Clare Grady at 100 Seconds To Midnight

BY SUSIE DAY-DECEMBER 2, 2020

April 4, 2018, fifty years after Martin Luther King’s murder: Seven white, aging Catholic peace activists cut a fence and enter Georgia’s Kings Bay Naval Base, the largest nuclear submarine base in the world. They carry hammers and bottles of their own blood to deface nuclear monuments, and banners decrying “omnicide”: the unimaginable destruction promised by nuclear weapons, not only of human life, but of life on Earth. They read a statement, repenting of “the sin of white supremacy” and resisting U.S. “militarism that has employed violence to enforce global domination.” They’re arrested and thrown into jail.

Heartfelt and daring, this protest was meant to be known around the world. It’s barely been noticed.

This “Plowshares 7” action is just the latest in decades of nonviolent, Catholic-led protests, wielding hammers, blood, and banners, begging the world to pay attention to the increasing threat of nuclear war.

Says Clare Grady, 62, a Plowshares 7 defendant: “When I was younger, if you had this antinuclear awakening, there were any number of activist choices. That doesn’t exist now, except for some older white people still doing it – it’s definitely not cool.”

Since Plowshares actions began in 1980, many arrests, convictions, and much jail time have accrued. On November 12, Clare was sentenced to one year and a day. She’s due to report to federal prison in February.

I also fear nuclear weapons, energy, and accidents. Yet I’ve done almost nothing to speak up about this. That’s why I called Clare at her home in Ithaca, NY, and asked her about her life.

An Irish Thing

I was born and raised in the Bronx. My dad was the child of Irish immigrants. His mother was a maid her entire life and never lost her Irish brogue.

My dad was underground a lot, doing draft resistance, draft board actions. The FBI were always trying to catch him; they’d come to our apartment. The neighborhood kids had a fun time, calling them flatfoot and things, ’cause they were so obvious. But my nana was: [speaking in brogue] “Go away, will ye?” My childhood was filled with these experiences, which is perhaps unusual for people that look like me.

This was the late ’60s, early ’70s. My dad was part of the Camden 28 [anti-Vietnam War activists charged with 1971 raid on Camden, NJ draft board], so he was hugely on J. Edgar Hoover’s wanted list. The FBI referred to my dad as “Quicksilver” because he kept evading them. He was always in – I guess you’d call it “good trouble” these days.

Our mom had five kids and more than anything loved being a mother and being in the Bronx. She was from Chicago, so she didn’t talk like everybody else’s “muthah.”

We grew up with dear, beloved friends – almost all of whom we’re still in touch with. It was really a tight neighborhood. I went to John Philip Sousa Jr. High School, and Angela Davis was on everybody’s minds then, like the Black Panthers. My school was maybe 10% white, with the rest Black and Puerto Rican. We have good times now, connecting over our childhoods and what it looked like from different perspectives.

My mom supported my dad ’cause he was underground so much. Us kids knew he was underground. It’s an Irish thing – we had this friend from Ireland, Lonnie Donegan, who’d come over here to do music. He’d warn us: [brogue] “Tell them nothing.”

Because we’d been colonized for 700 years. So there was this culture already in place, and our dad – even though he was born in the Bronx – identified with the Irish rebel more than anything.

He was arrested during that Camden raid and put right in jail. I remember they brought him into the courthouse. Everybody was chained, shackled together, walking through the hallway to the courtroom, singing Irish rebel songs. He was surrounded by a bunch of other first-generation Irish people whose mothers were very connected to the resistance in Ireland. Like, never lose your roots?

The Monster Won’t Decapitate Itself

We moved to Ithaca when I was going into tenth grade. While it was breathtakingly beautiful, this Cayuga land where I lived, I was feeling the lack of the Bronx. I was in high school here three years, then I went back to New York City and joined the United Farm Workers. I was waitressing, taking classes at Hunter College, living on the Lower East Side. Then in 1980, Plowshares Eight happened [General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division, King of Prussia, PA].

When I heard about that, I thought: “Trying to get the United States government to disarm is like asking a monster to decapitate itself. Just not gonna happen.”

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