Civil Disobedience vs. Civil Defense

This article was first published December 5, 2024 at InDepthNH, New Hampshire’s non-profit, no-paywall news outlet.

DURHAM, NEW HAMPSHIRE—At a service for David Diamond, a longtime peace activist from Dover who died in September, I learned that he had been arrested for refusing to take shelter during a civil defense drill in Durham in 1961, when he was a first-year student at the university. The full story is fascinating, in part because the punitive attitude of Governor Wesley Powell is disturbingly similar to the attitude of our current governor, Chris Sununu.

In a sense, the story starts six years earlier, when Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy, leaders of the Catholic Worker movement, refused to take shelter during the federal government’s first “Operation Alert” civil defense drill in Manhattan. The nuclear arms race was accelerating, and the Eisenhower administration was promoting fallout shelters to protect government officials and the general

Photo by Felton Davis via Wikimedia Commons

population in the event of nuclear war. The protesters maintained that the best course for survival would be to get rid of nuclear weapons, not create a false impression that nuclear war could be survived. Day, Hennacy, Bayard Rustin, A.J. Muste, and two dozen others were arrested. Operation Alert drills and corresponding demonstrations continued for several years.

In the spring of 1961, Robert Kingsley, a UNH grad student, learned about plans for civil defense protests in a newsletter from the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA), a radical pacifist group, and decided to organize one in Durham. Kingsley had spent ten years in the Air Force, including service in Japan during the Korean War as well as training pilots to drop atomic bombs. But at some point, his ex-wife Margo LaPerle recalled in a recent interview, he decided he couldn’t do that anymore and left the Air Force.

In a letter published in the UNH campus newspaper, The New Hampshire, Kingsley announced that on April 28 at 4 pm, the time of the nationwide alert, a group of students and local residents would “commence a non-violent and non-vocal walk up and down the main street of Durham.” Knowing that arrests might follow and wanting officials to understand the protesters’ commitment to nonviolence, Kingsley met ahead of time with the local police chief, a judge, and the Associate Dean of Students.

Main Street Durham, late 1950s.  Photo courtesy of Dunfey Family

“When the alert sounds we will continue to walk,” Kingsley’s letter said. “We will refuse all orders to take shelter. If we should be arrested we will not resist the arresting officers. The purpose to the demonstration is to point up the inadequacy and insanity of our present nuclear defense policy. We invite others to participate in the protest.”

David Diamond was among those who accepted Kingsley’s invitation, as did Alice Nye, at the time named Alice Boodey, another first-year student.

Governor Wesley Powell took notice as well. “State troopers flooded the university town shortly before the 4 PM alert following orders from Gov. Powell for ‘complete and adequate compliance,’” reported Fosters Daily Democrat, the local newspaper. Powell instructed the state’s civil defense director to take down the names of demonstrators and anyone who encouraged them to disobey the order to take shelter.

Hundreds joined the peaceful protest in downtown Durham, where about twenty reporters showed up to watch. As Steve Taylor, who at the time was editor of the The New Hampshire, recalls, “Anybody walking on the street was supposed to go into an adjacent building. If there was no building handy, you could climb into a parked car.” That’s what most everyone did when the orders came. But a band of people refused to take shelter and continued their march down Main Street, where “they were met by the New Hampshire state police.” Bob Kingsley and his wife Margo, pregnant and pushing a baby carriage, were at the front, Nye remembers.

“They were ordered to halt and to take cover,” Taylor recalled, “and they said, ‘No, we’re going to keep marching.’”

Calling refusal to take shelter “a matter of conscience,” Kingsley submitted to arrest, as did Diamond, Nye, and fifteen others. “They didn’t want to deal with pregnant ladies,” said LaPerle, now 87, who was left with her children and a mass of reporters on the sidewalk while the others were taken away by police officers.

Margo LaPerle, in front of Town and Campus, showing the route of the 1961 march.

The eighteen arrestees were charged with violating RSA 107, the Civil Defense Act, punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of $100. They were also placed on academic probation by university officials for the remainder of the term.

Three days later, Gov. Powell, an ex officio member of the university’s board of trustees, telegrammed Eldon Johnson, the UNH president, calling on him to expel the students. “It is my wish that you be aware of my strong personal opinion that the students who participated in the planned and open disobedience on Friday last should be promptly dismissed from the university.” In “this time of national crisis,” Powell said, expulsion of the disobedient students was “an action which should be obviously necessary.” The governor’s demand was reinforced by coverage in the Manchester Union Leader, which had long been on the watch for leftist activity on campus.

While Cold War tensions remained high, the excesses of the McCarthy era had faded in most of the country. But not in New Hampshire, where Dr. Willard Uphaus, the pacifist director of the World Fellowship Center in the White Mountains, was only sixteen months out of jail for refusing to turn over the Center’s guest list to Attorney General Louis Wyman’s inquiry into “subversive activities.” Wyman’s investigation had ended years before, but in the spring of 1961, legislators were debating a bill to establish a permanent “Division of Subversive Investigations” within the Department of Justice. And by chance, Uphaus and his wife had stopped by the home of UNH professor Gwynne Daggett on the eve of the protest. Kingsley and three other students were there for dinner.

Like Uphaus, Daggett had drawn the Attorney General’s attention. Never accused of being a Communist, Daggett had been associated with groups like the Progressive Party, had spoken at World Fellowship, and had even attended a meeting in Weare where Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the guest speaker. The governor wanted to know whether Daggett was really the protest instigator and who else was at the professor’s home for dinner. Three other faculty members, named by the Union Leader, also fell under suspicion.

William O’Neill, an Assistant Attorney General, sent a letter asking David Knapp, who was Acting President at UNH while Johnson was on vacation, to order Daggett to divulge the names of any students who had been at the dinner. Later in the month, another Assistant AG, Richard Greenhalge, went to campus to interview President Johnson at length, as well as several protestors and Professor Daggett. His objective, in the words of Gov. Powell’s “formal request,” was to determine whether “the University students who violated the civil law at Durham on Friday, April 28, 1961, were counseled to do so by the University faculty.”

Kingsley said consistently that Daggett and Uphaus had counselled against civil disobedience during the by then infamous dinner. He also pointed out that by informing police ahead of time of his plans for a peaceful protest, it was evident that the dinner was not part of some Daggett-led or Uphaus-inspired conspiracy. As LaPerle remembers, they were already committed to civil disobedience to protest nuclear weapons.

At trial, the 18 Durham protesters were fined $50 each, with $25 suspended. When UNH President Johnson decided against taking further action, Gov. Powell said the university was “pampering” the students. William Loeb, the Union Leader publisher, called the UNH leadership “moral cowards” who were coddling lawbreakers. Loeb gave a blaring front page headline to the national leader of Veterans for Foreign Wars, who called for professors who advocate civil disobedience to be fired and said, “so-called pacifists are a greater threat than communists.” Berlin’s state senator called for high school students to take a class on the dangers of communism, with a required essay on “American freedom versus communist enslavement.” And a Portsmouth high school teacher who had attended the civil defense protest but had not been arrested was forced out of his job. In the climate of threats to university life and academic freedom, Nye said the student activists worried about what might happen next.

There may have been no conspiracy in a legal sense, but there was a plan, openly conceived and publicized, to undermine civil defense as a protest against preparation for nuclear war. The Civil Defense Protest Committee had formed in 1960 to increase participation in civil defense protests. One thousand people demonstrated in New York that year, with half refusing to take shelter. By 1961, attendance there had doubled, and 52 protesters were arrested. At the same time as the Durham protest, arrests took place on other campuses, too, including five arrests at Dartmouth. It would be the last year of Operation Alert. The Civil Defense Act would remain on the books until its repeal in 1987.

After the Durham trial, Kingsley flew to England to join the Committee for Nonviolent Action in further protests against nuclear weapons. Although Kingsley was not there at the end, a CNVA march that had started in San Francisco finally reached Moscow in October. In Red Square, a band of American and European pacifists called on the Soviet Union to do away with its nuclear weapons, just as they had demanded of American leaders. Two years later, President John F. Kennedy signed a treaty with the Soviet Union to halt atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and the era of arms control had begun. UNH students, including Alice Nye, openly invited outside criticism by inviting controversial speakers to campus.

It’s too bad Chris Sununu and UNH leaders have not learned the lessons of history. Instead of accepting or even promoting the importance of peaceful dissent, the governor branded everyone involved in protests against the Gaza war last spring to be anti-Semites, directly intervened with UNH police, and sent State Police in riot gear to break up nonviolent encampments. University officials alleged the demonstration had been instigated by “outside groups.” Perhaps the new governor and the new UNH president will be more tolerant.

As for David Diamond, he pleaded guilty at trial and took four decades off from civil disobedience. But he never gave up his concern for peace and in 2002 he was arrested with four others at the office of Senator Judd Gregg protesting plans to wage war against Iraq. I think most readers will agree now that the Iraq war was misguided, based on falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction, and that the destabilization of the entire Middle East which followed has left us more insecure. Sometimes, civil disobedience is the right course of action.

Grief, Determination, and Community on Transgender Day of Remembrance

This article was first published Nov. 21, 2024 at InDepthNH, New Hampshire’s non-profit, no-paywall news outlet. 

CONCORD—The sky was already dark when people began to gather by the Franklin Pierce statue in front of the State House in downtown Concord Wednesday evening, November 20. Jessica Goff passed out electric candles while another volunteer set up 30 jars on the granite step, placing a candle in each and a small card with a portrait and a description leaning against the front.

Each jar represented a transgender person who had been murdered in the past year.

It was Concord’s Transgender Day of Remembrance, drawing upwards of 150 people for a solemn community vigil.

After two brief speeches, volunteers came to the microphone and read the descriptions of those who had been killed.

Quanesha Shantel, who often went by Cocoa among her friends and has also been named in some press reports as Juchuan Hamilton, had, in recent years, been involved in ballroom and drag performances across the Southeast US and Chicago. Friends described her as “radiant” and “stunning.” Cocoa’s mother, Toi Ni’Cole Ratliff, remembers Cocoa as “happy and full of joy.” Tragically, on Sunday, November 15, 2024, Cocoa was found shot and killed on Guilford College Road in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was just 26 years old.

Shannon Boswell, a 30-year-old Black transgender woman, is remembered as “one of a kind” and a “sweet soul” according to her obituary. Shannon was killed on July 2, 2024, in Atlanta. Her life was honored on July 13th, with a service filled with loved ones and friends sharing fond memories of Shannon. Shannon was someone who “loved people” and enjoyed hobbies of “watching movies and living life to the fullest.” A friend described Shannon as their “best friend” and “dear friend” who was always there when you needed her.

Pauly Likens, a 14-year-old transgender girl, was “a bright and loving individual, cherished by all who knew them,” according to a GoFundMe page. Pauly’s obituary said that she “lit up every room she entered, always making people smile and passing around her contagious laughter.” She loved music, Fortnite and Roblox.

She was last seen on June 23 at the Budd Street Public Park in Morristown, NJ. Two days later, on June 25, Pauly was reported missing. That same day, Pauly’s dismembered body was found in the Shenango River Lake, a reservoir in western Pennsylvania, as confirmed by the Mercer County Coroner’s Office and Pennsylvania State Police.

Liara Tsai, a 35-year-old white transgender woman, was found dead in a vehicle after the car crashed in Iowa on Saturday June 22nd; evidence from the scene confirms she was killed prior to the car crash. Liara, who was described by friends and loved ones as an activist and an artist, had moved to Minneapolis just 6 weeks prior to her death, in order to better pursue her career as a DJ in a city with a large trans community.

Name after name, description after description, a glimpse into who they were, a glimpse into a life snuffed out, a community bonded in grief, reaching together for strength in the face of hate and violence.

As Journee LaFond, executive director at Black Lives Matter NH said, the statistics are staggering.

The Human Rights Campaign, a national advocacy group, counted “at least thirty transgender and gender-expansive people whose lives were tragically and inhumanely taken through violent means, including gun and intimate partner violence, in 2024.” Listening to their descriptions, it was impossible to avoid that many of them – 53% according to the Human Rights Campaign – were Black transgender women. Seventy-seven percent were people of color.

“I stand at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities,” said LaFond, a Black, trans, non-binary person. “The challenges we’re facing are compounded by systemic racism, sexism and transphobia. We live in a society that actively devalues our existence and perpetuates violence against us. Now more than ever, it’s crucial to understand that these issues do not exist in isolation. They intersect and they amplify each other, and when we talk about violence against trans people, we have to also address the institutions and dangerous attitudes that exacerbate that violence.”

And it’s not just an American issue. According to Trans Gender EU’s Global Monitoring Project, 350 trans and gender diverse people were reported murdered in the past year around the world. “This is a significant increase in comparison with the previous year, when 321 cases were reported. It confirms what the trans community has been saying – transphobic violence is in no way subsiding, and on the contrary, is increasing, aided by growing anti-trans hate speech,” the group said.

Transgender Day of Remembrance began in 1999 as a vigil to honor Rita Hester, a transgender woman who was killed in Boston the year before. Local observances in Concord began more than ten years ago, sponsored by the organization now known as Equality Health Center. The events usually consisted of a walk followed by an indoor commemoration. The Covid pandemic brought on an interruption, with this year’s event the first since 2019.

The Day of Remembrance is an occasion for collective mourning, but also a collective statement of determination to live in a world where such violence no longer occurs. As Journee LaFond said, “Let’s honor those we’ve lost by committing ourselves to creating a world where all trans lives matter, where no one has to fear for their safety because of who they are or how they identify. Together, we can transform our grief into action and ensure that those legacies inspire change rather than silence.”

In addition to Equality Health Center and Black Lives Matter NH, this year’s observance was also sponsored by ACLU-NH, 603 Equality, Seacoast Outright, Reproductive Equity Now, NH Youth Movement, and the NH Queer Consortium.

“What is important to me,” said Kallum Houlker, a counselor at Equality Health Center, “is creating a space for all of us to hold each other and take care of each other at such a difficult time, and allow ourselves to grieve in a space that feels safe and understanding that’s good.”

“We’re a community of people who’ve been who are under constant threat,” said Willow Young, who transitioned six years ago. The Day of Remembrance, she said, “is something we do annually as a way to acknowledge the lives lost to hate, misunderstanding, confusion, and trying to give voice and representation to our community.”

“We hold space for each other to grieve, not because our grief defines us, but because we are beautiful, complex people who deserve the space to feel this loss, to remember those taken from us, even though it should never have happened,” Houlker said in a short speech early in the program. “The names that we honor today are not martyrs or soldiers. They did not die in a battle for a cause. They died for simply existing.” To Houlker, the Day of Remembrance is “a call to feeling, a call to sit here together and feel however we need while surrounded by our community.”

For LaFond, it’s a call to action, and not just in the realm of politics and policy. It’s also about practical assistance, like “providing food, shelter, health care, access and emotional support to those who are most vulnerable among us. These efforts are vital because they create safety where institutional systems fail us.”

Interrupted by traffic noise, the participants listened silently to the names and brief stories of thirty transgender individuals known to have lost their lives to violence in the past year. When the names were all read, Linds Jakows of 603 Equality, an advocacy group, said anti-transgender violence is “one hundred percent preventable.”

“Disrupting this horrific violence starts with disrupting anti-trans and racist comments everywhere we see them or hear them. We must also continue asking every elected official to speak up for us and not just assume they’ll continue to vote with us because they have in the past,” they said.

In their speech, Journee LaFond said, “Let’s honor those we’ve lost by committing ourselves to creating a world where all trans lives matter, where no one has to fear for their safety because of who they are or how they identify. Together, we can transform our grief into action and ensure that those legacies inspire change rather than silence.”

As participants left the plaza, Jessica Goff, the Education and Training Director at Seacoast Outright, collected electric candles and expressed gratitude that so many people had attended. The large turnout, she observed, was due to the intensified level of hostility expressed against the transgender community in what she termed “the current moment.” Bracing themselves for what comes next, she said, “I think people are really wanting community in more ways now, and so I think we’re going to continue to see more people come together at these events.”

“I wish we didn’t have to,” she continued. “I wish we could all come together around joyful events, but it’s really important to have this too.”

Kallum Houlker said the Equality Health Center will soon launch a mutual support group for transgender teens to help them boost their resiliency. In the current moment, boosted resiliency is something a lot of us will need.

Gaza War Protesters Found Guilty for May 10 Action

This article was first published October 29, 2024 at InDepthNH, on New Hampshire’s online, no-paywall news source.

Janet Simmon of Laconia, a member of the Mother’s Day Five, testifies about the impact of the Gaza war on Palestinian civilians.

DOVER — In a packed Dover District Court hearing room after an emotional two-hour trial on Tuesday, five antiwar protesters were found guilty of criminal trespass for refusing to leave the office of Congressman Chris Pappas, who the group charges with complicity for mass killings and destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure over the past year.

The group, which calls itself the “Mother’s Day Five” due to the timing of their civil disobedience, has pleaded for Pappas to respond to their pleas to stop U.S. aid for Israel, which in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, blocked delivery of humanitarian aid, and demolished much of the Gaza’s health, education, and housing infrastructure.

Peace vigils organized by the NH Coalition for a

Just Peace in the Middle East outside Pappas’ Dover office have taken place every other week since last fall. Each time, members of the group said, they have delivered to his staff documentation of the war’s catastrophic impact on Palestinian civilians, which they say has taken place in violation of U.S. and international law. Other than form letters, they said they have received no substantive response from the Congressman.

“When laws are being broken by our own government, what are citizens in a democracy supposed to do?” asked Amy Antonucci, one of the five defendants.

On May 10, the Friday before Mother’s Day, the group of five delivered a written statement calling for a ceasefire, distribution of humanitarian aid, and an end to U.S. military assistance to Israel “until Palestinians’ and Israelis’ equal human rights are upheld and ongoing abuses ended, as required by International and US laws.” Waiting for a response, they sat themselves down in a small waiting area outside a glassed-in office, where no staff people could be seen. There, they quietly conversed about their concerns, goals, and hopes until they were asked to leave shortly after 5 PM. When they refused, a member of Pappas’ staff called the Dover Police to have them removed.

Read about the May 10 protest here.

The May 10 sit-in, where she was arrested, was the group’s fifteenth visit to the office, Antonucci said.

One by one, with about 70 supporters packed into the courtroom benches behind them, Antonucci and the other four explained to Judge Sawako Gardner what they did and why. The defendants all represented themselves.

Janet Zeller, a Concord resident who chairs the Peace with Justice Advocates Committee for the NH Conference of the United Church of Christ, went first. As she explained, the Foreign Assistance Act and the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy both prohibit delivery of arms to governments which restrict delivery of humanitarian aid. “By providing weapons to Israel, while Israel is impeding the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance to the civilians in Gaza, the Congress and White House are violating those laws,” she said. “As a citizen, I cannot stand by and do nothing, while my own government officials continue to break these laws.”

Janet Simmon being escorted from Rep. Pappas’ office on May 10.

“We must take the responsibility of ensuring our representatives hear and understand our recognition of the laws that are being broken, and seek their support to end those violations,” she said.

Janet Simmon of Laconia decried the use of U.S. tax dollars to provide weapons Israel uses in Gaza. “I am just so dismayed over this use of my tax dollars that I have tried and tried and tried, by emails, by phone calls, by visiting this office, by writing personal letters to get some response about this misuse of our tax money for bombing and destroying people’s homes and property,” she said. When she spoke briefly to Rep. Pappas at a Laconia festival, she recounted, he said nothing more than that everybody has a right to say what they think. “He may not agree with me, but it is his job to listen,” she said, and so far, there’s no evidence that he is, she said.

Em Friedrichs, a member of the Durham Town Council and who uses zie/zer pronouns, was visibly pregnant when zie was escorted out of Pappas’ office in May. Trying to contrast the care zie received when delivering zer daughter Ruby by C-section with the lack of anesthesia available to women in Gaza who need caesarians, zie tried to introduce photos as evidence. The prosecutor objected, but Friedrichs went on to tearfully describe the plight of women and children in Gaza.

Friedrichs’ own journey to the Congressman’s office began, in a sense, when the Durham Town Council was presented with a resolution drafted by local residents calling for a Gaza ceasefire. One of the speakers was a local high school student who wanted simply to read a list of names, “the names of infants under age one who had died from military operations or starvation in Gaza since October 8,” Friedrichs recalled. The student was given only five minutes of speaking time, and “this high schooler could not even finish the names of infants that started with ‘A’ a in those five minutes.” And that was six months ago. Durham’s congressman, Chris Pappas, has been unwilling to address their concerns, Friedrichs said.

The final defendant to testify was the Rev. David Grishaw-Jones, pastor of the Community Church of Durham and a member of the United Church of Christ’s nationwide Palestine Israel Network. He, too, explained that the U.S. has provided military support for Israel in violation of U.S. law and that Congressman Pappas has been unresponsive to the concerns of constituents. Grishaw-Jones went on to say that PACs associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobbying group, have donated half a million dollars to Pappas’ campaigns and have had his ear all along. “We are dismissed as irrelevant. AIPAC gets access and influence. Human rights are marginalized and even dismissed. And war rages on,” Rev. Grishaw-Jones told Judge Gardner.

“The idea that our member of Congress has time and again voted against international law and in defiance of US law to support unimaginable violence, even genocide, in Gaza, is abhorrent to us,” he concluded. “And the fact that deadly U.S. policy is beholden to PACs unseen and often unacknowledged is just plain wrong. And this requires courage and action on the part of citizen leaders. Folks like the five of us. Despair is not an option; and genocide requires courage and resistance.”

The prosecutor, Meagan Gann, had no questions for the defendants.

Gann called only one witness, Sgt. David Collis, who explained the police had been summoned by Pappas’ staff to deal with people who refused to leave the office at closing time on May 10. Collis testified it was a “peaceful protest” and told me before the trial he had had a long conversation with the defendants about their reasons for being there. Collis explained the defendants were told they would be arrested if they insisted on remaining in the Central Street suite. When they didn’t leave, he said, he had pairs of officers escort them outside where they were issued summons for criminal trespass and ordered not to return to the interior of the Congressman’s office.

None of the defendants disputed his report.

The defendants had hoped to call witnesses to elaborate on the war’s impact on civilians, Israel’s violation of international law, and the violations of U.S. law committed in the provision of arms to a country that is blocking humanitarian assistance. They had also hoped to provide expert testimony on the power of nonviolent action to affect public policy. The prosecutor objected, stating that unless witnesses had factual testimony relevant to the arrests their expertise had no bearing on the case. The judge agreed with the prosecutor.

Left seated with the spectators/supporters in the courtroom were the would-be witnesses: Ayman Nijim, a Palestinian American with family members in Gaza; Will Hopkins, a member of Veterans for Peace; Bob Sanders, founder of a group of New Hampshire Jews who oppose Israel’s Gaza war; and Jamila Raqib, Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution, a research group which studies active nonviolence.

The defendants had also hoped to question Patrick Carroll of the Pappas staff, who had been present in the congressional office on the day of the arrests. But since they had failed to subpoena him and he was not present, that was not possible.

Judge Gardner did admit as evidence information about international law and a resolution adopted by the Durham Town Council calling for a Gaza war ceasefire and provision of humanitarian assistance in the territory.

When testimony wrapped up, Judge Gardner told the defendants she had listened carefully to their statements. “My job here today is to apply the laws to the facts that have been presented to the court,” she said.

Rev. David Grishaw-Jones getting a summons for criminal trespass on May 10 outside Rep. Pappas’ office.

“Having heard your testimony,” she continued, “it is evident that you are all passionate and dedicated to your cause for peace.” The judge stated her verdict was not a reflection on the issues the defendants raised in the courtroom or at the May sit-in, but “simply whether or not the state has satisfied their burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt as to the elements of each charge.” With that, she found them each guilty of criminal trespassing.

Following a recommendation from the prosecutor, they were each fined $250 plus $60 in court fees with $150 suspended provided they do not re-offend in the coming year. The Mother’s Day Five are still barred from entering Pappas’ office, but are free to participate in the regular vigils held on the sidewalk.

“I do ask for you to consider where the harm really lies in this case,” Em Friedrichs told the judge, “and I ask you to use your power as a judge to consider that my actions on May 10 are not the source of harm here. The source of harm are the actions taken and not taken by our government, including Representative Pappas, enabling both crimes and an extreme humanitarian crisis by sending weapons to be used against civilians in Gaza, and for that reason, I ask for a sentence of community service.”

The judge agreed Friedrichs could perform community service in lieu of paying a fine, as long as the service is with a nonprofit organization unrelated to anti-war activism.

The defendants did not appear to be remorseful about the consequences of their actions on May 10. In her own defense, Amy Antonucci told Judge Gardner, “In New Hampshire, we do have a tradition of engagement of citizens going above and beyond just voting and letting our Reps make decisions. Durham is not home to an oil refinery because of activists. The Clamshell Alliance challenged nuclear power and stopped any new plants from being built after Seabrook. Granny D Haddock spent her 90s walking across the country and all around New Hampshire for campaign finance reform.”

“I have not enjoyed any of this, breaking laws, being arrested, going to court,” she said. “It’s very stressful, and is hard on my health. But I thought of

the people I know in Palestine and in Israel and others around the world, what they go through, and I knew that I had to try as hard as I could to reach my Representative.”

Outside the courthouse after the trial, Antonucci pledged that demonstrations would continue as long as the war goes on and their messages are not reaching Congress through “normal, acceptable, polite channels.”

“We’re going to take some time, some of us are going to catch up on sleep, and then we’re going to be talking about what next,” she said, adding that another round of nonviolent action training would begin soon to equip other protesters with the skills and attitudes needed for peaceful acts of civil disobedience.

This week’s peace vigil will be outside Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s Dover office. The NH Coalition for a Just Peace in the Middle East will return to the sidewalk outside Rep. Pappas’ office next week.

Also Tuesday, Israel bombed a residential building in northern Gaza, killing dozens of civilians including many children. A State Department spokesperson called it “a horrifying incident.”

Ayman Nijim outside the courthouse before the trial.

Solidarity Town Hall Held to Keep Dartmouth Labor Movement Growing

This article was first published October 22, 2024 at InDepthNH, the state’s non-profit, no-paywall news source.

Daniel Abosso of the librarians’ union speaks during panel discussion at the Labor Town Hall.

HANOVER—More than 100 Dartmouth College students, joined by faculty, staff, and community members, rallied Monday evening at an on-campus church in support of the college’s growing labor movement. It was the third annual Labor Solidarity Town Hall, organized by an informal coalition known as the “Mighty Labor Coalition.”

“We are taking on the college to continue to better our conditions each and every day,” said Harper Richardson of the Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth (SWCD), which represents undergraduate workers. It was a sentiment echoed by representatives of other campus unions. The SWCD, which started with dining hall workers three years ago and won a big wage increase in 2023 after threatening to strike, has recently expanded to include Undergraduate Advisors.

Negotiations between the Undergraduate Advisors, known as Resident Advisors on other campuses, will begin Thursday.

Richardson said the SWCD is pursuing affiliation with the United Auto Workers Union, whose members include student workers on other campuses, including UNH Durham.

Another recent addition to organized labor on the Ivy League campus is a union of librarians, affiliated with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. A year ago, librarian Daniel Abosso told me their successful organizing drive was prompted largely by the college taking away promotion rights during the pandemic, as well as by the high cost of living in the Upper Valley.

After the forum, Abosso said the librarians have been negotiating with the college since February. After 16 sessions, they still haven’t made progress on what he called “the big stuff,” like compensation. “We continue to negotiate in good faith. We hope that the college will come to meet us in the middle, but that’s probably all I can say,” he said.

The oldest campus union by decades is Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union, which has contracts for non-academic workers, including the Hanover Inn, which is owned by the college but managed by an outside firm. Its newest members are the Dartmouth basketball team, the first college players in the country to unionize.

However, the college has refused to bargain with them, with officials saying they will fight all the way to the US Supreme Court to deny the players their rights to collective bargaining. Chris Peck, Local 560’s president, said the players’ story has attracted interest at the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, as well as on Capitol Hill. “We’re talking to anybody we can talk to,” he said.

Peck noted the recent retirement of Tony Bennett, the famed coach at the University of Virginia, who said at a retirement news conference that the future of college basketball “is going to be closer to a professional model. There’s got to be collective bargaining.” While the National Labor Relations Board is still considering ordering Dartmouth to negotiate, Peck is looking forward to Dartmouth being the first college with a players’ union.

Other participants came from GOLD-UE, the union of graduate student workers, which won its first contract at the end of June after a two-month strike. They’re still working on getting the college to implement provisions they agreed to in the contract, a member of the negotiating team told me after the forum.

Links between pro-labor and pro-Palestinian concerns were evident. Sean Dumont, a member of SEIU, said organizations of Palestinian workers pleaded last fall for the international labor movement to put its weight behind efforts to stop the flow of weapons to Israel. “It is our obligation as workers to fight for the workers of Palestine,” she said.

No one needed to mention that the graduate workers strike last May 1 began on the same day that police busted up a peaceful encampment on the Dartmouth Green. Neither did it need to be mentioned that Roan Wade, an SWCD leader, was one of the first two students arrested protesting the Gaza war last year.

Wade asked a panel of representatives of campus labor groups to explain what motivates workers to unionize and stay engaged. “Bad bosses,” Peck said, is the number one condition. Alora Greiner of GOLD-UE agreed. “One of the biggest motivators for engagement is the boss misbehaving,” she said.

One of their hopes is that more union efforts will emerge in the coming months. If they do, Rev. Gail Kinney of the NH Faith and Labor Alliance said, “We want to stand in solidarity with you whenever and wherever and as long as needed, until you get what you’re asking for to be treated decently with respect.”

The forum ended, of course, with everyone singing the labor anthem, “Solidarity Forever.”

Nobel Highlights Need for Nuclear Abolition

This article was first published on October 20 by InDepthNH, New Hampshire’s non-profit, no-paywall news source.

For the third time in recent decades, the Nobel Peace Prize went this year to a group advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons as the only sure way to eliminate the threat they pose. It’s a threat that is growing, but mainstream media reports on the prize let the United States off the hook for our own responsibility.

Presenting the Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo, an organization made up of survivors of the atomic blasts which spread fire and radiation over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Nobel Committee praised the group “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

“In response to the atomic bomb attacks of August 1945, a global movement arose whose members have worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons. Gradually, a powerful international norm developed, stigmatising the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable,” they said.

“At this moment in human history,” they added, “it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.”

NPR played a quote from a Nobel spokesperson, “The nuclear powers are modernizing and upgrading their arsenals. New countries appear to be preparing to acquire nuclear weapons. And threats are being made to use nuclear weapons as part of ongoing warfare.” The reporter went on to single out Iran, North Korea, and Russia, “where Vladimir Putin recently lowered the threshold for when it would launch a nuclear attack.”

Reuters, too, pointed fingers at Iran, N Korea, and Russia, where it noted, “Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned the West of potential nuclear consequences since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”

CNN focused on Russia, where “Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened the West with using nuclear weapons.”

The New York Times, like the others, noted the Nobel reference to the nuclear powers that are all “modernizing” their arsenals while others consider joining the nuclear club. “The committee did not name any specific nations,” reported the Times.

The Times also noted, “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. And concerns are growing about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and Asia.”

We get the point.

Russia’s threats, and the nuclear programs of Iran and N. Korea are indeed deserving of the world’s attention and condemnation. But it’s too bad the Times reporter didn’t mention the paper’s recent article by W.J. Hennigan on our own nuclear buildup. “With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs, the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal.”

That’s right. $1.7 trillion and counting to build a new generation of missile-bearing submarines, bombers, and land-based missiles to threaten nuclear devastation all over the world, armed with a new generation of warheads. “The federal government has said little about the plan in public, outside of congressional hearings and strategy papers, or the vast amount being spent,” wrote Hennigan. “There has been no significant debate. The billion-dollar programs move under the radar. At a time when funding for politicized issues such as climate change, foreign military aid and border security are under a microscope, this issue miraculously appears to have sidestepped the crossfire.”

In other words, responsibility for nuclear threats is not limited to nations deemed U.S. adversaries. It was George W. Bush who pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. It was Donald Trump who withdrew the United States from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. It was Trump again who withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, under which Iran pledged to abandon its plans to acquire nuclear weapons. It was Joe Biden who pledged during the 2020 New Hampshire Primary campaign to adopt a no-first-use policy and after his election adopted a nuclear strategy which maintains the first strike option.

And it’s Congress, which year after year appropriates the money, which has backed the nuclear build-up. According to the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, itself a Nobel Peace Prize winner, the United States spent $51.5 billion on nuclear weapons in 2023, “more than all the other nuclear-armed countries put together.”

China, too, is expanding its nuclear capacity, and Israel’s “secret” nuclear arsenal should not be ignored when we consider rising tensions in the Middle East. Critics need a lot of fingers to point at all the parties responsible.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. As a new report, “Common Security in the Indo-Pacific Region,” points out, “International peace requires a commitment to joint survival rather than the threat of mutual destruction.” While the report focuses on the Indo-Pacific, it’s equally true in the Middle East and eastern Europe, all regions where strategic choices or mis-steps could set off nuclear conflagration. No nation is safe when its potential adversaries believe their own security is at risk, especially when they have nuclear weapons at their disposal. And with the last major arms control agreement between Russia and the United States due to expire in 2026, we should be deploying more diplomats, not more missiles.

In recent decades, the Nobel Committee has pointed its finger squarely at this existential problem. In 2017, the Peace Prize went to the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons for its leadership in the global effort for a treaty declaring nuclear weapons to be illegal. In 1985, the prize was awarded to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The Prize has also gone to the International Atomic Energy Agency for its non-proliferation work and the Pugwash Movement, an international group of scientists who have been advocating nuclear arms control since 1957. When Barack Obama received the prize in 2009, the Nobel Committee emphasized “his support – in word and deed – for the vision of a world free from nuclear weapons.” Sadly, he backed off from the vision before leaving the White House.

At this moment in human history, the vision of a world free from nuclear weapons desperately needs to be revived. Toshiyuki Mimaki, the chairman of Nihon Hidankyo, said upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize that his foremost wish was for the world to “please abolish nuclear weapons while we are alive.” His message deserves our urgent attention and support.

Don’t Let What Happened in TX Happen in NH, Warns Visitor

Amerika Garcia Grewal ( r ) with Amanda Azad ( l ) of the ACLU at strategy retreat in Littleton.

This article was first published October 9, 2024 at InDepthNH, a nonprofit, no-paywall news source for New Hampshire.

Amerika Garcia Grewal came to New Hampshire with a simple message: don’t let what happened in Texas happen to you.

What happened was Operation Lone Star, Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to “defend” Texas from what he termed an “invasion” of immigrants crossing the border from Mexico.  From Garcia Grewal’s vantage point, the would-be immigrants are largely desperate families who risk and too often lose their lives crossing the river separating the two countries.

Her vantage point is Eagle Pass, a small city on the Rio Grande, where she grew up and lives with her parents.   When two bodies were recovered from the river in August of 2023, Garcia Grewal organized a prayer vigil in city-owned Shelby Park by the river.   But the very next day, she said, “there were more bodies found in the river,” where Abbott had installed strings of buoys separated by saw blades.  Eagle Pass residents held another prayer vigil in October, and every month since, on the first Monday of the month.

There’s been one major change: in January, the State seized Shelby Park from the City, surrounded it with a chain link fence, and told Eagle Pass residents that the park where families had held festivals and picnics, fished, and boated for years was off limits. The action “ripped the heart out of our community,” Garcia Grewal said.  Instead, the park became the Operation Lone Star headquarters, a base for soldiers, helicopter landings, and military vehicles.  Per Abbott’s orders, federal Border Patrol officers aren’t allowed there either.  If Garcia Grewal jumps through hoops set up by the Texas Military Department, she can still get permission for people to pray in the park, but the presence of armed soldiers, fences, and barbed wire is enough to keep most people away.  

The International Organization for Migration, a UN agency, calls the US-Mexico border “the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide,” with 686 recorded deaths in 2022.

Texas law requires the dead to be identified, but “due to the high volume of deaths and lack of county resources,” says Operation ID, a project led by specialists from the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University.

According to the project’s website, “most counties were overwhelmed and began to bury the undocumented migrants, most without proper analyses or collection of DNA samples, without documenting the location of burial leaving little chance that these individuals will ever be returned to their families.

In turn, families are left without knowing what happened to their son, daughter, mother, father, brother or sister.” 

Operation ID relies on volunteers, including Garcia Grewal, who displayed slides of the project’s work during a presentation in Pembroke last Saturday. It’s grisly work, taking fingerprints and DNA from partially decomposed corpses, some of which have been held at local morgues for months or years. 

The deaths are just one of the harmful impacts of Operation Lone Star, which has cost Texas taxpayers $11 billion since Abbot launched it in 2021.  In addition to thousands of buoys in the river, thousands of shipping containers lining the riverbank, and more than 90 miles of concertina wire, Texans have paid for several bases for the thousands of National Guard members and police officers staffing Lone Star, buses to ship immigrants to “blue” cities, prosecution of migrants for minor offenses like trespassing, and felony prosecutions mostly of US citizens for transporting unauthorized immigrants. 

Lone Star has also equipped the Texas National Guard with pepper ball projectiles, which they have repeatedly fired at unarmed migrants attempting to cross the river.  “In separate incidents this summer, witnesses saw Texas National Guard members firing pepper spray projectiles at migrants who posed no risk to National Guard members or anyone else,” said Bob Libal, Texas a consultant at Human Rights Watch, which issued a report in September.  Amerika Garcia Grewal was one of the witnesses to the incidents.

“Under international human rights law,” Human Rights Watch said, “law enforcement may only use force—including less lethal weapons like pepper ball projectiles—when strictly necessary and proportionate to a legitimate aim. The UN Guidance on Less Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement states chemical irritants should only be used where there is an ‘imminent risk of injury.’”

In addition, Garcia Grewal said, “Seventy percent of high-speed chases that happen in the state of Texas happen in border communities. We’ve had well over 100 deaths from those high-speed chases. We’ve had millions in property damage. We also have a very high rate of suicides with National Guard members who’ve been detached to the southern border, but also with Customs and Border Patrol,” she told a group of immigrants’ rights activists at a strategy meeting in Littleton.

Operation Lone Star has also disrupted the local economy, which for generations has depended on cultural and commercial ties with Piedras Negras, Eagle Pass’s sister city across the border.   For an impoverished community–Maverick County, where Eagle Pass is the biggest city, ranks 250th out of the state’s 254 counties when it comes to per capita income–militarization has come at a high cost beyond the state budget impact.   “The closer you looked, the more there was to look at,” Garcia Grewal said.

“The funds spent on Lone Star is money that would have been education.  This is the money that would have been healthcare. This would have been our roads,” she said.

Last week, Gov. Abbott asked the Texas legislature for another $2.9 billion for “border security.”

Gov. Chris Sununu

Something similar could be said about New Hampshire, where Gov. Chris Sununu allocated $1.4 million for his Northern Border Force, a mini-Lone Star responding to a trumped-up (pun intended) crisis along the state’s 58-mile border with Canada.  He sent a unit of the National Guard to Texas for a year in 2022 to work alongside the Border Patrol.  He joined Gov. Abbott and other Republican governors in a Shelby Park publicity event last February, and in April he sent another unit to Eagle Pass to join Operation Lone Star.  In several statements, the governor said the exercise was needed to stop drug trafficking, even though analysts believe most illegal drugs enter the United States carried by U.S. citizens crossing at ports of entry, not migrants wading across the Rio Grande. 

The latest National Guard mission cost New Hampshire taxpayer $850,000.

If we’re so concerned about fentanyl, said Eva Castillo of the NH Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees after Garcia Grewal’s talk in Pembroke, “we should invest more in preventing people from using drugs” rather than using force and violence against immigrants desperate for safer lives in the United States.

Castillo, New Hampshire’s most experienced and indefatigable immigrants’ rights advocate, said she sees the northern border and National Guard missions as “planting the seeds” of something like what is going on in Texas.  It’s a sign of upside-down priorities, spending money on soldiers and policing “instead of using them on the people and their needs.”

More Texas-inspired policy may be on the horizon, modeled on a bill Abbott signed last December which authorizes law enforcement officers to arrest and deport people they believe to be unauthorized immigrants.  The law is being held up in federal court, but it has inspired copycat bills, including one expected to come to the New Hampshire State House next year.   Rep. Joe Sweeney says he wants to make it a felony for unauthorized immigrants to be in New Hampshire at all and to create a state deportation task force.  (For State House watchers, it’s LSR 0012 for the coming session.)

The Sweeney bill, the northern border, and the political hostility to immigrants which is so evident in election season politics were topics of discussion for the meeting in Littleton last week where representatives from the ACLU, NH Legal Assistance, the American Friends Service Committee, NH Council of Churches, Granite State Organizing Project, Welcoming NH, and others heard Amerika Garcia Grewal’s warning loud and clear. 
Together, the group has beaten back a host of anti-immigrant bills over the years and almost succeeded in stripping the Northern Border Force out of the 2023 state budget.  They’ve already got their eyes on Sweeney’s proposal and are gearing up for another budget debate.

At the Pembroke meeting, Garcia Grewal said “doing things here in New Hampshire will help me in Eagle Pass.”  The “doing things” agenda they discussed started with Castillo talking about the importance of resisting efforts to dehumanize immigrants.  Others spoke about sifting through deceitful political messaging about drugs and human trafficking.  “They have to resort to lies because the truth isn’t scary enough,” suggested Chris Wellington, whose background includes policing and immigration law.    

Martin Toe of the Granite State Organizing Project described a campaign called “Invest in Us,” which he said looks at “how we can redirect our tax dollars towards local issues and public services” instead of devoting funds to projects like the Northern Border Force and Operation Lone Star.  He said he found receptive people on the streets of Littleton, where he used his smart phone to record short videos asking people how they want their tax dollars used.  

Garcia Grewal concluded the Pembroke meeting by asking everyone to take out their calendars and say what they are going to do and when they are going to do it.   Among the responses were education of church congregations, research on anti-immigrant legislation, writing to members of Congress, and wearing buttons that say, “I’m pro-immigrant and I vote.”  I said I’d write a column for InDepthNH.org.

[This post includes photos from Amerika Garcia Grewal, Vicky Martinez, and the NH National Guard.]

NLRB Attorney Calls for Dartmouth to Negotiate with Basketball Players Union

This article first appeared October 2, 2024 at InDepthNH. Click on the Dartmouth tag for more stories about union organizing at Dartmouth.

HANOVER—An investigating attorney for the National Labor Relations Board has recommended that the Board order Dartmouth College to begin collective bargaining with its basketball team, the first undergraduate basketball players in the country to form a union.

The Board, a federal agency which administers and enforces provisions of the National Labor Relations Act, ruled last February that the players were employees under the law and therefore eligible to form a union and bargain with the College. In an NLRB-supervised election held in March, team members voted 13 to 2 to unionize and join Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union, which also represents about 500 other Dartmouth employees, including power plant workers, custodians, security officers, trades people, and museum staff.

Rejecting the Board’s ruling and following the vote, Dartmouth’s president, Sian Bellock, said the college would not negotiate with the players and vowed to fight the unionization effort “all the way to the Supreme Court if that’s what it takes to prevent this misguided development from taking hold.”

The September 30 opinion came in response to an Unfair Labor Practice charge leveled in August by Local 560, which complained that the college’s failure to bargain was a violation of the law. Dartmouth “has no valid defense to the Complaint,” it said.

In addition to violating federal law, the college’s defiance also violates Dartmouth’s Code of Ethical Conduct which requires Dartmouth to “transact its business in compliance with laws of the jurisdictions in which it does business,” stated Chris Peck, president of Local 560.

The past two years have seen an outpouring of union activity on the Dartmouth campus. A union of undergrad food service workers, which won a significant pay increase after threatening a strike in 2023, has expanded to include Undergraduate Assistants, the college’s term for resident advisors. Graduate student workers, who unionized in 2023, won their first contract in June after a 2-month strike. A new union of librarians is in the midst of negotiating its first contract. Local 560 recently renegotiated two longstanding contracts for non-academic workers.

The Dartmouth unions are planning a “Labor Town Hall” event on October 21.

The Motion for a Summary judgment, written by Thomas Quigley in the Board’s General Counsel department, said the college should begin good faith bargaining and “agree to a bargaining schedule, which requires meeting at least once per month for at least 2 hours per session (or pursuant to another schedule mutually agreed upon by the parties) and requires [Dartmouth] to submit a written summary of each bargaining session to the [NLRB’s] Compliance Officer within five days of each meeting.”

“Our local would welcome a required bargaining schedule,” Peck said. “Bargaining would not only resolve Dartmouth’s exposure to the NCAA’s massive antitrust liability, but directly improve our members’ academic experience by relieving those on financial aid of the need to work second jobs, give them a say in scheduling decisions that force them to miss class, and create real accountability for the athletic department around varsity athletes’ physical and mental health.”

If the Board follows through with a ruling in line with the General Counsel’s motion, the college is expected to appeal the decision in the federal court system.

Valerie Cunningham Honored at Black Heritage Trail 30th Anniversary

Kirby Randolph at the Black Heritage Trail celebration with her mother, Valerie Cunningham, projected on the wall behind.  Valerie was unable to attend.

This article was first published August 31, 2024 at InDepthNH.

PORTSMOUTH—Nur Shoop remembers meeting Valerie Cunningham for the first time about fifteen years ago at a meeting of the Seacoast NAACP.   Shoop asked Cunningham to sign her copy of Black Portsmouth, a book Cunningham had co-authored based on decades of historical research.

By then, Cunningham’s work had already led to the creation of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, which marked sites where the city’s first Black residents lived and worked.  From its birth with a map and brochure for self-guided walking tours, the Trail had evolved into a nonprofit organization a staff of six, an active board, and a team of volunteer tour guides taking groups through the city’s oldest neighborhoods.  At each stop, tour leaders would tell stories of African people who had been enslaved and brought to Portsmouth as far back as 1645.

A year or two after they met, Shoop said, Cunningham “asked me to help her with tours. And who can say no to Valerie Cunningham?”  Now, Shoop is the lead tour guide, a volunteer position with the group now known as the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire.

Thursday, marking its thirtieth anniversary, the organization celebrated Cunningham’s leadership at the Portsmouth Historical Society, which occupies the former site of the local library.

It was there that the story started, in a sense, when in the late 1950s the teenage Valerie Cunningham started a quest to uncover the stories of Portsmouth’s first Black residents.  As the Trail’s Executive Director, JerriAnne Boggis, put it, “she was searching for the reflections of herself on the pages of every book the library had to offer.”

In the library’s collection, she found only hints of the Black people who had lived and been enslaved in colonial Portsmouth, but she kept searching.  In a city which has long prided itself on its heritage, Cunningham uncovered details of the city’s history that had been too long ignored.   

Mark Sammons, who later became her research partner, said the door opened when she began looking at centuries-old church archives from 1807 and found a record of a $1 Christmas season donation to “Venus, a black.”  “That was sort of a Eureka moment for her,” he said.  As Sammons told it, she just kept “looking and looking and looking until her living room was filled with photocopies of historic documents.”

When she began, racial exclusion was still commonly practiced in New Hampshire’s restaurants, hotels, rental properties, and other businesses.  After high school, Cunningham

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Click here to learn about the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire.

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married and moved away, returning to Portsmouth in the late 1960s.  By then, Black consciousness was gathering steam and Black history was gaining attention.  Cunningham joined activist groups, but did research on her own. 

The research became her passion, pursued quietly for decades.  Without academic training or credentials, and well before the internet opened up previously unimaginable avenues for research, Cunningham learned how to find and reveal the details of people long dead.  What were their names?  Where did they live?  What work did they do?   How did they organize themselves?  In her files and in her mind, characters from her city’s past came alive.

At a meeting of a “Diversity Committee” sponsored by a local foundation in the early 1990s, “it occurred to me one day that I should tell them more about the work that I was doing,” Cunningham said, in a recording played at the anniversary event.  “Everybody kind of knew that I was doing something about Black history. They thought, wow, this is really very interesting. We should get this available to the teachers so they can talk about it to their students and classes.”

With the committee’s encouragement, Cunningham teamed up with Sammons, a historian working at the Strawbery Banke museum.  Together they wrote and edited the stories Cunningham had researched, put them in a binder for distribution to teachers, and created a brochure with a map for self-guided walking tours.  Cunningham also established the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail as a nonprofit organization so they could raise money and install plaques marking significant sites.  With the map, the brochure, and the plaques, the newly formed Heritage Trail brought Portsmouth’s Black history out of Cunningham’s files and into the light of day.  The binder’s contents grew, too, and became Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage, published by Cunningham and Sammons in 2004. 

Thirty years after the formal part of the project began, the stories of Portsmouth’s first Black residents “now form an integral part of our collective history and identity in New Hampshire,” said Shari Robinson, the Black Heritage Trail’s president.  “Valerie’s work has been nothing short of transformative. Through her dedication, she has provided a voice to those who were long silenced, and she has ensured that the history of the Black lives in New Hampshire is recognized, respected and remembered.”

Mark Sammons, now retired and living in Tucson, flew in for the occasion.  “She asked me very quietly once if I’d help with a pocket brochure. And of course, before I know it, I’m enthusiastically volunteering for 10 years, or life, whichever is longer,” he recalled with a smile.  “Everyone she touches seems to become engaged.”

Kirby Randolph, Cunningham’s daughter, flew in from Kansas City, where she teaches in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center.  Her mom was shy, she said, but busy.  “I just remember, Mom always had some meeting to go to, and the phone was ringing, and people always wanted a little information about this and a little information about that.”

Cunningham always talked about Portsmouth’s Black history at home, Randolph said, and now, thanks to her mom’s work, “I think it’s probably going to be better and easier for the Black girls in Portsmouth.”

Valerie Cunningham wasn’t present to hear the flow of accolades.  On her way to the event, she tripped, broke her wrist, and spent the rest of the evening at the hospital.  So, she missed hearing Portsmouth Mayor Deaglan MacEachern read a proclamation declaring it Valerie Cunnigham Day.  She missed hearing letters read from Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, and Chris Pappas.  She missed watching her daughter tear up with emotion.  And she missed spending a couple hours with a roomful of friends and admirers.

Portsmouth Mayor Deaglan McEachern is pictured with Kirby Randolph, Valerie Cunningham’s daughter at the celebration with the plaque honoring Valerie Cunningham.

She would have been surprised by the unveiling of the latest NH Black Heritage plaque, soon to be located in Portsmouth’s old South End.  At the top it says, “Valerie Cunningham (b. 1942).”  It goes on, “Cultural historian, activist, and mentor Valerie Cunningham was born in Portsmouth.  Her painstaking research recovered and celebrated the stories of Black life in Portsmouth and beyond.”   “By centering Portsmouth’s Black residents, Cunningham’s work became a model for public historians,” the plaque also says.

Had she been there, she might have been embarrassed with all the fuss, attention she might prefer were going to the stories of Prince Whipple, Ona Judge Staines, and generations of Black Portsmouth residents who lived lives of dignity in spite of all the obstacles placed before them.   But I know she’s pleased and proud of how far the Black Heritage Trail has come since it began with a binder and a brochure.  The Trail leads regular walking tours in Portsmouth, holds annual events marking Juneteenth, sponsors the annual Black New England conference, and holds “tea talks” on a wide variety of topics.  In addition to the African Burial Ground and markers at historic sites in Portsmouth, there are now Black History markers in Kittery, Windham, Warner, Milford, Andover, Derry, Hancock, Dover, Jaffrey, and Nashua.  The next one, honoring enslaved people’s contributions to Manchester’s textile industry, will be dedicated on September 21.  

Robert Thompson is pictured with honoree Valerie Cunningham projected behind him at Thursday night’s celebration.

At the Thursday night celebration, Rev. Robert Thompson was the final speaker and singer.  He recalled a meeting with Cunningham at this church office in Exeter years ago.  “I knew that whatever she was about to ask me, it was clear she was going to ask me something, that the answer was going to be ‘yes,’” he said.  What she asked was for Thompson to take a seat on the board of the Portsmouth Historical Society, where he could make sure connections with the Black Heritage Trail were as strong as possible.  Later she asked him to join the Trail’s board and serve as its president.  “I couldn’t say no to Valerie,” he said.  “I don’t know if you can. I couldn’t.”

For the anniversary, his friend Valerie asked him to sing her favorite song, John Lennon’s “Imagine.”   With Rev. Thompson’s stirring voice ringing out, and Cunningham across town at the hospital, the celebration reached its conclusion. 

Keeping the Trail’s work going and growing takes money, of course, and the anniversary celebration didn’t neglect the topic.   In addition to a Valerie Cunningham marker, they unveiled the Valerie Cunningham Society for the Preservation of African American History, a campaign aiming to raise $400,000 to transform the Trail into a high tech “Outdoor Museum.”

Maryellen Burke delivered the fundraising pitch prior to Rev. Thompson’s song.  The Black Heritage Trail of NH is a beacon, she said, with an impact that can ripple through New Hampshire and beyond.  “This isn’t about the past, folks. This is about the future, a future where our shared history is not just remembered but celebrated, and a future where racial anxieties and misunderstandings become a thing in the past.”

Imagine.

Climate Activists Set Sights on Fossil-Fueled “Peakers”

What’s next after coal plants are closed?

This article was first published by InDepthNH on August 12, 2024.

photo courtesy of No Coal No Gas

PEMBROKE NH

On Saturday, five years after it launched a campaign using nonviolent civil disobedience to shut down a coal-fired power plant in Bow, New Hampshire, No Coal No Gas held a celebration in Pembroke’s Memorial Park marking the commitment of the plant’s owner, Granite Shore Power, to end coal combustion in 2027 and convert the facility to a “renewable energy park.” But No Coal No Gas isn’t going away: several hours before the celebration, its members displayed banners and painted slogans at four other New Hampshire fossil-fueled power plants calling for their permanent closure as well. At one of the plants, Newington Station, they hung a 170-foot “No Coal No Gas” banner from a smokestack, resulting in the arrest of five people on criminal trespass charges.

The new campaign focuses on “peaker” plants, those which sit idle most of the time but crank up in periods of high demand, such as hot days when use of air conditioners spikes. To keep their peaker plants in operation, operators earn revenue year-round through customers’ electric bills according to rates set by ISO New England, a private organization which manages the New England power grid.

According to No Coal No Gas, ISO has authorized nearly $350 million for the region’s peaker plants for the period June 1, 2027- May 31, 2028. The payments represent 10 to 20 percent of New Englanders’ electric bills, they said.

“Peaker plants are the dirtiest, most expensive, least efficient energy source on our grid, and they cost rate payers money all the time, whether they are sitting idle, which they do the vast majority of the year, or kicking on on the hottest and coldest days of the year to provide extra power when we supposedly need it,” said Lena Greenberg of Burlington VT, one of two activists who hung the giant banner from Newington Station. “There are other ways to manage demand for electricity,” Greenberg said.

Greenberg and Talia Trigg said they started climbing the tower at about 5:15 AM Saturday, reaching a platform 270 feet above the ground 40 minutes later. “Neither of us came into this summer with a ton of rock-climbing experience, but we’re lucky to have a lot of friends and colleagues who are super knowledgeable about this stuff, and so we went into the climb fully equipped, safety gear wise,” said Trigg, a resident of Washington NH.

Power plant security personnel were on the scene when Trigg and Greenberg were halfway back down. By the time they reached the ground, Newington police were there, too. The two climbers and three supporters, Nathan Phillips, Leif Taranta, and Atlas Cooper, were arrested and charged with criminal trespass. Their arraignment is set for October 7.

Like Merrimack Station in Bow, the Newington plant is run by Granite Shore Power (GSP), a subsidiary of Atlas Holdings, a Connecticut investment firm which also owns Greenridge Generation, a bitcoin mining operation in upstate New York, and Pelican Power, which operates four power plants in Louisiana and Texas.

New Hampshire’s three other fossil-fueled peaker plants, all owned by GSP, received visits from No Coal No Gas on Saturday, as well. At Schiller Station in Portsmouth, which formerly burned coal and like the Bow plant is slated for conversion to a renewable energy park, activists left a banner reading “Congrats on the battery park. What’s all this then?” on a pile of coal which remains at the facility.

photo courtesy of No Coal No Gas

“That banner’s 35 feet across and 10 feet this way, and we hung it between two pylons that are right in front of a coal pile,” said Siobhan Senier of Epping. The plant has already been decommissioned, she said, and GSP said they’ll turn it into a battery park for renewably generated power, “but the battery park is only going to occupy three acres of that whole property.” Senier wants to know what the company plans to do with “this big honkin’ coal pile sitting there.”

At another GSP peaker plant, Lost Nation in Northumberland, activists planted goldenrod and hung a banner that said, “Peaker by Peaker, Plant by Plant.” Eleanor Reid of Hanover said planting native flowers is a form of natural remediation for disturbed areas. “Part of the whole shutting down the peakers is also we need to undo the damage that they’ve been doing to the air and the water and the land near them,” she said.

According to No Coal No Gas, another group painted a mural at a rarely used facility in Tamworth with the message, “Last year this oil-burning power plant cost us $331K.”

The No Coal No Gas campaign achieved its first notoriety on September 28, 2019, when several dozen activists wearing tyvek suits and carrying plastic buckets walked toward the Bow plant’s coal pile saying they would remove the coal “bucket by bucket” if that’s what it would take to shut the plant down. Sixty-seven people were arrested.

Later actions included nonviolent blockades of

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Click on the <No Coal No Gas> tag for previous articles on the campaign.

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trains delivering coal to the plant, demonstrations at the offices of Atlas Holdings and the ISO, lobbying campaigns to halt Bow’s forward capacity payments, and more demonstrations and arrests at the Bow facility. The campaign is backed by staff support from two organizations, 350NH and the Climate Disobedience Center, both of which are dedicated to ending climate pollution. Using lyrics from Greg Greenway‘s song “Do What Must Be Done” as a motto, the campaign kept up a steady pace of organizing meetings, research, public education, and action to close New England’s last coal-fired power plant.

No Coal No Gas is not the only group which has opposed the operation of Merrimack Station, as the Bow plant is formally named. The actual shut-down declaration followed litigation by the NH Sierra Club and the Conservation Law Foundation. Announcing plans to cease coal-burning by 2028, Jim Andrews of Granite Shore Power said, “From our earliest days as owners and operators, we have been crystal clear; while our power occasionally is still on during New England’s warmest days and coldest nights, we were firmly committed to transitioning our facilities away from coal and into a newer, cleaner energy future.”

Critics, however, say the plant’s occasional operation still emits carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere. The plant failed a “stack test” for particulate matter last year. Another test was conducted on July 11. According to the Department of Environmental Services, results will be available by early September.

On Saturday afternoon at Memorial Park, which sits across the Merrimack River from the Bow power plant, about 35 members of No Coal No Gas listened to a set of music performed by the Leftist

Marching Band, two speakers, and a presentation by the 350NH Youth Team. Afterwards, half of the group took to the river in canoes and kayaks. Before setting out on the water, Mary Beth Raven said she had contacted the NH Marine Patrol to assure them no civil disobedience was planned.

The ”kayaktivists” included Kai Parlett, a recent UNH grad who dressed in a dinosaur costume for the occasion. Parlett, who has been active with No Coal No Gas since she was in high school, said she has used the dino outfit for years to draw attention to the cause. “It’s time for fossil fuels to go extinct,” she said, like dinosaurs. Parlett said she enjoys “running around in a dinosaur suit just because it’s comical and it’s relatable and people engage with it.”

Marla Marcum, who has been with No Coal No Gas since the beginning, said the group decided in March to shift its focus to shutting down all of New England’s fossil-fueled peaker plants, including the New Hampshire facilities owned by GSP. Some of them never get turned on at all, she said, and others run rarely. While that might be a reason to downplay their climate impact, Marcum says they are the “low hanging fruit” for the energy transition needed to combat climate change. The money coming from ratepayers to keep them operating could be better used, she said.

We’re paying for the peaker plants to “just sit there,” Marcum said. “That’s an opportunity cost that we could be using to transition the grid. It’s holding up resources that would make the transition possible. We think at least half of them could be retired tomorrow.”

Others might disagree. The ISO issued an “energy emergency” on August 1 when regional temperatures soared and a “capacity deficiency” occurred. “Temperatures were higher than anticipated across New England during the late afternoon and early evening hours, leading consumer demand for electricity during the peak hour to be approximately 300 megawatts (MW) above forecasts from that morning,” an ISO statement said. Moreover, an unnamed 335 MW power plant went offline unexpectedly. “System operators used well-established procedures to balance supply and demand on the regional power system,” the ISO statement said, and the emergency was declared over after five hours without cuts affecting energy consumers.

No Coal No Gas says the problem may have been bad forecasting by ISO. Rebecca Beaulieu, a spokesperson, said, “If ISO-NE had a policy to respond to this outage with community conservation or demand response, they wouldn’t need to rely on fossil fuel peaker plants to make up the slack, and would have a more immediate way to reduce energy usage instead of using power plants that take hours to power up.”

Moreover, the regional energy system is in transition. The US Department of Energy announced a $389 million “Power Up” proposal on August 6 to boost the region’s capacity to integrate renewable power into its grid. The program includes “an innovative, multi-day battery energy storage system in Northern Maine to enhance grid resilience and optimize the delivery of renewable energy.” According to a DOE statement, “These investments will provide the New England region with access to thousands of megawatts of offshore wind, greater resource diversity, and increased reliability while lowering consumer costs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

“We know that batteries aren’t a perfect solution,” Marcum acknowledged. “We also know that we’ve as a global community gotten ourselves to a point in history where we don’t have any perfect solutions available to us.” But through efforts of groups like No Coal No Gas, she believes, political will to speed the transition is growing.

Lena Greenberg, clearly exhausted from an early morning climb up and down a tower followed by hours in police custody, still had energy to outline what must be done. “It’s tremendously important to be strategic in our interventions and try to get the dirtiest, least efficient, most expensive energy sources on our grid taken offline as soon as possible,” Greenberg said, sitting with Talia Trigg in a pavilion at Memorial Park.

Instead of subsidizing fossil-fueled peaker plants, Greenberg said, we have to “incentivize really efficient electricity use, like heat pumps and getting people off of fossil fuels so that we can use electricity and then invest in new electrical sources like wind and solar and geothermal, so that we can really be using the renewable resources that we have without destroying the planet that makes it enjoyable to use them on.”

Dartmouth Grad Workers End Strike, Win Better Pay and Benefits

This article first appeared in InDepthNH on June 29, 2024.

After 59 days on strike, the union representing Dartmouth College graduate student workers has approved its first contract, winning a substantial pay increase, expanded benefits, and protections against unfair treatment.

The Graduate Organized Laborers at Dartmouth, GOLD, was conceived in the fall of 2021.  A year later, they affiliated with the United Electrical Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) and became known as GOLD-UE.  Negotiations began after GOLD-UE won an NLRB-supervised election in 2023.  Frustrated by a lack of progress after months at the bargaining table, the union went on strike on May 1.

Negotiations continued during the strike, up until June 20, when the college presented what it called “a slightly-revised package proposal designed to reach an agreement with GOLD-UE, while also maintaining Dartmouth’s core positions,” including a clause barring the union from striking during the contract’s life.  Union negotiators brought the proposal back to members, who agreed to submit it to a ratification vote with support from their bargaining committee. 

In addition to a 17.5% pay increase in the first year of the three-year contract, bringing their annual stipend to $47,000, annual compensation will rise with the cost of living in years two and three.  Genevieve Goebel, a member of the union’s bargaining committee, said Dartmouth will be the first grad student union to win raises tied to the CPI.  “No other graduate contracts, including UE-negotiated ones, include a straight cost-of-living adjustment like ours,” a college statement agreed.

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See More on GOLD-UE’ and Union Organizing at Dartmouth

May 1, 2024 – Dartmouth Grad Workers Go On Strike Today

April 23, 2024 – Rolling the Union On at Dartmouth

April 3, 2024 – NH Grad Students Raise the Union Banner

October 21, 2023 – “We Are Workers,” Dartmouth Grad Students Insist

April 15, 2023 – Dartmouth Grad Students Win Union Vote

November 6, 2022 – “Student Union” Takes on New Meaning at Dartmouth 

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The college did not agree to retroactive pay for the period when the graduate student workers were on strike.  Neither did the union win access to the college’s childcare center, but they did win a substantial childcare support fund and a promise to have access to the childcare center at some unspecified date.

During the past week, the union held “Town Halls” to inform members about contract details and conducted online voting open to everyone whose dues were paid.  The voting concluded at 5 p.m. Friday, after which the union informed members by email that the contract was ratified. The union did not release the actual vote totals, only that it was “a lot to a little,” according to Royce Brown, a UE staff member.

Genevieve Goebel, a soil chemist in the fifth year of her Ph.D. program, led the final Town Hall Friday afternoon and went over the contract terms for more than an hour.  Section by section, she detailed provisions dealing with compensation, time off, medical and dental benefits, grievance procedures, non-discrimination protections, health and safety, intellectual property, assignments of teaching responsibilities, the needs of international students, the union security clause, and more.

Some measures are relatively simple, like the right to post union notices on campus billboards.  Other provisions may prove to be complex, like “pooled funds” which can be used for medical expenses.  I don’t know if anyone actually prints a union contract any more, but this one would fill a lot of pages.

In some areas, the union fell short of its goals, for example accepting the “no strike” clause and a stipend less than the amount they determined was needed to meet the local cost of living.  But in most areas, they won improvements.

When I first interviewed Goebel, she told me talks on discrimination and unfair treatment were stalled.  “Right now, we’re running into a wall with the college,” she said at a rally held prior to a negotiating session.  Eight months later, the ratified contract includes a grievance procedure with binding arbitration, protections against overwork and unreasonable schedules, and an ability to appeal rulings made by the college’s Title IX office, which handles complaints about discrimination.  “I’m really proud we won this,” she said, calling the appeal process “a dramatic improvement from the way things have been.”

Ankita Sarkar, a fourth year Ph.D. student in computer science from India said the contract includes “better support for the expenses of being international,” like payment of visa fees and mandated leave time to deal with immigration matters.  She also said the college is now obligated to “provide paperwork on the correct timeline” in order for students to satisfy government requirements.  She’s disappointed about the “no strike” clause, but happy to have paid dental care.

Dylan Barbagallo, a Ph.D. student in materials science, said for him, the contract fight was about “housing, housing, housing, housing,” which is no surprise in the county with the highest rents in the state.  Although the union failed to get raises tied specifically to the cost of housing, he said, “I think we tackled it through more circuitous routes of increasing pay and lowering other burdens on students.”  Barbagallo voted “yes” to ratify the agreement and said the two-month strike fostered “a sense of solidarity” among students who might work in relatively isolated conditions.

Goebel said, “I think more than any one thing in the contract itself, I’m proud that we put our foot down and went out on strike.”  By striking, she said the union showed Dartmouth “we won’t be bullied out of demanding things that we need to get by here.”

Along the way, Goebel said the union benefited from the experience of other campuses, where union organizing among graduate student workers has taken off in recent years.  “I think we’re in a really unique time for organizing in higher ed,” she said, noting that the Dartmouth contract “follows a pretty quick sequence of other contracts that were recently resolved.”  The benefits provisions of the recent agreement at Johns Hopkins, she said, provided a model that inspired the Dartmouth union to hold out for more than what the college was initially willing to offer. 

In the end, “the strike showed that we were all willing to take on pretty substantial sacrifices. What striking means to a lot of grad students is basically suspending progress on work that they really care about,” she said.  “A lot of us came to grad school because we’re genuinely passionate about our fields and have a curiosity. That’s almost like an itch that begs to be followed through to a conclusion.  But in this contract fight, by going on strike, we showed each other that we were willing to put passions like that on hold for a greater passion, which is the benefit of all, not leaving people behind.”

Now, Goebel can return to her research plots at Hubbard Brook Experiment Station in the White Mountains and in Corinth, Vermont, where she’s studying how changes in northern New England’s winter weather are affecting the soil.  But she’ll remain active in the union, which now has to adopt a constitution, elect officers and stewards, and orient new grad students to life and work on an organized campus. 

She’ll be gone when the contract expires at the end of June in 2027, but she’s confident that the union will have new leadership by then.  “We have a lot of people in their first years of their five-year programs, so they will certainly be here for the next contract fight. And they’ve been able to essentially shadow the bargaining committee that was just dissolved. So they’ll be really well prepared.”