Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 90

27 March 1909—23 May 2002

1923—

War Tax Resisters

A chance meeting, when she was a journalist and he was serving a jail term for participating in the Journey of Reconciliation, an effort to end segregation in the South, brought Wally Nelson and Juanita Morrow together. That was in 1948. For the next half-century, the two were life partners and collaborators in active nonviolence.

Both had been involved in civil rights actions before they met; both were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In addition, Wally had spent nearly four years in a federal penitentiary for refusing to serve in World War II. As African-Americans, they were dedicated to securing civil rights for blacks. As advocates of nonviolence, they were equally devoted to resisting what they saw as the American war machine.

In the same year they met, the couple collaborated in the founding of Peacemakers, a national organization dedicated to “revolutionary pacifist activity.” Members of Peacemakers pledged to live radically countercultural lives by refusing to serve in wartime, participate in the production or transportation of weapons, or pay war taxes. They also promised to spread the good news of pacifism in word and deed. The Nelsons were two of the first members to take the plunge into war tax resistance. It’s a form of protest that, then and now, can have severe consequences, including seizure of property by the government and even imprisonment.

The basic purpose of war tax resistance is a refusal to fund military spending through tax dollars. There are several strategies that resisters have adopted over the years. Some refuse to pay any taxes, whereas others deduct the percentage of their tax that goes to the Pentagon but pay the rest. Some donate to charities the amount of money they would otherwise pay in taxes, and others don’t. And some avoid the whole problem of paying taxes by adopting a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity in order to keep their income below taxable levels.

This last option was the one chosen by the Nelsons. They built their own home out of salvaged supplies and grew most of their food in a half-acre organic garden. They refused to buy insurance or automobiles, and earned what little cash they needed through odd jobs that deducted no social security tax from their wages. Their decision to live on a drastically reduced income and to forgo conventional insurance or governmental benefits, difficult as it was at times, was sustained by their conviction, as Wally put it, that “our entire economic life is tied into violence. It seemed logical that the less we participated, the less we’d be giving to that system.”

But the Nelsons weren’t just refuseniks. They continued their work with CORE through the 1950s, actively supported César Chávez’s United Farm Workers campaign, and helped build tax resistance as a national movement. Wally died in 2002, advocating active nonviolence to the end. Juanita continues to live in their hand-built Massachusetts home, still refusing to pay taxes.