James Peck (pacifist)
| James Peck | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 19, 1914 Manhattan, New York, U.S. |
| Died | July 12, 1993 (aged 78) Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. |
| Known for | Civil rights activism |
James Peck (December 19, 1914 – July 12, 1993) was an American activist who practiced nonviolent resistance during World War II and in the Civil Rights Movement. He is the only person who participated in both the Journey of Reconciliation (1947) and the first Freedom Ride of 1961, and has been called a white civil rights hero. Peck advocated nonviolent civil disobedience throughout his life, and was arrested more than 60 times between the 1930s and 1980s.
James Peck (usually called "Jim") was born in Manhattan, the son of Samuel Peck, a wealthy clothing wholesaler, who died when his son was eleven years old. He attended Choate Rosemary Hall, a private boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut. Even though Peck and his family had converted from Judaism to the Episcopalian Church, Peck was still considered a social outsider at Choate. Peck preferred the fellowship of scholarly intellectuals and in their company he developed a reputation as an independent thinker and at the same time adopted idealistic political doctrines. He enrolled and studied at Harvard in 1933. While studying at Harvard, Peck polished his skills as a writer and engaged in radical acts that ended up shocking his classmates and forcing him to become the outsider once again. Peck wrote that his mother "referred to Negroes as 'coons'" and he chose to defy her and his classmates by asking a black girl to be his date at the Freshman dance. He dropped out of school at the end of his freshman year when "his alienation from his family and the American establishment was complete". Peck was married to the former Paula Zweier for twenty-two years. She was a teacher of cooking and author of The Art of Fine Baking (1961) and Art of Good Cooking (1966). Paula Peck died in 1972. They had two sons, Charles and Samuel.
Peck was critical of both U.S. political parties throughout his life, but leaned toward a radical form of democratic-socialism. He thought a Utopian world was impossible, and that there would always be a battle between what he called the "Upperdogs" and "Underdogs." He considered himself on the side of the underdogs. Peck was a member of numerous antiwar and civil rights organizations, and spent his life as a radical journalist. He assisted the War Resisters League, and eventually became editor of WRL News until the 1980s. He also edited the Worker's Defense League News Bulletin. In the 1930s he wrote a labor column for a paper conducted by WRL, The Conscientious Objector. Beginning in 1938, he worked at Federated Press and reported on union activism and joined the American Newspaper Guild. Peck worked as editor of the CORE-lator from the 1940s-1960s for CORE. Beginning in 1967, Peck became news editor of WIN magazine, a youth antiwar magazine. At times he wrote articles in numerous pacifist publications, such as Liberation magazine.
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