March 16, 2015

How Frances Crowe found her radical soul

"I read the longtime activist's memoir looking for pointers, lessons and examples for how to sustain a lifetime of activism — and boy, did I find it," writes Frida Berrigan in a review of Frances' memoir.

Book review by Frida Berrigan in Waging Nonviolence, March 14, 2015

"Vitality, verve and vision. Those are three words that come to mind when I think of Frances Crowe, the peace powerhouse of Western Massachusetts.

Frances will celebrate her 96th birthday on the Ides of March. She was already old when I met her more than 20 years ago as a student at Hampshire College. As a work study student, I cleaned toilets on the second floor of the library for a year before realizing that I could intern for the American Friends Service Committee, or AFSC, in Northampton instead.

In a peace-poster-plastered office, in the basement of her tidy home up the hill from NoHo’s main drag, I learned how to file papers, make copies, call reporters, draft press releases and take phone messages. Sometimes she would send me out with a roll of tape and a staple gun to hang posters for events on telephone poles and coffee shop bulletin boards. I don’t recall what big issues we were organizing around at the time. There was U.S. military intervention in the former Yugoslavia, the imposition of neoliberal economic policies in Central and South America, the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to name a few of the mid-90s issues that her AFSC office would have been concerned about. Sometimes we would eat lunch together: Homemade hummus and cut up vegetables, cottage cheese with nutritional yeast, thick slices of whole wheat bread.

It was not glamourous or exciting work. It did not feel cutting edge or hardcore, but it was all of those things — I am some small part of Frances’ long life of resistance and peace work. I learned so much from her. And then I learned even more reading her incredible life story “Finding My Radical Soul: A Memoir.”

In the book, she recounts her upbringing, education and as much of her family background as she was able to uncover. This is all interesting stuff, but the book really gets going when she begins to relate how her adult life intersects with history. Frances married Tom Crowe in May 1945 and they moved to New Orleans where Tom served as a doctor on an Army ship. On August 6 of that year, she was ironing placemats and making arrangements to welcome her husband home after a tour of duty. She listened to the radio as she worked to make a picture perfect home and meal for his return. The announcer said that the United States had dropped a new kind of bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

“This act of violence shook me to the core,” Frances writes. She unplugged the iron and went out into the streets, looking, she writes, “for someone interested in nonviolence.” New to the city, she could not find a peace center, but she walked into a used bookstore where the shop keeper told her to start with Leo Tolstoy, “the father of nonviolence.” And so she did. Years later, Frances learned that this is exactly where Gandhi started too." ...

Read the full review