Many Successful Solidarity Events Held, with More to Come!

The peace symbol made with small peace cranes, a display made by Sacramento WILPFer Sabreena Britt. Photo taken by Sabreena Britt and used with her permission.

By Cherrill Spencer and Margaret Pecoraro
Co-team Coordinators of the Ceasefire/75th Solidarity Event Planning Team

September 2020

Nineteen of our WILPF branches organized one or more activities to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This was the main theme for the first part of our “CEASEFIRE/75th” solidarity season; spurred on by the 12 resource guides our solidarity planning team produced these branches carried out ten different types of activities between the 3rd  and 9th of August. This eNews article will just be a brief summary of what our branches did. I have prepared a more detailed overview of these branch activities, it has been distributed to the branch contacts by email, if you’d like your own copy please write to Cherrill Spencer at this email address: cherrill.m.spencer@gmail.com.

This photo, captioned “Boston WILPFers show one of the educational lawn signs they included in a walking 1945 timeline exhibit outside the Newton, MA, public library,” describes an “outdoor, educational” type of activity. Boston WILPFer Eileen Kurkoski “borrowed” the information in ten of the dates in the online 1945 timeline that three other WILPFers had created (which many of you will have visited here) and placed the photo and text from those 10 dates on 10 lawn sign posters, which she arranged in a walking timeline in the lawn outside her local library. Each poster has strings of peace cranes hanging from them, and at the end of the exhibit, you could pick up a crane pin and a card telling you where to sign our petition supporting the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the hibakusha appeal. Eileen has already received requests from other libraries to show this exhibit; it can be shown on an inside wall, too, and Eileen will send you the pdf files if you’d like to display this educational exhibit in your local library or community hall. Kudos to Eileen for this innovative solidarity activity.

Photo credit: WILPFer Eileen Kurkoski, used with permission.

Peace Crane Displays

The most popular type of activity our branches did was an “outdoor crane display.” These branches assembled such displays: Burlington, VT; Fresno, CA; Humboldt, CA; Minneapolis Metro, MN; Peninsula/Palo Alto, CA,  and San Jose, CA.

This photo of “Twenty-foot-tall trellis and nearby tree filled with 1,000 cranes” shows the Peninsula/Palo Alto branch’s outdoor crane display. Many of these cranes were made by local children and are larger than the ones we received from the Ehime Co-op in Japan.

Another popular crane display activity was to place them inside a bookshop window with posters explaining their significance, so passers-by could see them, even if the pandemic prevented them from entering the bookshop. These branches assembled such window displays: Corvallis, OR (see the August eNews for a photo); East Bay, CA; San Francisco, CA and Santa Cruz CA.

Photo credit: Becky Fischbach, used with permission of Peninsula/Palo Alto Branch.

Outdoor, In-Person Events

The pandemic notwithstanding, many of our branches held solidarity events outdoors at which they could interact with the walking-by public. These branches held outdoor tabling events: Cape Cod, MA – eight different towns!; Greater Philadelphia, PA (see photo); and Santa Cruz, CA.

Some branches held outdoor rallies, marches and street demonstrations. They included: Boston, MA; Burlington, VT; Milwaukee, WI and Peninsula/Palo Alto, CA. During their outdoor event on August 6, the Des Moines, IA, branch helped to strike a large Japanese peace and friendship bell 75 times and heard a proclamation from their Mayor.

Photo: Greater Philadelphia, PA branch members staffing their outreach table in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, on August 9, 2020. Photo credit: WILPFer Tina Shelton, used with permission

Online Solidarity Events

On account of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our branches arranged activities and events using the World Wide Web and the Zoom platform. The silver lining in the pandemic cloud is that people all over the world could take part in these online events or watch online films at their own convenience. These branches arranged for films made by others to be shown online with discussions afterwards: Burlington, VT; Monterey County, CA; and Peninsula/Palo Alto, CA.

WILPF US has joined with 165 other anti-nuclear organizations to form a coalition to amplify our common nuclear disarmament voice in order to reach a much wider public on this 75th Anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The coalition arranged for 19 hours of livestreamed events to be shown on August 6th and 9th via https://www.hiroshimanagasaki75.org/events (where they are still available to be watched). These branches provided content for this well-watched event (over 25,000 accumulated views): Monterey County, CA; Sacramento, CA; Tucson, AZ; and the Disarm Issue Committee (see their eNews article). 

Two branches held Zoom meetings to light candles, hear poems written by hibakusha, and reflect on the terrible attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Greater Phoenix, AZ, and Tucson, AZ. The latter invited any other WILPFer to join them, which I gladly did.

Inspired, I hope, by our resource guide on media outreach, these branches managed to get their local TV stations to attend their events and report on them during their news broadcast: Burlington, VT; Des Moines, IA; and Greater Philadelphia, PA. 

Twelve New Resource Guides Sent to All Branches for the Second Part of Solidarity Season

Congratulations to our many branches who put on the above described activities and I hope all our members took advantage of the many resource guides we sent out for the first part of this solidarity season.

Now it’s time to focus on a new set of topics and the solidarity planning team encourages even more branches to look through the twelve resource guides we have recently sent to you and arrange some events to inform the general  public and your congressional reps on these topics: the Global Ceasefire that was requested by the UN Secretary General and is in force until at least September 30th; the founding of the UN in 1945 and its current work, especially in disarmament matters; arms control treaties; why we don’t want nuclear weapons testing to be re-started; the connections between militarism and racism, the warming climate, environmental devastation, and the COVID-19 pandemic; how to counteract militarism; and celebrating the International Day of Peace on September 21st which is the last day of our CEASEFIRE/75th solidarity season.

If you have not received any of the above resource guides from your branch contact or you are a member-at-large and would like to receive any or all of the new guides by email, write to cherrill.m.spencer@gmail.com and specify which guide by topic.