In September of 1961, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American, Rufus Wells, interviewed three imprisoned Black activists: Wallace and Juanita Nelson and their close friend, Eroseanna Robinson. They told Wells, “We’d rather die than cooperate with the law in any way.”Footnote 1 Since their arrest, all three had refused to follow their jailers’ instructions and rejected all nourishment. The Nelsons and Robinson lived together in Philadelphia and were prominent members of radical pacifist organization the Peacemakers since the late 1940s. They did not pay federal taxes and, when arrested, practiced total noncooperation, refusing to participate in legal proceedings and carrying out hunger strikes while in prison. An unplanned stop at a diner along the notorious Route 40, known for its segregated facilities, had landed them in jail. State troopers arrested the three activists, along with their white pacifist companion Kay M. Fields, for “trespassing” at the segregated facility.
The saga of what became known as the Elkton Three (because they were arrested in Elkton, Maryland) highlighted the pervasive segregation in the mid-Atlantic states and helped propel freedom rides in the region. But while there has been significant scholarship on the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)’s Desegregate Route 40 project and its role in international diplomacy, the role of the Elkton Three has been overlooked.Footnote 2 It is unsurprising that the Nelsons and Robinson have been largely forgotten in civil rights historiography. They acted largely independently of major civil rights organizations and practiced a form of noncooperation that made even some of their supporters deeply uncomfortable. But they were well trained in the art of nonviolent direct action, and they were nimble, taking orders from their own conscience rather than from an organizational hierarchy. Their embodied resistance and fortitude were a form of affective protest, inspiring strong emotional reactions to their plight.
Because they were not attempting to coordinate a mass campaign and they distrusted the state, the Peacemakers operated on the periphery, often living in small-scale communities and sympathetic to anarchist thought. Together with individual actors working outside of civil rights organizations, the “local people” who formed the backbone of the movement, marginal groups like the Peacemakers suggest a broader approach to civil rights history. In addition to focusing on large, sweeping campaigns, we should recognize how smaller often spontaneous actions reflect the depth and breadth of cultural and political change in mid-twentieth century America.Footnote 3 The Elkton Three were not local to the Baltimore area and were trained activists, but their noncooperation tactics and radical politics marked them as marginal.
As the rich historiography on civil rights suggests, African Americans and sympathetic white allies challenged racial injustice in small towns and major metropolises throughout the twentieth century without the support of mainstream civil rights organizations. Radical pacifists also engaged in this protest activity, training not necessarily for a single organized action, but for the opportunity to live their ideals fully, at home and on the streets. For Peacemakers, embodied protest was not a separate event, a date and time to be recorded for the future; it was part of the everyday. Peacemakers believed that only by fully inhabiting one’s politics was one ready to act on them on a moment’s notice. This took, perhaps surprisingly, a significant amount of training, mobilization, and concerted action. It is difficult, if not impossible, to exactly determine the practical impact of this work, but it reflects something less understood or theorized about the long civil rights movement. Marginal radical groups, in addition to local people, helped propel the movement forward.
Throughout the long civil rights movement, small groups and individuals challenged segregation, police brutality, and racial inequality in all its myriad forms.Footnote 4 This kind of spontaneous protest has a long history, of which only a small percentage is visible to us. Often, we only know their names through National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawsuits and coverage in the Black press. Although they were seasoned radical activists, the Elkton Three’s protest had more in common with these quotidian actions of African Americans throughout the Jim Crow era than with the mass mobilizations spearheaded by civil rights organizations. Think of Pauli Murray and her companion Adelene McBean’s decision in 1940 to refuse to move to the back of an interstate bus in Virginia, leading to their arrest for disorderly conduct.Footnote 5 At times, spontaneous acts led to major civil rights breakthroughs. For example, in 1945, Sarah Elizabeth Ray, a young Black graduate of a Detroit secretarial school, went to the NAACP when she was barred from an excursion to the Bob-Lo Amusement Park. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, whose 1948 decision served as an important precedent for Brown v. Board of Education. Footnote 6 Or more famously, Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, launched a bus boycott, although she did not plan to refuse to give up her seat on that specific day. Parks’s previous activism and her training at Highlander Folk School primed her to stay seated.Footnote 7 More often, the results of such courageous actions were beatings, arrest, or profound distress. But, as in the case of the Elkton Three, such actions illuminated instances of discrimination and forced the hand of larger organizations and more visible leaders.
Peacemakers’ challenges to the status quo lay somewhere between the collective mass movement that was gaining ascendancy by 1961 and individual agency. Local people often challenged white supremacy without the support of major organizations, who later provided resources and support. Peacemakers similarly embarked on resistance campaigns individually or in small groups. The peripheral nature of the Elkton Three’s activism suggests the need to grapple with this range of individual and collective actions. But their marginality did not mean that their resistance had no import or legacy. In fact, the Elkton Three’s embodied resistance was remarkably effective at bringing attention to multiple intersecting systems of oppression. Their arrest, which was widely publicized in the press, brought increased attention to discrimination along Route 40, both from the federal government and from major civil rights organizations.Footnote 8 Through their hunger strikes, a tactic that more activists embraced during the decades to follow, they used their imprisoned bodies to speak out against racial discrimination and militarism and challenged the power of the carceral state.Footnote 9
The Arrest
In early September 1961, the Nelsons, Robinson, and Fields traveled from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in support of their friend Max Sandin, a fellow Peacemaker. Sandin had been a World War II conscientious objector along with Wallace Nelson and, like the Nelsons and Robinson, he was a tax refuser, declining to pay federal income taxes used for military spending. In 1960, Sandin picketed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) headquarters with other Peacemakers. The following year, when the IRS began to confiscate his social security checks for back payment of taxes, he went to Washington and began a sit-down protest and hunger strike in front of the U.S. Treasury building. Authorities promptly arrested Sandin and placed him in a psychiatric hospital, a fate his three fellow Peacemakers would soon share.Footnote 10
While returning to Philadelphia, Juanita was driving along Route 40 when Fields said she was hungry. The group realized they had forgotten the lunch Robinson had packed for them, so they stopped at the Bar-Chuckhouse truck stop for a quick meal. They all later insisted this was spontaneous, but they were also ready to react. For African Americans, travel always meant the possibility of encountering discrimination and potential violence. There was no question that the Elkton Three were on the alert for conflict. Juanita later wrote of their decision, “Now we knew that Route 40 was notorious, that black people, including African diplomats, couldn’t find a place to eat or sleep on that road … I guess hunger makes you forget about stupid, unkind customs. So we were startled when the waitress announced, ‘Sorry, we don’t serve colored.’”Footnote 11 Startled but not surprised, Juanita and her companions knew what would come next. Indeed, fellow pacifist Maurice McCrackin called the Elkton Three “inwardly prepared” to act on discrimination.Footnote 12 The Bar-Chuckhouse manager sent the dishwasher to a local police barracks and soon two state troopers appeared at the table. Wallace Nelson later wrote, “when state troopers arrived acting like storm troopers they met strong nonviolent resistance.”Footnote 13
The four agreed to show their drivers’ licenses, but Juanita Nelson asked for an explanation. The troopers arrested her for noncompliance. Juanita immediately went limp, and the troopers dragged her to the police cruiser and drove to the nearby Elkton jail, with the others following by car. Juanita remembered arriving at the station: “One trooper twisted my arm with a mean looking prongs that bit into my skin. It hurt so much I screamed. When Wally and Sis [Eroseanna] protested, they were arrested.”Footnote 14 Wallace Nelson wrote to fellow Peacemaker Ernest Bromley, “Since we are not cooperating with this dastardly act against our freedom and persons they dragged us out of the sheriff’s office to the cells in which we are kept.” He continued, “Although the treatment of us when being dragged has been quite cruel (arms are twisted and steel claws are used on our arms) we are in good condition. Our spirits are high because we know that we are right. To us one is free only when one behaves as if one is free.”Footnote 15 Fields, who needed to get back to work in Chicago, decided to pay a fine, although she pleaded innocent to the charge of trespassing.Footnote 16 She later unsuccessfully appealed her case and returned to Baltimore for a jury trial. Her three companions refused to enter a plea. Wallace Nelson, when asked whether he preferred a jury trial or a court trial, said he elected “to go home.”Footnote 17 Now imprisoned, the Nelsons and Robinson practiced total noncooperation. They refused all food, refused to walk to the courtroom, and refused to cooperate with the jailers and judge. Incensed by their resistance, the sheriff and prison guards placed metal claws on their arms and dragged them roughly to and from court.Footnote 18
This cruel treatment was not new to the Elkton Three. As a conscientious objector (CO) during World War II, Wally Nelson, along with many of his fellow COs, carried out hunger strikes to protest racial segregation and prison conditions.Footnote 19 Guards force-fed Nelson for eighty days during his hunger strike, and he weighed only 116 pounds when finally released from prison. Indeed, it was in prison that Juanita first met Nelson; as a journalist, she was investigating segregated prison conditions in Cleveland, Ohio. It was during these World War II hunger strikes that some American COs first deployed total noncooperation against their jailers. These “absolutists” went limp when arrested, refused to cooperate in any way in prison, and refused all food.Footnote 20 Their bodies also became weapons in the struggle for racial justice within the prison walls as they protested racial segregation. Exasperated by the government’s insistence that he remain imprisoned even after the war’s end, Wallace Nelson finally declared in a 1946 letter to the attorney general, “If you must keep my body in prison then you must take care of it … I am not going to eat until I am free again.”Footnote 21
Absolutist tactics such as Nelson’s were at one extreme of CO resistance strategies. The renowned pacifist A. J. Muste, who led the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and other pacifists questioned the efficacy of the hunger strikes and criticized the absolutists as potentially diverting attention away from the central issues for which pacifists and civil rights activists advocated. “If one considers the matter from the standpoint of tactics,” wrote Muste to a friend, “it seems to me that again ‘total noncooperation’ and/or the fast unto death, are steps at the end of a process that a movement works up to, but does not begin with.”Footnote 22 Muste urged COs to stick to the Gandhian script, to the extent that was possible, rather than escalating directly to total noncooperation.Footnote 23 Some pacifists were also concerned that openly defying prison authorities from the moment of their arrest could be viewed as coercive, and thus not a true Gandhian practice. But the absolutists persisted in the practice and carried it over into the postwar years. “We flapped our butterfly wings in prison,” remembered absolutist CO William Roberts Jr., “Who can know their effect in our interconnected world.”Footnote 24 For the linked pacifist and civil rights movements, that effect would shape the nature of activism for the next half century and beyond. The disciplined body, trained in direct action and lean from fasting and hunger strikes, was at the center of radical pacifism and became an important tool for some civil rights activists.
Route 40 and the Cold War
In the Cold War context, the Elkton Three’s significance spans from the local, free travel along Route 40, to the global, a world without militarism or rampant inequality. Their refusal to bow down to the state also illuminates the breadth of opposition to Cold War liberalism among some radical pacifists. Cold War liberalism supported slow and gradual change in race relations, while promoting anticommunism at home and abroad. In contrast, elements of the Peacemakers, War Resisters League, and the Catholic Workers comprised a peripheral anarchist pacifist movement that placed opposition to the militarism and white supremacy of the state at the center of their ideology.Footnote 25 They were dissenters across multiple fronts and embraced radicalism, rather than liberalism. But because they were neither Black Nationalists nor communists, their politics have received less attention from scholars.Footnote 26 In contrast to these allies, anarchist pacifist demands for immediacy led them to nonviolent direct action and noncooperation. And for many, like the Elkton Three, their politics were wedded to their practices of daily life.
Peacemakers who rejected Cold War liberalism were sympathetic to the plight of newly independent nations in Africa and elsewhere, which they viewed as part of a global antiracist movement rather than Cold War pawns. For example, one of those radical pacifists who, along with Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger, was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II, was the Black activist Bill Sutherland. In 1953, Sutherland moved to Ghana and befriended the newly elected Kwame Nkrumah. Several years later he and Ghana’s minister of finance, Komla Gbedemah, were refused service at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Dover, Delaware, while on a tour of the United States, an incident that allowed them to expose the hypocrisy of Cold War propaganda that promoted the United States as the land of equality and freedom.Footnote 27 Like other Peacemakers, as an anticolonial activist, as well as a voice for pacifism and civil rights, Sutherland rejected the gradualism of Cold War liberalism and the sectarian politics of the Communist Party. When newly appointed African diplomats, like Gbedemah, confronted U.S. segregation, they clarified the profound limits of Cold War liberalism. Lukewarm support for gradualism was not advancing change quickly enough and the pacifist support for newly independent nations threatened to undermine Cold War foreign policy objectives. Route 40 was where these contradictions most clearly manifested.
In November 1961, about six weeks after the Elkton Three’s release, CORE and allied civil rights organizations launched a freedom ride along Route 40, the highway connecting Washington, D.C., to New York City. In addition to the Elkton Three’s arrest, this campaign developed because of a series of deeply embarrassing incidents when restaurants barred African diplomats representing newly independent nations from eating at their segregated facilities. These diplomats, their staffs, and their families routinely traveled from their D.C. embassies to the United Nations. The level of housing and employment discrimination, as well as the segregated public accommodations they encountered, led African ambassadors to consider Washington, D.C., as a “hardship post.”Footnote 28 The Kennedy administration, under pressure to bring these nations under United States control at the height of the Cold War, authorized the State Department to create a Special Service Protocol Section to put pressure on the businesses to voluntarily desegregate. There were even proposals to give African diplomats passes that they could show to proprietors in order to be served. This ineffective campaign of persuasion took place the same week state troopers arrested the Elkton Three.Footnote 29
The State Department watched in alarm as the Soviet press gleefully publicized the humiliating incidents of exclusion; however, U.S. officials did not push for the wholesale end of segregation, but rather for better treatment of diplomats. Of course, it was not only African diplomats who were distraught at the discrimination that Black people faced on Route 40. CORE understood this, noting ahead of their November campaign, “Realizing that a growing portion of the American Negro Community resents the special privileges foreign negroes are accorded, the publicity would have to be carefully handled.” But CORE officials also viewed the state department interest as an opportunity to take action: “The State Department has by its interference in the ‘internal affairs’ of the state of Maryland given us a perfect in, it seems a shame to pass it up.”Footnote 30 In addition, by 1961, the freedom to travel had become a national issue in the wake of the Boynton v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which ruled that segregation in interstate public transportation was unconstitutional. “Once a regional peculiarity that attracted little attention outside the country,” argues Mia Bay, “by the beginning of the 1960s the South’s Jim Crow buses, trains, and public accommodations had become a highly public symbol of the nation’s failure to live up to its own democratic ideals.”Footnote 31 The freedom to ride the nation’s highways, trains, and buses was at the center of the civil rights struggle domestically and had become a symbol of U.S. hypocrisy globally.
And it was a struggle that hit a nerve for many African Americans. While a student at Howard University, Stokely Carmichael would frequently make the trip from Washington, D.C., to New York City with a close friend: “On those rides I developed a deep hatred—one shared by many—for Route 40 …”Footnote 32 To underscore the discrepancy over concerns for diplomats versus ordinary Black Americans, students from Howard and other historically black colleges and universities dressed as African diplomats to see if they could be served. In contrast to the Elkton Three, they were.Footnote 33 The Elkton Three’s arrest, then, came at a moment when the nation was focused on Route 40 and their experience stood in for the countless incidents of segregation and harassment experienced by Carmichael and many others. “While the interest in the Route 40 situation has been sharpened by the treatment of Africans,” wrote the Baltimore Afro-American, “the question of the treatment of colored Americans has also entered the picture. This was dramatically underscored several weeks ago when three colored Philadelphians and a white friend were jailed when they stopped at a restaurant for food.”Footnote 34 By putting their bodies on the line, the Elkton Three demanded justice not only for diplomats but for all Americans.
The Peacemakers
After World War II, many radical pacifists focused their energy on using nonviolent direct action to desegregate public accommodations in the North and Midwest. They took the lessons of the CO hunger strikes with them into the new Cold War era. In 1948, the absolutist COs, radical pacifists, and civil rights activists dedicated to Gandhian nonviolence met in Chicago for a “Conference on Non-violent Revolutionary Socialism.” There they formed the Committee for Non-Violent Revolution (CNVR). This short-lived organization morphed into the Peacemakers, which took its name from the Bible’s Beatitudes, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matt. 5:9). They were committed to group living, non-payment of taxes, ascetic practices such as fasting, and noncooperation, including hunger strikes, upon arrest. Peacemakers were non-hierarchical and formed small interracial communities to organize on a local level and model egalitarian living. Their practice of tax refusal expressed their opposition to military spending and required them to live at or below the poverty level.Footnote 35
The Peacemakers’ choice of a name that referenced the bible reflected their deep religious commitments. Most were products of the ecumenical Student Christian Movement of the interwar period, coming out of the Young Men’s Christian Association’s (YMCA) and Young Women’s Christian Association’s (YWCA) student divisions and mainstream Protestant denominations.Footnote 36 Wallace Nelson, for example, was introduced to nonviolence through a Methodist youth group in Chicago during the 1930s.Footnote 37 These vibrant circles had been debating the relevancy of Gandhian teachings to the Black freedom struggle since the 1920s. Rather than the optimistic liberalism of the Progressive era’s Social Gospel movement, radical pacifists embraced an ecumenical prophetic faith. Leaders such as Muste modeled themselves after the Hebrew prophets and viewed the world as inherently sinful. In order alleviate that sin, Christians needed to engage with the world politically, both at home and overseas.Footnote 38 A. J. Muste wrote in 1940, “Our preoccupation … has not been with mere war-resistance or with a narrow and secular anti-war movement. Our concern has been with the problems and crisis of modern civilization as a whole; with the achievement of a dynamic, beautiful, and noble social order …”Footnote 39 This utopian vision also inspired Peacemakers to link together struggles against racial discrimination and militarism, as addressing all aspects of a disordered society might lead to a “noble social order.” And it led them to emphasize cooperation and egalitarianism, embracing a form of “spiritual socialism” in both their daily lives and their politics.Footnote 40 While the Elkton Three did not belong to a specific denomination, these deep spiritual beliefs sustained them during their imprisonments and hunger strikes.
Although such a vision incorporated both men and women, there were clear gender divisions within the movement. The World War II COs were all men, who, because they refused to fight, were vulnerable to accusations of weakness and effeminacy. Their embodied resistance as COs was evidence of their physical strength and prowess as well as their political commitments, which contradicted these smears. But Black and white women were also attracted to the radical and egalitarian ethos of the Peacemakers and embraced their rejection of Cold War liberalism’s gradual approaches to societal change. For Juanita Nelson and Robinson, being active in the Peacemakers set them apart from the women’s peace movement that we associate with Cold War feminine politics. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), established in 1915, and the Women’s Strike for Peace, formed in 1961 (in part in reaction to the more conservative and anticommunist stance of the WILPF), offered activist women, many of them white and middle class, the opportunity to deploy maternalist arguments for peace. These groups emphasized the unique roles mothers played during the Cold War, as protectors of children and the generations to come.Footnote 41 But, for the most part, the Peacemakers did not offer this protection of maternal respectability, particularly for Black women.
One significant exception was Marjorie Swann, a white mother of four with two decades of experience in the radical pacifist and civil rights movements when she was arrested in 1959 during the Peacemakers’ Omaha action protest near Mead, Nebraska. Peacemakers designed the five-week project to call attention to the newly developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), long-range missiles capable of launching nuclear warheads between continents. The action was initially planned as a vigil, but soon Peacemakers started breaching the fence. After consulting with her family, Swann joined them, and after her arrest, she was sentenced to a six-month prison term in Alderson, Virginia. This act marked Swann as the first woman to be arrested and serve time in prison for a form of conscientious objection.Footnote 42 But it was not her act of courage that drew attention to Swann; it was her motherhood. An article in Redbook magazine provocatively titled, “You Are a Bad Mother,” offered Swann publicity for her action that few pacifists received. Despite the title, a quote from Swann’s sentencing judge, the article was sympathetic. It described Swann as “slender and brown-haired,” and “a respectable suburban housewife.”Footnote 43 Swann believed her sacrifice was well worth it, stating, “I can only say that the guilt I may feel now, and the pain at leaving my husband and children, is nothing compared to the guilt and pain I will feel—if I am still alive—at seeing my children blasted to death by an H-bomb.”Footnote 44 Neither Robinson nor Juanita Nelson had children, nor did they ever attract the sympathy of the mainstream press. Thus, maternalism in the cause of peace was limited in its efficacy. The Peacemakers, in contrast, offered a broad and inclusive community of like-minded activists.
Although seldom recognized, noncooperation, particularly the hunger strike, was first developed by women fighting for voting rights during the suffrage movement.Footnote 45 The hunger striker politicized the most deeply personal aspects of themselves, their bodies. Suffragists used their imprisoned bodies to shift patriarchal power relations and cultivate allies. Prolonged fasting was also a form of speech that could breach prison walls and draw sympathetic supporters. Pacifists differentiated hunger strikes from religious or political fasts, which seek to pressure social institutions or individuals to change their position and ordinarily take place outside of prison.Footnote 46 Indeed, it is the prison itself that necessitated the hunger strike. Michel Foucault has argued, “At the beginning of the nineteenth century … the great spectacle of physical punishment disappeared; the tortured body was avoided; the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment.”Footnote 47 But the hunger strike forced the reappearance of the incarcerated body as a target of repression. Central to this dynamic was the role of supporters in publicizing and picketing, exposing the violence of the carceral state. The Elkton Three were part of a Peacemaker network that was experienced in this labor.
By the early 1950s, hunger strikes and fasts had become part of the ritualistic and performative nature of pacifist culture. Fasting took place outside of prison walls, often to support those who were hunger striking in prison, and was a practice that was part of a continuum of bodily discipline, from marching on a picket line to total noncooperation. On Easter week in 1950, for example, Peacemakers, in alliance with other pacifist organizations, fasted in Washington, D.C., and other cities to protest President Truman’s announcement about the development of the hydrogen bomb and the outset of the Korean War. Their collective fast lasted for ten days, to correspond with the time Christ spent on the cross, and drew support internationally, including from Japan, Puerto Rico, and England. David Dellinger, a Peacemaker and absolutist who had spent the war years carrying out hunger strikes in prison, found this fast “effortless,” but reportedly, newcomers to fasting struggled.Footnote 48 Such political fasts persisted throughout the Cold War era, allowing activists and ordinary people to protest the growing threat of nuclear war. The Elkton’s Three’s hunger strike, then, was only one example of absolutist Peacemakers using embodied resistance in the fight against segregation and militarism.
The Nelsons and Robinson all had extensive experience in noncooperation. Wallace and Juanita Nelson lived with a white couple who were also Peacemakers, Ernest and Marion Bromley, in a communal home outside of Cincinnati during the early 1950s, which Eroseanna Robinson often visited. This Peacemaker cell was fully committed to noncooperation. When arrested during a campaign to desegregate the local amusement park, Coney Island, Marion Bromley and the Nelsons refused to speak in the courtroom and remained on a hunger strike throughout their imprisonment.Footnote 49 These tactics continued to alienate more mainstream civil rights organizations, including those that strategically deployed nonviolent direct action. The Nelsons had been deeply involved in CORE since its founding in the early 1940s, for example, but the organization’s reluctance to embrace the policy of total noncooperation, including hunger strikes, was troubling to the couple, who identified with the libertarian and anarchist wing of the movement. Although part of the anti-communist Left, the Nelsons were also troubled by CORE’s attempts to purge the organization of communist sympathizers. A CORE report on Wallace Nelson noted, “Wally asserts that communism is a personal conviction, and a democratic organization has no right to proscribe a communist so long as he accepts CORE’s discipline and does not disrupt its work.”Footnote 50 CORE leadership disagreed and in 1954 he was ousted from his position as a field organizer and Juanita, who had been a secretary in the organization, resigned in response.Footnote 51 Their refusal to ostracize communists in the movement reflected their skepticism of Cold War liberalism.
Eroseanna Robinson, a social worker and teacher whose religious convictions and egalitarian beliefs drew her to pacifism, also spent much of the 1950s engaged in a series of desegregation campaigns with CORE and the Peacemakers, as well as pursuing her career as a track and field athlete.Footnote 52 After she competed successfully in national meets, the U.S. State Department invited her to travel to Russia in a well-publicized goodwill sporting tour in 1958. Robinson refused to attend the meet. She wrote in Liberation, a pacifist publication, “I thought about all the men and women of the United States lifting their hands and pledging blind allegiance to the militarization and police authoritarianism and … propaganda symbolized in the cloth of the country. I was relieved to stay home.”Footnote 53 Robinson, like other Peacemakers, viewed pacifism and the struggle for racial equality as interlinked battles and took an absolutist stand while engaging in nonviolent direct action.Footnote 54 By refusing to participate in a State Department tour, Robinson was thwarting the Eisenhower administration’s attempt to downplay racial conflict within the United States. By the late 1950s, the cultural cold war had heated up and international goodwill tours were a primary State Department weapon to counter Soviet propaganda that emphasized America’s apartheid system. Refusing to participate in this war was a powerful pacifist stance akin to the male COs’ protests during World War II. Similarly, Robinson’s noncooperation during the Route 40 arrest thwarted the State Department’s focus on African diplomats as the primary victims of segregation.
It was, perhaps, Robinson’s refusal to participate in track meets against the Soviets that brought the full weight of the law against her. Robinson first came to the attention of the federal government in 1954 when she, and other Peacemakers, publicized a statement refusing to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities if called to testify.Footnote 55 In 1959, Robinson, who was then living in Chicago, received a subpoena from the attorney for the Department of Internal Revenue stating that she must appear in court for non-payment of taxes.Footnote 56 In defiance of the court order, Robinson simply ignored the subpoena and failed to show up at court. What followed was a dramatic series of events that captured the attention of pacifists and civil rights activists around the country. When officers attempted to arrest Robinson at the Chicago community center where she worked, she simply walked away. Robinson remembered, “I wasn’t going to contribute my body for incarceration any more than I would contribute federal income taxes for militarization.”Footnote 57 The marshals called for backup, and ten officers handcuffed Robinson and carried her to a wheelchair as she continued to refuse to cooperate. When taken to court, she was carried before the judge and deposited on the floor before being sent to the county jail. When she was brought back to court the following day, again in a wheelchair, she would not speak to the judge or follow his instructions. Incensed, he sent her back to Cook County Jail for as long as it would take to inspire her cooperation.Footnote 58
Within days of her arrest, Peacemakers and other local activists began around-the-clock mass picketing outside the jail. As would happen in Elkton, these activists were working to make Robinson’s hunger strike visible through daily pickets and press releases.Footnote 59 After six days, the warden sent Robinson to the Public Health Service hospital. There, four men and two women struggled to pin her down, eventually placing her in a straitjacket. They jammed a tube down her nose to her stomach and proceeded to force-feed her.Footnote 60 For the next twelve days, she was constrained and force-fed, often gagging, sometimes bleeding out her nose. Eventually Robinson was strapped to a gurney and wheeled back to the courthouse, where Judge Robson, the Federal District Court judge, sentenced her to a year and a day in Alderson Prison, where Marjorie Swann had recently served her own sentence, on the charge of criminal contempt.Footnote 61
Robinson’s hunger strike was a means of controlling her body, a turning inward that belied her imprisonment. Reflecting on her experiences, Robinson wrote, “Freedom is a state of mind, and leaves no space for anxiety over wires in walls and locked doors and warping prison rules and strategies.”Footnote 62 Putting one’s body “on the line” was a central strategy of radical nonviolence, and was being practiced by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in sit-ins throughout the South during the months Robinson spent in prison.Footnote 63 These young activists, who often experienced brutality in southern prisons, stopped short of Robinson’s absolutist stance but, like her, courageously withstood bodily assaults and indignities.
Robinson’s athleticism had always been central to her politics, whether outwitting white racists at demonstrations, or refusing to represent the United States on the track. In Alderson prison, this athleticism and discipline allowed her to successfully defy the authorities. After persistent picketing by her fellow Peacemakers and increased publicity, authorities released Robinson before the end of her sentence. In a final act of defiance, Robinson refused to board the train at the station where prison guards had driven her. Instead, she jumped into the car with the jubilant Peacemakers who awaited her appearance. Together they drove to the home of a sympathetic Black family and broke their fast with milk and fruit juices. It was the first sustenance Robinson had voluntarily imbibed for 115 days. “My imprisonment,” she wrote after her release, “has been the ugliest and most beautiful of my experiences.”Footnote 64
Juanita and Wallace Nelson were also veterans of noncooperation. Juanita was imprisoned during the Cincinnati amusement park demonstrations, carrying out a nine-day hunger strike, and her husband, Wallace, was force-fed during his 108-day hunger strike during World War II. Like Robinson, authorities also targeted Juanita in 1959 for tax refusal. Seven officers arrived at her house to arrest her for nonpayment of taxes; like Robinson, she had to be carried bodily out of her home. It was early morning, and Nelson was wearing only a kimono. When a fellow pacifist later brought her some clothes in jail, she noted, “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe.”Footnote 65 Reflecting on her decision not to get dressed, Nelson wrote, “I wanted to strip to the skeleton and clothe it with my own humanity, my own meaning.”Footnote 66 Authorities released Nelson soon after her arrest, but she and Robinson were the first women to carry out prison hunger strikes because of their opposition to war, taking on the male mantle of absolutism in jail.Footnote 67 For the Nelsons and Robinson, pacifism and civil rights work were deeply intertwined. The same state that was building up a nuclear arsenal was also condoning racial apartheid. Both were violent systems that, in their mind, could be challenged through radical nonviolence and total noncooperation. The effectiveness of their noncooperation persuaded other Peacemakers, such as FOR director A. J. Muste, that absolutist tactics could be effective.Footnote 68
The practices of total noncooperation, fasting, and hunger strikes went beyond joining an organization such as the NAACP or parading on a picket line. It involved bodily discipline, constant training, and community support. Indeed, community was the foundation of the Peacemakers’ activist work. Living communally and sharing resources was an economic necessity for tax refusers who lived below the poverty line. And noncooperation was only possible with support from like-minded activists. The Nelsons and Robinson, before, during, and after their imprisonments, were part of an anarchist pacifist community that was in constant communication with one another. This community celebrated the sacrifices of the Elkton Three and provided solace during difficult periods. Fellow Peacemaker Dave Henry wrote to Robinson in prison with great admiration: “What a clear distinction between doing and being. Does soul power increase proportionally to body power’s decrease?” he asked.Footnote 69 These connections were reciprocal. Just a few weeks after her release, Robinson was writing daily letters to Maurice McCrackin, imprisoned for his work assisting evicted sharecroppers in Tennessee, offering advice and support. “Hope you’re running up the walls for exercise and flying about the skimpy space in the cell,” she wrote, “Remember to breathe deeply throughout or such gyrations might prove overly strenuous.”Footnote 70 She also sent advice about the difficult decision to embark on a hunger strike while in prison. “For one thing, it seems odious to me to accept food from persons hard bent on punishing me. I could not nourish myself from their hands or their proxy’s hands. … I fear less where I am less dependent. Where I am not dependent, I have escaped from fear. I’m speaking of dependence for survival.”Footnote 71 Survival, for Robinson, meant independence from state control and fully embodying her values.
Robinson, McCrackin, and their fellow Peacemakers relied on over a decade of experience since the total noncooperation practiced by Wally Nelson and other COs in the 1940s. There was a wealth of information anarchists, pacifists, and other dissenters could turn to when imprisoned. In a 1950 volume, Prison Etiquette, the authors, many of them anarchists, focused on the ability to maintain individuality under a prison regime. The hunger strike was a prime way to do this. “The hunger strike is better adapted to the use of individuals or small, highly dedicated groups with a long-range view of what is to be accomplished,” the editors advised.Footnote 72 Former CO Arthur Kassin wrote this poem while in prison:
“Behest of the Government”
Is it a jest of the government
That I’m fed and dressed by the government,
Repressed and suppressed by the government,
Distressed and depressed by the government?
And when I protest to the government
That I’m oppressed by the government,
Why is it stressed by the government—
That I am a “guest of the government”?Footnote 73
Thus, for the Peacemakers, the hunger strike was a way to assert power and control when incarcerated. Writing in the voice of a fictional character, Juanita Nelson noted that “The courts and the jails have the power because we give it to them.” The hunger striker she envisioned asserted, “My only power, our only power at this point, it to take the power away by refusing to cooperate.”Footnote 74 They understood the jail cell as the ultimate form of state power and made it the center of their politics well before the publicity surrounding incarcerated Black Power activists in the late 1960s.Footnote 75 Through noncooperation, Peacemakers demonstrated that incarceration was never a totalizing system. It was possible to resist within prison walls using one’s body as a weapon with community support. These women and men became experts on prison life and prison resistance and spread that knowledge.
Prison and the Asylum
But to turn their prison cells into centers of political education, the Elkton Three had to rely on allies. Upon their arrest, they called friends from the progressive enclave in Philadelphia where they shared housing, the Powelton community, well known for its racial integration and anti-war activism during the 1960s.Footnote 76 There, neighbors and friends quickly mobilized to form the “Nelson-Robinson Committee.” The committee began to publicize the plight of their friends, calling journalists and giving interviews. The group wrote the governors of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland and asked them to work with the federal government on the Elkton Three’s release.Footnote 77 They also organized caravans of supporters to picket the jail and attend the trials. More than a hundred supporters flocked to the courthouse for their first hearing.Footnote 78 That was followed by a large meeting at an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Elkton to mobilize support. Kay Meyers, who attended, showed the deep bruises on her wrists from the metal claw used in their arrest, making the wounds of the imprisoned visible to those who were free.Footnote 79
In addition, Wallace Nelson’s employer, James Yoham of the Antioch Bookplate Company, sent his customers a postcard explaining that their salesman was imprisoned for his convictions, which brought even more support to the group. Yoham telegraphed Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) and President John F. Kennedy in support of Nelson stating, “You can understand something like this happening in the deep South, but not in this area.”Footnote 80 This pressure was aided by a constant stream of visitors to the prison, although not all were allowed in to speak to the Nelsons or Robinson. And some of the visitors were critical of the prisoners. Rev. Curtis of the local AME church, and a leader in Baltimore’s Human Relations Committee, visited as did the Baltimore NAACP attorney Paul J. Cockrell, who hoped to represent them in court. Neither was entirely pleased with the Elkton Three’s noncooperation.Footnote 81 Wallace Nelson later reported that “Cockrell seemed more threatened by our position than the officials.” Like some in the movement, Cockrell believed the three protestors were being unreasonable and acting “outside of the law.”Footnote 82 Rev. Curtis was concerned that their actions “might harm local efforts to desegregate restaurants.” “‘What these people expect to gain, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We feel that our approach to this thing will bring more dependable results.’”Footnote 83 Curtis’s approach was to visit segregated facilities and try to persuade them to change their policies. Similarly, a local woman who was working on school integration in Elkton, Mrs. J. Mercer Terrell, “said she regarded the actions of the defendants as ‘deliberately aggravating.’ She praised Magistrate Lockhart and the police for their ‘patience and restraint.’”Footnote 84 Absolutism and noncooperation had always been controversial, but Cockrell and Terrell underestimated its effectiveness. As the Elkton Three’s hunger strike continued, and their actions became more widely publicized, the Human Relations Council met with the governor urging him to call a special session of the legislature to pass a bill mandating desegregation.Footnote 85
Throughout their ordeal, the three experienced hunger strikers remained remarkably healthy. Wallace Nelson, apparently, did daily push-ups in his jail cell to stay in shape.Footnote 86 But their strength raised a difficult issue for their jailers, who wanted to force-feed the prisoners to ensure they survived. The warden could not authorize force-feeding unless a physician declared that the prisoners were in serious physical danger. The solution the authorities landed on was the same one inflicted on the Elkton Three’s friend, Max Sandin: commit them to an asylum.
In making this decision, the state’s attorney, J. Albert Roney Jr., reportedly said, “since they won’t eat the food that is put before them, they must be mentally unsound.”Footnote 87 This was the same logic deployed in the late nineteenth century asylums that had perfected the practice of force-feeding patients, which they often termed “artificial feeding.”Footnote 88 And declaring radical activists literally “insane,” a practice sometimes referred to as “punitive psychiatry,” has a long history in the American psychiatric profession.Footnote 89 Placing this incident within the context of the Cold War, Juanita Nelson noted, “People talk about Russia, about how they put dissidents in mental hospitals. It’s the ultimate fear, the ultimate way of breaking you. Well that’s what they tried to do to us.”Footnote 90
To initiate the Elkton Three’s force feeding after twelve days in jail, guards carried the Nelsons and Robinson from their cells and drove them to the Crownsville State Hospital, the only mental hospital in Maryland that accepted Black patients. Juanita remembered that they were fearful about becoming inmates of the asylum with no escape. But to their surprise and relief, “Crownsville was heaven after the jail.”Footnote 91 In fact, Crownsville was undergoing its own desegregation campaign, with the progressive leadership hiring Black professionals and working to desegregate the patient community.Footnote 92 The integrated staff, then, may have had a heightened sympathy for the activists. We know from the Elkton Three’s recollections that the Crownsville nurses treated the Elkton Three’s bodies with care, a blessing after the sharp handcuffs and physical abuse to which they had been subjected. They were given plentiful fresh water, visiting privileges, and the concern and nurture of the staff, who had been following their story in the press. The superintendent, Charles Ward, stayed with them late into the night, attentively listening to their story. After two days, he declared them sane and returned them to the jailhouse.Footnote 93
Ward wrote to their judge, Edward Rollins, “It is the opinion of this hospital that each of these three individuals is sane. Additionally, each is quite capable of participating in his or her own defense. Although they had been on a hunger strike for a period of twelve days, they are now in no physical danger due to their lack of food. There appears to be no reason for them to be confined to a mental hospital at this time and on the basis of their state of sanity.”Footnote 94 The state attorney’s ploy had backfired. As one commentator stated, “The man who dreamed up the marvelous idea of sending the trio to Crownsville … deserves some type of medal for the bonehead play of the week.”Footnote 95 Prison officials returned the Elkton Three to the Cecil County Jail to await trial. And Wallace Nelson and Eroseanna Robinson, who had both experienced horrific force-feeding, were no doubt immensely relieved to be spared from the ordeal.
On the seventeenth day of their hunger strike, the Nelsons, Robinson, and a returned Kay M. Fields, who was appealing her case, all had jury trials. At one point in the lengthy trials, which were physically taxing, Juanita Nelson declared, “I consider it an indignity to be here.”Footnote 96 Wallace Nelson told the judge, “I walked into that restaurant to be served. If you want to charge me with being colored, I’m guilty.”Footnote 97 The Elkton Three continued to refuse to cooperate in any way in the courtroom. Despite this, the judge, weary of their continued resistance, found them guilty only of trespassing, and they were given suspended fines of fifty dollars and released. Fields lost her appeal. Clearly the judge and state’s attorney were eager to have this drama over and done with.
The Elkton Three effectively used the courtroom as a dramatic arena to declare their commitments to racial justice and noncooperation. One sympathetic observer reported, “What I saw here was good for me. It woke me up again and made me realize this fight is far from over. All I have to do is look in a mirror and I know I’m in it too.”Footnote 98 Outside the courtroom, friends, loaded with food and drink, were overjoyed to greet them. They soon broke their fast: the Nelsons with a light soup, but Eroseanna with pizza. They later regretted not following up with the restaurant management who had begun their ordeal, but they were physically and emotionally exhausted and quickly returned to their Powelton enclave in Philadelphia to recover.Footnote 99
The end of the Elkton Three’s imprisonment did not mark the end of their commitment to the cause of desegregating Route 40, which was coming to a head. After their release, the Elkton Three gave numerous public talks ahead of CORE’s planned freedom ride. Mass meetings at the Baltimore NAACP and in Newark, Delaware, brought hundreds eager to hear of the dramatic hunger strikes. Juanita reported that at the NAACP meeting Wally had been overcome with emotion. “Not until then had he been able to face squarely what this experience revealed about our environment, a world so made that one could spend seventeen days in a steel cage as a result of stopping at a restaurant,” she reported.Footnote 100 In addition to their public talks, the three activists appeared on several radio shows.Footnote 101 Their decision to stop at the truck stop may have been spontaneous, but they were going to do all they could to ensure that it yielded results. Wallace Nelson reported, “We hope that it will say something to the people of Maryland, that it will say that these laws have got to go.”Footnote 102 Eroseanna wrote to her jailed Peacemaker comrade Maurice McCrackin that they had just returned from a speaking tour and attended the meeting that launched the Route 40 project. She and Wally Nelson were preparing to speak at Philadelphia’s Fellowship House the next day.Footnote 103 Juanita and Wally Nelson also took the time to return to the Crownsville Mental Hospital. Dr. Charles Ward invited colleagues to hear about their experiences, and they were touched by the continued support and encouragement they found at the asylum.Footnote 104
In the aftermath of the Elkton Three’s ordeal, more people learned about the rampant discrimination along Route 40 and mobilized to combat it. As reported in CORE’s newsletter, “an outcome of the local interest aroused by this case … Laverne McCummings, chairman of Philadelphia CORE, journeyed to Elkton to organize a CORE group there.”Footnote 105 Reflecting back on the protest, Juanita Nelson noted there the growing awareness of the discrimination due to the groups’ actions.
Last Friday representatives of CORE, NAACP and other groups met in Washington to discuss strategy for changing practices along that stretch of highway. We know that some Elkton residents were sufficiently jolted by our presence to express interest in forming an action group. Undoubtedly many people must be aware of the pitfalls of Route 40 who had not been so before. I know that I shall never be able to go along that stretch of macadam again without painful awareness.Footnote 106
The pitfalls of being a Black traveler and daily navigating segregated public accommodations were illuminated by the Elkton Three’s ordeal in a stark, but also relatable way.
The awareness that Route 40 had become a major national embarrassment also came from the highest levels of government. The Kennedy administration pressured Maryland’s governor, the conservative J. Millard Tawes, and an intransient state legislature to act on a proposed public accommodations law. However, their attempts at persuasion largely fell on deaf ears. But the State Department was aided in its efforts to pressure the state government by the publicity surrounding the Elkton Three and major civil rights groups, particularly CORE, which were carrying out Freedom Rides throughout the South in 1961. By mid-October, after the Elkton Three’s release, Washington, D.C., CORE leader Julius Hobson announced the first freedom ride along Route 40.Footnote 107 This put enormous pressure on the state, which was balancing the interests of white supremacists and a Cold War imperative. “CORE’s contemplated November 11 action will cause publicity and headlines throughout the world that will damage and deteriorate the position of our country in these perilous times when it is imperative that all patriotic Americans put the interest of our country first,” declared the governor’s Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations, “We must not take any action that will make harder our President’s conduct of our foreign affairs.” They concluded, “We urge CORE to consider the present situation realistically as it exists, and to not worsen a problem that can and will be solved with a little more time and effort.”Footnote 108 This call for persuasion and gradualism was a key component of Cold War liberalism and marked a sharp contrast to the Elkton Three’s stance.
In response to the governor’s pleas for cooperation, forty-seven restaurants agreed in early November to desegregate voluntarily, leading CORE to temporarily suspend their protests. “CORE feels that the decision of 35 Maryland and 12 Delaware restaurant operators to provide equal service for all is a Thanksgiving present for the American people,” stated CORE in a press release. They did promise to continue testing other restaurants along the highway and gave December 15 as a deadline for full restaurant desegregation along Route 40.Footnote 109 But CORE made a tactical decision to delay the freedom ride targeting Route 40.
Eroseanna Robinson was unimpressed with this decision. Writing fellow Peacemaker Ernest Bromley, she noted, “Did you hear that CORE called off the Motorcade down Route 40 because a ‘substantial’ number of restauranteurs [sic] have consented to have continuing open policy. Seems 35 out of 73 agree. Funny—I’d heard that there were 200 owners of 400 restaurants.”Footnote 110 In a similar vein, she wrote to the imprisoned Maurice McCrackin, “CORE called off the US 40 project when it was disclosed that a ‘substantial’ number of restaurants agreed to have a continuing open policy. I don’t know what that word ‘substantial’ means.”Footnote 111 Robinson’s skepticism was well placed. Student activists, primarily from Baltimore’s SNCC-affiliated Civic Interest Group (CIG) and the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) from Howard University, also criticized CORE’s leadership. Frustrated by the inaction and well trained in nonviolence, at least five hundred students instead carried out a series of tests of local accommodations in Baltimore during weekends in November and December.Footnote 112 These activists quickly discovered many restaurants still practicing discrimination, including restaurants on Route 40 that had promised to voluntarily desegregate their facilities.
In response, CORE finally mounted a series of freedom rides in December 1961, dubbed “Project Maryland.”Footnote 113 This was a mass action, far larger in scale than the Peacemakers could possibly coordinate. One large December 16 freedom ride, for example, involved eight hundred demonstrators. But there were limits to the freedom riders’ actions. James Farmer of CORE instructed them to be polite and to retreat before arrest to avoid having to pay bail. “Only those who plan to stay in jail should remain in the restaurants after being asked to leave,” warned one field secretary.Footnote 114 Prison and certainly noncooperation were not on the table for most activists. However, the protests proved transformative for some. One freedom rider, the journalist Lee Hamalian, wrote, “For me, a white man, the experience was humiliating, shattering, but it was also exhilarating.”Footnote 115 For Hamalian, as for many newly recruited activists, directly confronting racial segregation was a transformative experience. CORE’s Project Maryland went beyond the ineffective persuasion of Cold War liberalism without going so far as the Elkton Three’s total noncooperation. This middle road, over a protracted period, proved effective.
Despite the mounting pressure, Maryland did not pass a public accommodations law until 1963, and then only in the counties surrounding Route 40. But this piecemeal law helped push the argument for a national civil rights bill.Footnote 116 And by 1963, Route 40 no longer was a corridor of discrimination and hate. In the wake of the Route 40 demonstrations, civil rights organizations also developed the “Freedom Highways” campaign targeting chain restaurants like Howard Johnson’s, which had resisted calls for desegregation.Footnote 117
Conclusion
The Elkton Three’s noncooperation marked them as outliers in the struggle against segregation. However, hunger strikes, fasts, and tax refusal proliferated as the Vietnam War escalated after 1965. Celebrities including Joan Baez, Alan Ginsburg, and Pete Seeger joined the ranks of noncooperators.Footnote 118 Black prisoners at San Quentin prison engaged in hunger strikes after the death of Black Panther Party leader George Jackson.Footnote 119 Perhaps the best known political fast took place when Cesar Chavez refused food for twenty-five days in 1968 in support of the United Farm Workers Union, breaking his fast with the presidential candidate Robert Kennedy at his side.Footnote 120 The Black comedian Dick Gregory, a pacifist and vegetarian, went on a series of fasts to advocate for progressive causes in the last decades of his life.Footnote 121 When arrested in 1970, the Black power activist Angela Davis went on a hunger strike in the Women’s House of Detention to protest prison conditions.Footnote 122 This is just a sample of the proliferation of hunger striking and noncooperation during the tumultuous uprisings of the late 1960s and 1970s.
But most activists who engaged in nonviolent direct action in groups such as SNCC and CORE did not take the same absolutist stance as the Peacemakers. In their rejection of Cold War liberalism and their reluctance to participate in hierarchal organizations, the Elkton Three were marginal to the movement. But they were also extraordinarily effective. The embodied resistance the Elkton Three deployed through total noncooperation brought attention to the persistent segregation in Maryland’s public accommodations. The Nelsons and Robinson also demonstrated a commitment to radical nonviolence that went beyond more mainstream civil rights activists, including those in CORE. All three had all spent significant time in prisons, and on hunger strikes, since the mid-1940s as a result of their civil rights and pacifist work. They often made fellow activists uncomfortable and baffled prison authorities, but by asserting their bodily autonomy, they challenged the carceral power of the state and brought needed attention to the dehumanization that segregation wrought.
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