slide by with words of pity.

The cross she wore was more than a symbol.

“A rooted woman, Kip always wears that cross,’’ Globe op-ed columnist James Carroll wrote in 1996, “which marks her not for piety or for a religion of easy answers, but for being, in her words, ‘an angry daughter of Christ. . . . I find that the cross of Jesus is the radical condemnation of an unjust world. You have to stay with the one crucified or stand with the crucifiers.’ ’’

Sue Marsh, executive director of Rosie’s Place, said in a statement that she was “so sorry to be saying goodbye to a good friend of mine. . . . She has been the fiery, feisty, and beloved touchstone for the mission and vision of Rosie’s Place, a compassionate friend to every woman in need.’’

On behalf of housing, health care, and an array of social justice issues, Ms. Tiernan lobbied, fasted, marched in protest, and was arrested during sit-ins at government offices. In November 1990, she began a fast in Arlington Street Church and explained why in an op-ed essay for the Globe.

“We should atone for what we have allowed to happen to all poor people in this state, in the name of fiscal austerity or plain mean-spiritedness. . . . We have, as citizens, much to repent for, for what we have and have not done, to ease the suffering of our sisters and brothers who have no lobby to protect them.’’

Before founding Rosie’s Place in 1974, Ms. Tiernan traveled to meet with legendary Catholic activist Dorothy Day, from whose life she drew inspiration and spiritual sustenance for the decades that lay ahead.

Beth Healy, a Globe reporter who is writing a biography of Ms. Tiernan, said: “She had this soft spot in her heart for broken people, whether they were sick or mentally ill or struggling with addiction. Kip would hug a person dying of AIDS back in the 1980s when everyone else was running away. She would talk to someone living on the streets that no one else would talk to.’’

Ms. Tiernan, Froehlich said, combined compassion with “a pragmatic approach to solving issues, like: Hungry? Food. Homeless? Housing. And she challenged people with that clarity.’’

Though Ms. Tiernan asked “hard questions, at the same time, I was always impressed that she embraced people of all persuasions because she wanted them to see what she saw,’’ Froehlich said. “And I mean really embraced them. She would hold somebody’s hand while they were disagreeing with her. She really wanted you to join her in this pursuit of justice for people who have nothing.’’

Born in West Haven, Conn., Ms. Tiernan was 6 months old when her father died and 11 when her mother died. Raised by her maternal grandmother, she learned during the Great Depression to help others.

“Her grandmother always had soup or stew on the stove,’’ Froehlich said, “and when people came to the house who were down on their luck, she always had bowls of soup or stew ready for them.’’

By her teens, she was learning to fly a plane and play jazz piano. She also was expelled from a Catholic boarding school, telling the Globe she had failed math and asked too many difficult moral questions.

She worked as a newspaper reporter and moved to Boston in 1947 to attend the Boston Conservatory on a scholarship, only to be expelled for drinking. “I was raped once,’’ she told the Globe in 1988. “I was 19. Drunk.’’

Speaking of the women she served at Rosie’s Place, she added: “I’ll tell you one thing. It helps me identify with what some of these women have been through.’’

Ms. Tiernan joined Alcoholics Anonymous, learned from recovering street drunks how to stay sober, and became a successful advertising copywriter with her own agency. In 1968, she did some free work for priests who had invited activist Daniel Berrigan to speak at a church.

Listening to him, she later recalled, it was as if a voice inside her head said, “I have just passed through a door, and there is no going back.’’

Leaving the affluence of her advertising life, she moved into Warwick House, an urban ministry center in Roxbury. Using her copywriter’s facility with language, she became one of Boston’s most quotable advocates for the poor, coining phrases such as “from the Great Society to the Grate Society.’’

A service will be announced for Ms. Tiernan, whose longtime companion of decades, Edith Nicholson, died in the 1990s.

Ms. Tiernan helped raise Nicholson’s three children and leaves one of those children, Peg Wright of Saugerties, N.Y.; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. For the past 15 years, Ms. Tiernan and Donna Pomponio have been a couple. They married in 2004.

“The tragedies in the world continued to propel her to fix things and make them better,’’ Pomponio said of Ms. Tiernan. “She knew that as human beings, we could do better for each other. There was a support and strength that came from that woman, and having her by your side and in your life, you knew that you could do it, too.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com. 

Source:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2011/07/04/rosies_place_founder_kip_tiernan_dies_at_85/?s_campaign=8315

Minny Pohlmann, environmental activist, dies

 Wilhelmina “Minny” Pohlmann, a Frederick County (MD) environmental advocate who was instrumental in staving off development at the base of scenic Sugarloaf Mountain, died June 8, 2011 at Homewood at Crumland Farms in Frederick of a stroke. She was 92.

Sugarloaf is a lone, 1,280-foot mountain that rises abruptly from the orchards and rolling fields of hay and corn below. Crisscrossed by trails, the hill has been protected since 1946 as a privately owned, publicly accessible recreation area through a trust established by Gordon Strong, a wealthy Chicago banker.

The mantle of picturesque farms surrounding the mountain, however, has long been viewed as prime land for development within commuting distance of Washington. Mrs. Dickerson, who lived on one of those farms for more than 40 years, spent decades working to protect the character of her rural community.

An assistant planner for Frederick County in the 1960s and 70s, she put her knowledge of the zoning code to use in her efforts to preserve open space. She successfully down-zoned wide swaths of land from industrial use to open space. She also was part of a movement that persuaded the state to establish the Monocacy Natural Resources Area southwest of Sugarloaf.

She spent thousands of her own dollars to buy acreage with full development rights, then tacked on a conservation easement that reduced the resale value but protected the land in perpetuity.

Mrs. Pohlmann was the recipient of numerous awards for her advocacy and volunteerism.

She said the nicest thing she ever heard came from the mouth of an opponent, according to the 1987 book “Bay Country,” by environmental writer Tom Horton. During a public hearing on protecting yet another tract near Sugarloaf, a developer pointed his finger at her and said, “Minny Pohlmann, this is all your fault.”

Wilhelmina van de Wall was born March 30, 1919, in Washington, where her father, a Dutch musician, was working as a harpist in the Wilson White House.

Until she was 6, she lived in Holland and New York and spoke only Dutch. Her family settled in Allentown, Pa., where she learned English and graduated from high school. She received a bachelor’s degree in community planning from Columbia University Teachers College. She received a nursing degree from Columbia in 1943.

In 1944, she moved with her husband to the Washington area, where she worked as a community health nurse with the USO nursery and the D.C. health department. During the 1950s, she was an office administrator and nurse at Green Acres School in Bethesda.

The Pohlmanns’ three-year-old son, Kepi, died from cancer in 1948, and after a period of grief and reflection, they left the city for rural life. They raised cattle, horses, goats and hay on a 172-acre farm that straddled the boundary between Frederick and Montgomery counties.

Besides her environmental advocacy involving Sugarloaf, Mrs. Pohlmann worked to clean up the Potomac River watershed as a longtime member of the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin and the Maryland State Water Quality Advisory Committee.

She and others launched a successful fight against the proposed Sixes Bridge Dam on the Monocacy River, a Potomac tributary, which would have created a 12-mile-long reservoir and inundated more than 3,000 acres of farmland. She also lobbied for protection of the C&O Canal as a national historic park in the early 1970s, and later in support of restoring the Monocacy Aqueduct.

In 1995, Mrs. Pohlmann described herself as a “little old lady in tennis shoes” while introducing President Bill Clinton before an address at Rock Creek Park during which he promised to veto a Republican revision of the Clean Water Act. “This country,” Clinton declared when he took the microphone, “would be better off if we had a few more little old ladies in tennis shoes, don’t you think?”

Her husband, Kenneth E. Pohlmann, died in 1976. A stepdaughter, Florence McIntyre, and a stepson, David Pohlmann, died in 1972 and 2001, respectively.

Survivors include a daughter, Blanca Poteat, who lives near Dickerson; a stepson, Kenneth E. Pohlmann Jr. of Melbourne, Fla.; 11 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/minny-pohlmann-environmental-activist-dies/2011/06/16/AG4pQwbH_story.html

Gus Tyler

Gus Tyler, a longtime labor activist died June 3, 2011, in Sarasota, Fla. He was 99.

Tyler worked for more than 40 years for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union — serving in various capacities, including as political director, director of education and assistant president. A 1988 Newsday profile of Tyler said that his tenure at the ILGWU “helped make the union one of the most progressive and enlightened in organized labor,” and his prolific writing gave “labor and democratic socialism a cerebral underpinning that speaks louder than rants and posturing.”

Tyler authored more than a dozen books, including a history of the ILGWU, and contributed to such magazines as The New Leader and Dissent.

Born Augustus Tilove to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, N.Y., he would change his last name to Tyler —in honor of Wat Tyler,the leader of a 14th-century English peasant rebellion.  Tyler, who lived for many years in Great Neck, N.Y., is survived by two children, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren; he was predeceased by his wife of more than 60 years, Marie Tyler.

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/138362/#ixzz1OcXUgqff

Gil Scott-Heron

May 27, 2011

Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media in pieces like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died on Friday, May 27, 2011, at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 62 and had been a longtime resident of Harlem.

His death was announced in a Twitter message on Friday night by his British publisher, Jamie Byng, and confirmed early Saturday by an American representative of his record label, XL. The cause was not immediately known, although The Associated Press reported that he had become ill after returning from a trip to Europe.

Mr. Scott-Heron often bristled at the suggestion that his work had prefiguredrap. “I don’t know if I can take the blame for it,” he said in an interview last year with the music Web site The Daily Swarm. He preferred to call himself a “bluesologist,” drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz and Harlem renaissance poetics.

Yet, along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and the stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. And he has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West.

“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word,” Chuck D, the leader of Public Enemy, told The New Yorker in 2010. “He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.”

Mr. Scott-Heron’s career began with a literary rather than a musical bent. He was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949, and reared in Tennessee and New York. His mother was a librarian and an English teacher; his estranged father was a Jamaican soccer player.

In his early teens, Mr. Scott-Heron wrote detective stories, and his work as a writer won him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in the Bronx, where he was one of 5 black students in a class of 100. Following in the footsteps of Langston Hughes, he went to the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and he wrote his first novel at 19, a murder mystery called “The Vulture.” A book of verse, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” and a second novel, “The Nigger Factory,” soon followed.

Working with a college friend, Brian Jackson, Mr. Scott-Heron turned to music in search of a wider audience. His first album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” was released in 1970 on Flying Dutchman, a small label, and included a live recitation of “Revolution” accompanied by conga and bongo drums. Another version of that piece, recorded with a full band including the jazz bassist Ron Carter, was released on Mr. Scott-Heron’s second album, “Pieces of a Man,” in 1971.

“Revolution” established Mr. Scott-Heron as a rising star of the black cultural left, and its cool, biting ridicule of a nation anesthetized by mass media has resonated with the socially disaffected of various stripes — campus activists, media theorists, coffeehouse poets — for four decades. With sharp, sardonic wit and a barrage of pop-culture references, he derided society’s dominating forces as well as the gullibly dominated:

The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother.

During the 1970s, Mr. Scott-Heron was seen as a prodigy with significant potential, although he never achieved more than cult popularity. He recorded 13 albums from 1970 to 1982, and was one of the first acts that the music executive Clive Davis signed after starting Arista Records in 1974. In 1979, Mr. Scott-Heron performed at Musicians United for Safe Energy’s “No Nukes” benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, and in 1985, he appeared on the all-star anti-apartheid album “Sun City.”

But by the mid-1980s, Mr. Scott-Heron had begun to fade, and his recording output slowed to a trickle. In later years, he struggled publicly with addiction. Since 2001, Mr. Scott-Heron had been convicted twice for cocaine possession, and he served a sentence at Rikers Island in New York for parole violation.

Commentators sometimes used Mr. Scott-Heron’s plight as an example of the harshness of New York’s drug laws. Yet his friends were also horrified by his descent. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr. Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe.

That image seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?”

Complete information about Mr. Scott-Heron's survivors was not immediately available, but Mr. Byng, his publisher, said that they included a half-brother, Denis Scott-Heron; a son, Rumal; and two daughters, Gia Scott-Heron and Che Newton. Mr. Byng added that Mr. Scott-Heron had recently been working on voluminous memoirs, parts of which he hoped to publish soon.

Despite Mr. Scott-Heron’s public problems, he remained an admired figure in music, and he made occasional concert appearances and was sought after as a collaborator. Last year, XL released “I’m New Here,” his first album of new material in 16 years, which was produced by Richard Russell, a British record producer who met Mr. Scott-Heron at Rikers Island in 2006 after writing him a letter.

Reviews for the album inevitably called Mr. Scott-Heron the “godfather of rap,” but he made it clear he had different tastes.

“It’s something that’s aimed at the kids,” he once said. “I have kids, so I listen to it. But I would not say it’s aimed at me. I listen to the jazz station.”

This originally appeared at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/arts/music/gil-scott-heron-voice-of-black-culture-dies-at-62.html

Alice Glazer

The late Alice and Gene Glazer in an undated photo.

May 23, 2011

Social activist Alice Glazer died at the age of 86 on Monday, May 23, 2011, in Boulder, Colorado.

Some of the causes Glazer marched for included the 1963 march for civil rights in Washington, D.C. led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, and marches that protested military action in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq.  She was also a staunch supporter of organized labor and workers’ rights.

Ms. Glazer went to countless rallies and demonstrations to support civil rights, workers, and the anti-war movement in Vietnam and Iraq. She also supported the Reverend Jessie Jackson.  She fought racism, supported labor rights, and supported world peace based on equality and fairness.

“She was against the Iraq War before it started,” her son Barry Glazer said, “and she did not care if her views were popular.”

“She educated people through her example.” Glazer added, and she taught people that they can stand up for what is right, and touched the lives of everyone she met.  Her legacy was that your voice matters. If people stand together they can bring about profound change.”

Ms. Glazer is survived by her two children, Barry and Dara, and a grandson, Alex, 8, Mr. Glazer said.

Vivian Myerson

Vivian Myerson and her husband, Seymour, seen in 1982, display a brick and rock thrown through the front window of their Echo Park home by officers from the LAPD's Public Disorder Intelligence Division because of their political activities. (Los Angeles Times)May 13, 2011

Vivian Myerson, a longtime peace activist and Los Angeles human relations commissioner who won an early legal victory against a controversial Los Angeles Police Department unit that spied on leftists, died May 13, 2011, at her Hollywood home. She was 100.

                              

Myerson and her husband, Seymour, contended that they were subjected to "fascist, terrorist" harassment by the department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division from 1972 to 1976 because of their political activities.

Read more here—

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-vivian-myerson-20110514,0,3873612.story