Dissent Through Design (variation of “Paper Bullets” book afterword)
- Published
- in "Paper Bullets" exhibition, all
Political graphics dotted the walls of my family home when I was a child during the 1960s and ’70s, while my father was actively involved in U.S. civil rights and peace movements, though in far less prominent roles than others better known.
An oversized print of Lorraine Schneider’s War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things hung in the stairwell leading upstairs, and Sister Corita Kent’s yellow submarine and other posters protesting the war in Vietnam lined his home office.
As a young man in the early 1950s, my conservative Ohio-born father enrolled at Yale Divinity School to become a minister—an experience that he said “radicalized” him.[1] He studied under and worked with some of the most prominent and progressive theologians of the 20th century: Professor H. Richard Niebuhr; Harvey G. Cox, a roommate who became the Hollis Research Professor at Harvard Divinity School; and William Sloane Coffin, Jr., a classmate who became an outspoken peace activist, Yale Chaplain, and Senior Minister at Riverside Church in New York City.
By 1962, my father was an ordained Congregational minister in Delray Beach, Florida, sent south to build a new church. Through Cox and Coffin, he became active in civil rights and served as a regional coordinator for what he called the state’s “gold coast” Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Helping to organize marches in Florida and Alabama, he told me of his work with Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young. In 1963 and 1964, the marches, sit-ins, and wade-ins in St. Augustine—staged at times for a national audience, and which reached a breaking point in the summer of 1964—helped pass into law the landmark U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.[2][3]
My father wrote, “A minister didn’t have to do anything heroic to get in trouble. I had participated in marches and demonstrations and sit-ins. I had written some letters to the editor. I had announced from my pulpit the Sunday before I took part in the Selma march. I had integrated the first church of my denomination in the state of Florida in 1962…. I was a Yankee minister of a Yankee church in a place where damyankee is one word.”
The civil rights work my father did during those years led to anonymous letters and phone calls, intimidation, and vandalism at the church. On one occasion, rocks were thrown through the building’s plate glass doors, he said, and bomb threats there were also common, usually involving FBI follow up. In early March 1965, my father penned a sermon about Bloody Sunday, in Selma, Alabama, which described how “state troopers and mounted deputies, armed with tear gas, whips, clubs, ropes, and chains waded into a group of praying Negroes” (sic). The piece appeared the following Sunday as a letter to the editor in a local paper.
Some days later, vandals took a sledgehammer to the church’s new water mains, damaging the sprinkler system and flooding the building. According to my father, the sheriff of Palm Beach County was a Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and so the investigation went nowhere, as it was suspected that fringe conservative church members sent the anonymous letters and phone calls, and that the Klan had done the physical damage. The incident led to my father being placed under “FBI protection” for thirty days because he refused to carry a gun. I put “FBI protection” in quotes because my father wrote, “[the] FBI was so infiltrated by the Klan and the Klan was so infiltrated by the FBI that it was hard to tell which was which.”
By July 1, he was forced to resign from the church, fearing for his and the family’s safety. We moved north, where my father became minister at the Congregational Church in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Like Coffin during that time period, my father “put social activism at the heart of his clerical duties”[4], taking a stand against the war in Vietnam. Through Coffin, he took on the role of area director for Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV) in the metropolitan area north of New York City. It was undoubtedly because of Coffin and CALCAV that my father counseled young men experiencing a “conflict of conscience,” as several dates in his calendar from 1968 to 1970 list draft counseling appointments at Vassar College and Poughkeepsie Quaker Friends.[5][6][7]
Without question, my father’s cheap paper posters, like the ones below that were tacked to his office walls, taught me at a young age the power of printed words and images, and the possibility of “dissent through design.”[8] The link between these political posters from my youth and publicly placed stickers today is clear.
Clergy and Layman Concerned, Vietnamization Turns Children into Soldiers, 1969, offset lithograph; Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Would You Buy A Used War from this Man?, ca. 1970, offset lithograph; and Clergy and Layman Concerned, Is This What You’d Call Phased “Withdrawal?, ca. 1972, offset lithograph.
[1] The historical material about my father is from a StoryCorps interview that my sister recorded with him on December 27, 2006. “Duane Smith and Jean Cunningham,” https://archive.storycorps.org/interviews/wtc000980/, accessed 14 December 2024. I also referred to his typed notes from a presentation he made in 1966 to an unnamed group of ministers and from a paper he wrote for a doctoral class at NYU on Black liberation theology.
[2] “St. Augustine, Florida, May 18, 1964 to July 1, 1964.” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/st-augustine-florida.
[3] Momodou, Samuel. “The St. Augustine Movement (1963-1964).” BlackPast, April 9, 2022. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/events-african-american-history/the-st-augustine-movement-1963-1964/
[4] Marc D. Charney, “Rev. William Sloane Coffin Dies at 81: Fought for Civil Rights and Against a War,” The New York Times, April 13, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/us/rev-william-sloane-coffin-dies-at-81-fought-for-civil-rights-and-against.html.
[5] Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, WNYC, The Riverside Church, recorded on12 January 1968. https://www.wnyc.org/story/clergy-laymen-concerned-about-vietnam/.
[6] Warren Goldstein. “The Moments of Truth: Civil Disobedience and the Draft” in William Sloane Coffin, Jr.—A Holy Impatience, 183-224.
[7] Calendars past 1970 were not included in my father’s papers.
[8] Milton Glaser, Mirko Ilic, and Tony Kushner, The Design of Dissent, Rockport Publishers, 2006.