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CASUALTIES OF PEACEMAKING

By: Beverly Johnson Biehr

In the summer of 1968, amid the Democratic National Convention and Vietnam War protests in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, the author, then a summer school teacher, volunteered to chauffeur California Black Panthers to an antiwar rally. This decision led to her involvement in the Conspiracy Eight trial while starting her teaching career in an inner-city public high school. The era’s violence personally affected her when her former summer program director and his wife were murdered. Shocked by ongoing killings, including those at Kent State and leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, she committed herself, as an ordinary teacher, to extraordinary peacemaking efforts.

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The Author

Beverly Johnson Biehr

Beverly Johnson Biehr is twice retired as a Chicago Public School teacher/teacher-trainer, and pastor, now living in Northwest Indiana. She is still writing to her heart’s delight and loves getting together with family and friends and making new acquaintances.

“When basic needs are met, human development is
about being more, not having more.”

– The World Charter

“Once people understand the strength of nonviolence – the force it generates, the love it creates, the response it brings from the total community – they will not easily abandon it.”

– Cesar Chavez

CASUALTIES OF PEACEMAKING

By: Beverly Johnson Biehr

Something important was about to happen. You could feel it in the air and I was right in the middle of the 1968 political firestorm. I taught summer school in Major Daley’s Peace Corp program which was intended to keep inner city kids off the streets. By design, it provided tools of empowerment to Latino and Black high schoolers to learn about the political system and ways to effect peaceful change. When Chicago hosted the Democratic National Conven-tion, it was Corp’s young teachers and pastors’ turn to learn about radical empowerment and political discontent. The business of the sixties is still unfinished, but our legacy, ‘How to protest war’ and ‘How to do peacemaking’ remains a good foundation for the co-existence of peace and justice. We were just regular young people, but we heralded change by creating new paths toward equality in race relationships and learning to become peacemakers in Chicago and throughout the world. Winner of a Royal Palm Literary Award 2016, Florida Writers Association.

3 Most Remarkable Lines in the Book

“You’re going to be subpoenaed to a preliminary grand jury hearing, the purpose being to indict the people who crossed state lines to disrupt the Democratic Convention.” (p. 72)

At the same time that young people were breaking down racial barriers in the USA, the status quo folks were erecting walls of division and fear. (p, 215)

We were ahead of our time in participating in a model that might well be replicated: treating each other as equals, being open and as honest as possible about our differences and prejudices, accepting differences without judging, working together to reach a goal, having fun. (p. 185-186)

Top 3 Keywords

As I was writing this memoir and even now, I can’t miss hearing the same old questions once again in new but similar situations. The new question is, Why are there so many parallels between the 1960s and the 2020s?

Table Header Table Header
Black is beautiful!
Black lives matter!
One in Ten!
Gay pride! LBGTQ!
Women’s liberation!
Me, too movement!
Power to the people!
Inclusion, diversity, equality, woke
The establishment
The power brokers, the rich and the famous
Revolution vs. the establishment!
Democracy versus dictatorship, fascism!

Casualties of Peacemaking

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