After cafeteria lunch and setting up our photo display and petition table, we walked about a mile to a building, just off-campus, and met with a religious meditation class. After the class, we talked with some of them. They seemed pessimistic, somehow frustrated, about getting a campus peace group started. Yet they already had enough people to make a good core group.
After an hour vigil at the post office, we were driven to the UNC-G Catholic Center and watched the local news. It gave an excellent report on our walk and a special five-minute segment on the disarmament movement in the Tri-cities area. A physician, a political science professor, and a priest spoke live from a fallout shelter. The last food supply Greensboro sent to its shelter was biscuits in l96l; the shelter had nothing except "a pot to piss in."
March 3l, Rest day in Greensboro
Our schedule had been set so we could attend the NC Council of Churches Peace Conference as special guests. Three hundred church officials were there from across the state. The keynote address was from Bishop Armstrong, president of the National Council of Churches.
What an amazing reformation the churches have undergone respecting both nuclear and "conventional" weapons. They seem to be moving quickly to the position held by Christians in the first two centuries after Christ. Christians then refused to serve in the Roman army. Then, in 3l2 AD+, Christianity became the official religion of the Empire; Christians became soldiers. But now many churches are taking the position that there is no "just war": no matter what the balance between good and evil, it is negligible weighed against the effects of nuclear war.
During the conferences I saw Father Charles Mulholland, Steve Sumerford, and Patrick O'Neill, all good friends. Charlie, active in a breadth of activity from Pax Christi to the American Civil Liberties Union, has been a priest for over 25 years; since that conference he has made annual trips to Central America meeting high officials as well as priests and nuns working with the poor. Steve was regional director for the War Resisters League and had been arrested in Red Square in l978 for unfurling a disarmament flag there; since then he moved to Japan, but recently returned as a reference librarian. Patrick was then working with the Greenville Peace Committee and had just been arrested for blocking the entrance to Ft. Bragg in protest of the training of Salvadoran troops; since then he has served two years in federal prison as one of the Pershing Plowshares.
We walkers were driven to UNC-G for lunch, Patrick joining us. We ate at a table with a l7-year-old student, Patrick and I discussing the peace walk and the civil disobedience at Ft. Bragg. After about ten minutes, the student asked, "Where are you all from? You're not students, are you?" Patrick asked him what he thought about U.S. involvement in Central America, then I talked with him about nuclear weapons. He said he had never in his whole life thought about these issues. The three of us talked fifteen more minutes until the student had to leave, wearing a perplexed look.
We went back to the conference, agreeing that the morning talks had been powerful and to the point. Patrick said some of the people were wearing such nice clothes that he thought we were at a spring fashion show. When we got back, I heard that an elderly woman had also been observing clothes. She had told Bill that we should be wearing suits and dresses, not blue jeans. She said that our clothes did not help our cause. He had responded, "After all, we are walkers."
During the afternoon we heard eyewitness accounts of the violation of human rights in South America, especially in Argentina. We had to leave before the conference adjourned to attend a picnic at Guilford College. We looked forward to this visit at a Quaker school, but all of our scheduled events there were disappointing. The only encouraging thing was being joined by 25 students from Arthur Morgan School in Celo, N.C. AMS is a Quaker junior high school nearly two hundred miles west of Greensboro, and they had come in their activity bus to be with us tonight and walk with us tomorrow.
When we arrived at the Guilford campus, we found no sign of a picnic, and no one to greet us. The AMS bus was unloading at the student union, and a few non-college people had come. Without food, we were glad to accept rations from AMS folks, a pint of lettuce and a piece of bread.
Then everybody went to the student union lobby, where we talked and sang. It was good to meet Chip Poston and Herb Walters of AMS. Chip had walked in the '76 walk for disarmament and social justice, then went to Japan for a peace walk in '77. Herb edits a unique newsletter, Rural Southern Voice for Peace (RSVP).
The AMS book of peace songs was distributed and guitars appeared. I was refreshed to be joined as I sang by the cheerful, innocent voices of the students. The walk could swing one's feelings. Emotions went from disappointment at the apathy and poor planning at Guilford to enthusiasm and hope at being with the young Quaker students.
Only one college student came to our evening program, and she stayed only five minutes. She had expected a program about Buddhism, not about peace. She was a member of the student assembly and left when she remembered a committee meeting. The AMS students and teachers saw our program, then we theirs, a film by Ground Zero. We were through early and spent an hour at the union giving each other massages. Our hosts weren't expecting us until l0:30.
There were two houses hosting us. The fifteen males (counting AMS people) went to one, finding twelve students living there playing loud Rolling Stones music and more of us than our hosts could easily accommodate. We managed though. The music was turned down around 2 a.m.
The next day, we learned the women, to stay in a dorm room, fared even worse than we. Most of them elected to sleep outdoors. go to page 30