On Friday, August 26, 2005, on or around 4:20 in the morning,
in Antioch, California, my mother, Jean Cameron Wiley Zwickel
joined her beloved Abe on that Final Adventure. Jean wrote a book on the voices of Puerto Rico Independence movement “Voices for Independence”.
My father and mother, Abraham and Jean Zwickel brought their ideals, including pacifism, to their relationship when they met in 1943. My mother was living in an interracial, pacifist Christian commune in New York City called the Harlem Ashram. My father Abe, who already knew the founder of the Ashram, Jay Holmes Smith, had heard that they were planning a walk from New York to Washington to protest the Jim Crow laws which legalized segregation. Living in Baltimore at the time, he joined them en route and there the two met.
Father was that great rarity – both a conscientious objector and a Jew, at the time of WWII besides! Mother, from a Unitarian family and strongly influenced by the New York City Unitarian minister, John Haynes Holmes, held a similar pacifist philosophy and had in fact lost a teaching job for refusing to aid in enlisting young men in the military to fight the Germans. Father worked in a Quaker fire-fighting camp and ultimately served in prison for refusing to cooperate with the military. That was but the first of a lifelong series of arrests in the cause of peace and social justice. Read more
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