“CCPJ provides a way for those in our community who care about peace and justice to join with kindred spirits,” says CCPJ steering committee chair Bill Anderson, above. “As our name suggests, we in CCPJ believe that peace and justice are inextricably intertwined. When we work for one we promote the other.”
Twenty years ago, CCPJ began as the Interfaith Peace Coalition, promoting nuclear disarmament. One of IPC’s coups was hosting a talk by Vitaly Churkin, from the Soviet embassy in Washington. Later, with an office in The Prism coffeehouse, the group renamed itself the Charlottesville Peace Center. Operating on limited donations, the CPC held rallies, talks and asked the City Council to declare Charlottesville a nuclear-free zone. During the years, CCPJ members have been Quakers, Jews, pacifists and priests, as well as professors and parents, journalists, students, teachers and anybody committed to their cause.
The group has had its share of detractors, too. Anderson identifies them as “People who are themselves misinformed, who do not understand that peace making is everyone’s responsibility…the very thing that makes democracy stronger, and the world safer.”
CCPJ perceives peace, creativity and culture as going hand in hand, along with a good deal of introspection. Their means of protest and proactive discord have not been limited to banners and bullhorns. Local music teacher and CCPJ member Betty Gross (left), for instance, will soon be seen on the Downtown Mall playing her viola, singing “America the Beautiful” and the “Star-Spangled Banner” to call attention to the problems in the Middle East now perpetrated in the name of homeland security.”
Further, in March, to coincide with 998 readings in 59 countries and all 50 states, CCPJ co-sponsored a reading of Aristophanes’ anti-war Greek comedy Lysistrata in which Athenian and Laconian women end the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex from their hawkish husbands.
And for years, during its annual commemoration of Hiroshima/Nagasaki Day, CCPJ has taught children to fold paper cranes on the Downtown Mall, while reading the story of Sadako, a Hiroshima girl who died of leukemia before she could complete the 1,000 paper cranes that are a Japanese blessing of good fortune.
Not everybody is keen on CCPJ’s mission. Here and there across town, posters and pro-war rallies popped up, praising Bush. CCPJ diehards, still fixtures (in dwindling numbers) outside the Federal building on Ridge-McIntire every Thursday, take the insults right along with the approving honks.
CCPJ member and UVA English professor Herbert Tucker finds opposition all around: “On the right, reactionaries who confuse patriotism with apologetics for the ruling order and defense of the status quo,” he says, “on the left, radicals who demand solutions at once to problems it will take generations to solve.”
Act local, think global is the CCPJ motto. The group remains vital, says Herbert Tucker (left), because “It puts a nearby face on solidarity for those working on issues that can seem neglected at a time that definitely seems inimical.”
CCPJ has some unlikely allies. Local Army Recruiting Station Commander, Staff Sergeant Tom Hamilton respects CCPJ, despite their presentations at local high schools about students’ Selective Service conscientious-objector options. “Organizations on the other side of the fence, I think it’s great they’re there. It kind of puts things in check and balance,” he says. “Without any of them, you have one side running the fence. That’s dictatorship.”
Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo was thankful to have CCPJ coordinating the anti-war demonstrations. “When we look [at what happened] around the country, we had a relatively peaceful, conscientious group here.” Longo spoke of having an understanding dialogue with CCPJ.
We are all participants in democracy, says Longo. “I believe that it’s the responsibility of every American to assure a sense of peace and justice and to carry that out in a way that’s peaceful and doesn’t jeopardize public safety or property rights.”
Congressman Virgil Goode (right), on the other hand, credits our liberties to the muscle of our massive military and effusively praises the troops. He credits CCPJ’s existence to military might. “Organizations like CCPJ and anti-war rallies have freedoms and constitutional protections in this nation, unlike in Iraq,” Goode says. Ironically, on April 25, a Charlottesville judge ruled that protestors who had been charged with trespassing in Goode’s office on the day war broke out had no right to read their explanatory statements of protest during the trial.
Chief Longo admits that his officers, too, were displeased with what CCPJ was promoting during the Goode sit-in and at other times. “We are a paramilitary organization,” Longo says. “Our officers served in foreign conflicts. When you give that much of yourself, you may be upset when others are not in agreement with what you were fighting for.”
Bush has declared “victory.” Now, City Councilman Kevin Lynch (above) asks peace activists to “remind the country that the point of this adventure was long term peace in the middle east, as opposed to say, $1.20 per gallon gasoline. I would encourage anyone who still thinks the Iraq war was about weapons of mass destruction, to check out www.newamericancentury.org and then think long and hard about whether it was a good idea to entrust American blood and treasure to this crew.”
And the specter of upcoming elections looms large. “I hope that the new peace activists will be more constructively engaged in electoral politics,” says Lynch. “Too many activists on the left would rather talk to each other—and vote only for ‘ideologically pure’ candidates—than work to get their ideas into the mainstream of the Democratic party. We need to work together if we don’t want American policy in the hands of a bunch of Troglodytes.”
Former State Delegate Reverend Peter Way, who spoke at a pro-troops rally in the thick of war season, has a somewhat different assessment: “The City Council of Charlottesville are pigs,” he says. “They’ll do anything to promote liberalism.”
Council, of course, sees it another way, one more suited to CCPJ’s message. “To question is our duty. It’s the American thing to do,” says Councilman Blake Caravati, left, who defends people’s right to voice their condemnation of the Bush administration’s “dismal diplomatic failure.” He quotes Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote during the first World War, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Mayor Maurice Cox, right, seems to agree. “You can’t underestimate the benefit of having groups that mobilize citizens to influence their legislators,” says Cox, with regard to CCPJ’s mobilization of the city’s anti-unilateral-war resolution. “The supporters of our resolution and the millions of others who supported like resolutions sent an overwhelming message that Americans have a responsibility to question our government.”
The war is over, or at least in remission. Where does CCPJ go from here? Member Ben Walter says, “Anti-Bush all the way, 24/7. This guy is looking at Syria and Iran. God knows what he’ll do in Iraq.”
The new mission includes taking action on domestic and international injustices. During its May 4 meeting, the group discussed thwarting the “anti-terrorist” Patriot Act, which was passed by Bush in 2001. According to CCPJ, it violates civil rights by giving sweeping new powers to cops and international intelligence agencies. Locally CCPJ members have worked with the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library to make sure patrons know that their borrowing records are now turned over to the authorities, for instance.
And more restrictive laws are reportedly on the way. CCPJ sees its work as more important than ever. Helena Cobban, who is also a member of the prestigious, London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, proposes two questions for the future:
“1. How can we work to have our country build the capabilities for serious, effective, nonviolent responses to the crises it might face in the future?”
and
“2. How can we continue to explore and share information about the facts of Americans’ interdependence with the peoples of the rest of the world—even in a public climate that is increasingly triumphalist, and in a way that is respectful of and sensitive to the feelings of our neighbors, friends and legislators?”