March
Judi Bari
7 November 1949—2 March 1997
Redwood Friend
They called it Redwood Summer. Sponsored by the radical environmentalist group Earth First!, the plan was to launch an entire summer’s campaign against northern California timber companies seeking to log the state’s old-growth redwood forests. Hundreds of environmental activists, veterans as well as newcomers, were expected to participate in the protests.
One of the leaders was Judi Bari, longtime environmental activist and Earth First! organizer and spokesperson. She had become an environmentalist a few years earlier when, working as a carpenter, her boss indifferently informed her that some siding she was nailing on a house came from a 1,000-year-old redwood. “A light bulb went on,” she later remembered. “We are cutting down old-growth forests to make yuppie houses.”
Like the other activists who participated in Redwood Summer, Bari frequently chained herself to at-risk trees to prevent their cutting and blocked the paths of bulldozers with her own body. But unlike other Earth First! members, many of whom were ready to use violence against the loggers, Bari insisted on a nonviolent approach. She condemned some environmentalists’ practice of tree-spiking, in which metal nails are driven into tree trunks in order to ruin chainsaws and potentially injure loggers. Her inspiration was the nonviolent approach adopted by Martin Luther King Jr. during the struggle for civil rights. Because she was one of the most visible organizers of Redwood Summer, she became the target of an avalanche of hate mail and death threats. Although she reported the threats to local police, she couldn’t persuade authorities to take her seriously.
In May 1990, an explosion ripped through Bari’s car as she drove through Oakland, California. Caused by a nail-stuffed pipe bomb with a motion-sensitive trigger, the explosion nearly killed Bari, leaving her permanently disabled. She and the companion riding with her (his injuries were minor) gave police at the scene the names of several individuals and organizations who might have been responsible, but Oakland officials and the FBI instead chose to arrest Bari, claiming that she had made the bomb for the purposes of harming loggers but had accidentally set it off in her car. Given Bari’s reputation as an advocate of nonviolence, it was an outrageous indictment. The charge was dropped for lack of evidence a couple of months later. But Bari and her companion sued the FBI and Oakland Police for false arrest and violation of their civil liberties. The courts eventually decided in their favor and awarded them over $4 million in damages. By that time, however, Bari had died of breast cancer.
The tragedy of Bari’s attempted murder, although it brought immense personal suffering to her, led to something that the bomber, whose identity is still unknown, neither anticipated nor intended. The publicity surrounding the attempt on her life drew national attention to the destruction of old-growth redwoods, leading to the creation of Headwaters Forest Reserve in northern California, the nation’s largest area of protected redwoods.
3 March
Miriam Makeba
4 March 1932—10 November 2008
Mama Africa, Singer of Truth
So long as she stuck to singing African standards like “Pata Pata” and the “Click Song,” Miriam Makeba was a hit in America. Born into poverty in Johannesburg, South Africa, but eventually, despite the restrictions of apartheid, making an international name for herself as a singer, Makeba delighted audiences with the richness of her voice and her exotic African songs. Harry Belafonte took her under his wing (together they recorded a Grammy-winning album), President John Kennedy insisted on meeting her, and Marlon Brando was one of her admirers. Her only regret was that South Africa revoked her passport in 1959 in retaliation for her public criticism of her home country, her performances at Martin Luther King-led civil rights demonstrations, and especially her appearance in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa.
Things changed for the worse almost overnight when Makeba married Black Panther Stokely Carmichael in 1968. Scheduled concerts were cancelled, radio stations refused to play her music, and recording studios refused to work with her because of her association with Carmichael. Dismayed and angry at the racism she encountered in the United States, Makeba soon moved with Carmichael to Guinea, where she lived for the next fifteen years (she and Carmichael divorced in 1973). She continued to sing around the world, but refused for years to perform in the United States even after public outrage over her marriage had died down. In addition to opposing South African apartheid, she became a vocal critic of racism around the world. Her enemies tried to play down her outspoken anti-racism by claiming that she was a disgruntled hater of whites or a political opportunist. But Makeba vigorously rejected the accusations. “People have accused me of being a racist,” she said, “but I am just a person for justice and humanity. People say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth. I’m going to go on singing, telling the truth.”
During the final years of apartheid, Makeba kept up the pressure by publicly urging an economic boycott of South Africa. She was awarded the United Nation’s Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize for her energetic opposition to racism, and admirers of both her social activism and her music began calling her “Mama Africa.” When apartheid officially ended in 1990, she returned to the land of her birth after a thirty-year exile. Although popular in Europe and North America, especially after her musical collaboration in the 1980s with Paul Simon that resulted in the album Graceland, she was largely unknown by young South Africans. That the younger generation who benefited from her years of opposition to apartheid neither knew nor cared much about her music was an irony that she took in stride. To the end of her life, Mama Africa continued performing internationally, and actually died while giving a benefit concert in Italy.
4 March
Ludwig Quidde
23 March 1858—4 March 1941
The Foolishness of Vengeance
Kaiser Wilhelm II, the vainglorious and mustachioed German emperor who led his nation into the disastrous First World War, loved all things military. Diverting a goodly portion of the national economy to building up his army and navy and surrounding himself with generals and field marshals, he seemed out of touch with the real world in which ordinary people lived. So in 1894, a mild-mannered stutterer named Ludwig Quidde wrote a short pamphlet he hoped might serve as a reality check for the emperor. Titled Caligula: A Study of Imperial Insanity, Quidde’s essay was ostensibly a study of ancient Rome. But anyone with a discerning eye quickly saw that in fact it was an implicit criticism of the Kaiser’s infatuation with the military.
Caligula didn’t land its author in jail, although Quidde was imprisoned on several other occasions for his outspoken pacifism. A member of the German Peace Society, an organization that still exists despite being suppressed under Hitler, Quidde advocated disarmament and international law under three German regimes: the Wilhelmine reign, the Weimar Republic that replaced it, and the Nazi stranglehold that destroyed the Republic. He suffered for his convictions under all three. The Kaiser charged him with lèse-majesté several times and had him thrown into jail. When World War I erupted, Quidde was accused of treason after he traveled to The Hague to dialogue with French and British pacifists. The charge was dropped, but he was hounded by German authorities for the war’s duration. In 1924 the Republic imprisoned him for blowing the whistle on its secret buildup of the German Army. And when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Quidde was forced to flee the country. He settled in Switzerland, where he lived for the remainder of his days.
At the end of World War I, Quidde was one of the most vocal opponents of the harsh reparations levied against Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Many of the treaty’s critics disliked it because they believed
