Top 15 Juanita Morrow Nelson Quotes

we went into the Bar H Truck Stop, and sat at the table, and then were startled when the waitress came and said, "We don't serve colored." And we thought, oh my god, we're fifty miles from home—we wanna go home,; we don't wanna have a big deal. So, we're not gonna fight this thing. We're just gonna sit here for twenty minutes, half hour, just to show that we don't approve of this. Well, we were within no more than five minutes of leaving when two policemen came. They had sent the dishwasher down to the police barracks, that was about a mile down the road, and they came and said, you know...very officious, "Show me your..." I've forgotten; they asked some question, and we looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and answered, and then [they] said, "Show me your driver's license." And reluctantly, the three of them did, and I was going to do it, I'm sure, but I said, "I want to ask you a question." "Ahp...Show me your license." And I said it again. They arrested me. And people always want to know, what were you going to ask, and I really don't know. I think I was really stalling because it hurt me so much to comply with this. Then I didn't cooperate; they carried me out to the police car, and the others followed in our car. This was in Elkton, Maryland; I shall never forget it. They stopped the car in front of the jail and told me to get out. "Am I going home?" "No." "Well then I'm not going to get out." So they put something—I think they call them "twisters"—they're handcuffs, but they have little points in them and they twisted them, and I hollered. It hurt. The others came over to complain and they arrested them. All four of us were arrested in Elkton, Maryland, carried up to the jail; they tried to fingerprint us, we wouldn't—so they would move us from one place to another, and open our fingers and do that sort of thing... It was in all the papers and stuff because Route 40 was quite something; it was notorious.

I don't know; I guess maybe I'm atypical, but I know that the groups I work in—for instance, CORE had no color line, and Peacemakers had no color line—didn't have any age line either. For a while I think I was about the youngest person in Peacemakers, and I felt very close to somebody who was in her 80s, and...even now, I don't feel that age difference. I mean, I'm getting older; I know that. But I have friends who are one–third my age, one–fourth my age, and we're just on the same boundary. So I don't really know that—I really couldn't tell you much about that, because, or couldn't speak much to that. I think most of the people who were people who were against the war, or in a very active way, and I don't mean just saying it, but doing something, didn't have those kinds of barriers, weren't divided into that... Now in the general population, I honestly don't know.

That's the only way you can stop war, stop participating in it, and stop so much consumption that requires war, at least that's the way I look at it.

For two years they worked on the plantation of a, in quotes, white man, and he had both blacks and whites. They lived separately, but treated them all the same, pitted them one against the other. As Wally would say, he'd ask the poor whites to do something and if they complained he'd say, "That's alright, I'll go and ask the niggers; I'll tell the niggers to do it," and vice–a–versa...Then the next time they did the venture, they worked on a plantation owned by a black man, and he said it was the same thing. He didn't have any whites on his..., except that you could call him by his first name, but he was trying to get everything he could out of everybody. No different, no different. And that's something I believe, and it's discouraging; it really is discouraging, but people are people. Everybody seems to want to just wring everything they can out of people, and all of us do. This is society. [pause] I don't know, I've heard some figures—one percent of the population of the United States makes thirty times as much as a regular worker. And to say a worker is... that's like an epithet. The worker is the ones who keep the world going, so what's [laugh] I don't really quite understand that, but that's the way it seems to be.

I have something at my house now—somebody sent it; it says, "Peace would destroy civilization as we know it." And indeed it would, because we could not consume with, 5% of the population that we have, forty, fifty, whatever percent of the world's goods. And we have bases all over the world and so forth.

It was in 1970 during the Viet Nam War. We were refusing to pay taxes; we were working in CORE [Congress of Racial Equality]; we were working with the great brokers, Cesar Chavez and those. Wally fasted for twenty–three days once in front of one of the big chain stores to try to get them to stop using, either grapes, or something, whatever it was that they were doing. And yet, we began to feel, and I in particular, that our whole lives were tied up in war stuff, because we live on this war system.

Clarence Jordan was very, very funny. I know that during those days before we came down there, somebody came around, like some of the Ku Klux Klanners came around and, once they came and—?cause blacks worked on the farm even before anybody moved there, and so they would eat lunch together, and one of these guys came and said, "Preacher, I don't wanna see the sun set on you havin' niggers here anymore." And Clarence reached out his hand and said, "Well, I'm so glad to know you, I'm so glad to know somebody who can keep the sun from setting." He was funny.

I think we moved there in '58, 1958, I think. But before we could even get settled in Philadelphia, we got a call, "Would we go down to Georgia to Koinonia Farm?" which was an intentional community where people just put everything they had into the community. They were really being bombarded by the Ku Klux Klan because they had no barriers as to color. Their farm market was bombed and destroyed, and the kids were harassed on the buses. It was just terrible.

We never made much money, but we never spent much. As a matter of fact, we used to lend money to friends sometimes [chuckle] because we so hated this interest thing anyway, that if somebody needed to buy a car—I don't mean we had tons of money—maybe a friend would, we would lend him some money, obviously at no interest. And the other thing is I don't like having money hanging around; what's the use of having it doing nothing?

We had a friend who lived in Philadelphia, and he was doing what they called "interracial housing." Now Wally would never let anybody say that; he said, "Interracial, you mean, a monkey and a human being," et cetera, they might be different races.

(While living in Cincinnati) somebody said to us, "The birds and the bees don't live together; why should the blacks and the whites live together?"

most—at least half of the budget is for the military. It was then; it is now, continues to be.

a group called Peacemakers was formed (in 1948). They saw nonviolence as a way of life, not just a tactic, or different campaigns, and one of the things that was a hallmark of Peacemakers was refusing to pay taxes for war, and so I say that that was a very pivotal year in my life, '48. Wally and I started living together; I became a tax refuser; we became tax refusers. You see, he spent thirty–three months in prison because he wouldn't go; how was he going to pay for somebody else to go and kill people? We just had no problem with that.

I would do whatever job to keep body and soul together, that was good work, or at least not bad work, let's put it that way; at least wasn't bad work. And that I would just live my life and do the things that I believe in.

I had already been involved in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, that helped to start a chapter of CORE in Cleveland, along with a man named George Howser