Message to young people: Carry on the work
Longtime protester Mary Moore of Camp Meeker.
By ANDREA GRANAHAN / West County Correspondent
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Mary Moore’s fight for justice. It’s appropriate that it is Black History Month because her first cause, and still a passion, was civil rights. She has given her life to it and even had her children taken from her because of it.
Moore lives with one of her grandsons. She lost her daughter Diane to cancer five years ago and has adopted Chewy, her daughter’s dog. Their Camp Meeker home is a labyrinth of binders are carefully organized into causes.
A stack about the case of Earth First! organizer Judi Bari case, a stack on prisons and the death penalty, a stack on global warming and so on. They contain the history of Moore’s activism that she is preparing for UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.
How did your work begin?
My hometown is San Luis Obispo. In 1952, my father went on a business trip through the South and took me with him. We saw Jim Crow in action. It was a shock. My dad, a quiet man, refused to patronize restaurants that didn’t serve Blacks, so we bought snacks and ate in the car. I saw even in his way you could take a stand.
In high school I wrote a paper “Racial Inequality” and got an A. But it was 1962 I really started. I went door to door with petitions for fair housing and employment for Blacks. I was so naïve. I was the nice, white, liberal lady out to save the world. There were not a lot of nice liberal people behind the doors.
You were married?
I met my first husband, Joe, when I was attending the University of Arizona. We had two children, Diane and Kenny, then divorced in 1959. I married my second husband, Forest, and had my son Mark. I discovered the hard way Forest was a wife beater and quickly divorced him.
My two exes didn’t like my activism and got together. They wanted to take custody of the kids. I was still living in San Luis Obispo. My white friends all said, “Mary you are good mom, no one will take your kids.” My Black friends all said, “Watch out!” When I went before the judge he asked two questions:” Do you have Negroes in your house in front of your children? Do you ever have Negroes in your house past 9 p.m.?” That was it. I lost custody.
I traveled 200 miles each weekend to see Diane and Kenny. Forest vanished up to Alaska with Mark. I found myself only trusting my Black friends. I married Fred Moore, a Black therapist. I went into that marriage a nice liberal lady and came out a “screaming sistah.”
Tell us about some of your campaigns.
The anti-nuclear movement was important. They were building the Diablo Canyon plant in San Luis Obispo. During that protest I was arrested the first time. Eventually we got organized into a statewide action group called Abalone Alliance.
When I formed the Bohemian Grove Action Network, the Abalone Alliance was right there to do the work. We had one committee researching the Bohos who were profiting from the nukes. Then we had deep throats in the Grove leaking us their membership list, and we formed committees to investigate their finances. Then we planned actions, like the time we “arrested” the Bohos blocking the road into the grove. We were ready to be arrested ourselves, and 50 of us were. I’ve been arrested 15 times.
What are the critical issues right now and what can be done about them?
Globally or locally?
Both.
Globally I just wish we’d quit supporting Israel. That would change the landscape. Our support of Israel is the thread to pull to unravel the whole mess. It would change the Arab world, it would change all wars.
Locally I would love to see the Occupy movement occupy the Bohemian Grove during the encampment in late July. During the encampment the 1 percent is in that grove.
Most of all, I want people to pay attention. This attitude “I don’t read the news, it’s too negative,” all this woo-woo stuff and reliance on the spiritual to solve problems is just mental laziness. That laziness, an antiquated attitude, is what gives the 1 percent its power.
Young people need to wake up and carry on the work.
contact me
I remember when I was a corrections officer in the 80s, Mary and the folks protesting the Bohemian Grove used to get arrested and booked into the county jail. Classy lady.
This in not news worthy
You mean ..50-years of socialist activism.
Typical liberal idiot. Mary Moore doesn’t give a rat’s behind about the Holocaust that will be unleashed on Israel if we were to stop our support. She has her self-important leftism to keep her comforted in the face of all the murdering going on in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the hands of Islamists. Mary Moore is part of what is terribly wrong in our country at present: people who are either too stupid or too corrupt to see how truly destructive their “progressivism” really is.
Mary Moore is an inspiration to all activists. Her work initiating the Bohemian Grove Action anticipated the protests and attention now being given to the 1% by the Occupy movement. That certain members of what Mary has called the Bohemian Club’s “old boys network” are part of that 1% seems certain. They are part of a shadow government which specializes in creating enemies in order to have wars, and routinely invents “enemies” in order to maintain manipulation of “we, the people” by means of inducing constant fear and paranoia in the population.