Thank you

I am of course filled with awe and profound gratitude for your wonderful words, and for this amazing AHA protest conference to celebrate and explore our lives and works. My own life and work, every word I have ever written, depended on and was enhanced by our movements. I have always said, "never go anywhere without your gang;" and I have been blessed with an extraordinary gang of co-conspirators—activists and writers—many of whom are in this room, on this panel.

Above all, I want to thank Clare Coss—my lawfully wedded partner. We eloped this summer, to celebrate our 40th anniversary, and the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. We eloped to Bill Preston's deck on Martha's Vineyard—our annual July visit for several decades, a John Jay thing—to celebrate Jerry Markowitz's birthday. Bill, our former chair, Jerry, and I were the founders of the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA, Inc.); and when William Appleman Williams became president of the OAH, he created the historians' committee for Freedom of Information and Access, which Bill and I co-chaired.

And here today is Dr. Ruth Heifitz, Jerry's sister, one of the founders of Physicians for Human Rights, with Dr. Z Drescher Kripke. I am profoundly moved that Z is here today—she is actually responsible for my political life. As students at Hunter in 1958, Z suggested we "take over" the student council, which was not doing very much, and we both agreed there was so much to do. By 1960 she insisted that I run for president while she worked on the campaign and managed the game. Today, she remains the power-broker, while many of us wish she would run for office! It was an amazing time, at Hunter and throughout the country: Audre Lorde, my great friend, was editor of Wistaria, the literary magazine, and we all worked together: We protested silly dress codes (pants, or "bifurcated garments" were outlawed, and I got suspended for wearing them!); we protested the censorship demanded by the renewed Red Scare and HUAC's excesses; and we went south for Freedom. Two Hunter buses rolled into North Carolina, and my life as an activist began in earnest. In 1961 I was elected student affairs vice-president of NSA, and when that organization failed to pass a simple anti-segregation resolution ("we the students of America oppose segregation"), many of us turned our attention to a new group of activists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—which boldly supported the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in our divided country.

When I arrived at Johns Hopkins University in 1962, it was segregated by race and gender. The History Department, however, had a bail fund for students and faculty arrested for "sitting in" to protest restricted restaurants and pubs. Moreover, our mentors (Charles Barker, Frederic Chapin Lane, and Owen Lattimore) sat in with John Hope Franklin to open the Cosmo Club in Washington. Although David Donald was not part of my academic team of international economic and world relations advisers, he was responsible for my first teaching job at the historically black college then called Hampton Institute in Virginia. That job intensified my activist commitments.

My life was most dramatically changed by the unfolding war in Vietnam, as we worked to create a new level of peace activism. At Johns Hopkins, we were encouraged by Charles Barker and his friends active in SANE. In 1964, the Conference on Peace Research in History (CPRH) was created; it has remained central to our anti-war, anti-nuke lives. Now an international group of hundreds of historians, the Peace History Society, endures. Permanent friendships emerged—Berenice Carroll, Sandi Cooper, Larry Wittner, Charles Chatfield, Arthur Waskow, and so many others followed the path-breakers Merle Curti and Charles Barker, and we continue to do what we can. As Ella Baker said: "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." Which brings me to WILPF, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in 1915 by Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, and Lillian Wald, the key subjects of my dissertation, once I shifted...