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Legacies Project Oral History: Russ Fuller

When: 2020

Russell M. Fuller was born in 1924 and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He married Barbara Stauffer in 1948 and they both attended the Disciples Divinity House at the University of Chicago. After moving to Ann Arbor, they became active in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements and in 1965 they helped found the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice. Russ was chairman of the Human Relations Commission in the late 1960s. He also served as pastor of Memorial Christian Church for 40 years, retiring in 1995. Russ passed away in 2020, six years after Barbara.

Russ Fuller was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor in 2015 as part of the Legacies Project.

Transcript

  • [00:00:09.28] KATHY ST CLAIR: She was so nice. And she's very relaxed about it.
  • [00:00:13.00] RUSS FULLER: Good.
  • [00:00:13.81] KATHY ST CLAIR: She said, it's time.
  • [00:00:15.40] RUSS FULLER: Well, she's a pretty realistic person.
  • [00:00:24.76] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: So you were saying that when you started-- when you were growing up, you no more would have done anything with Catholics than you would have with the black Christians?
  • [00:00:34.50] RUSS FULLER: No, I remember I had a friend-- I was in, I think, sixth grade, and a friend. He was a young man. For some reason, he came down from Minneapolis to live with an aunt and uncle for a year. And-- oh, there they are. There are those people.
  • [00:00:56.38] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
  • [00:01:07.14] DON HULTQUIST: Hello, young man. I [INAUDIBLE]
  • [00:01:11.34] [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:01:12.87] RUSS FULLER: You listened to him long enough. Hard to [INAUDIBLE]
  • [00:01:17.03] DON HULTQUIST: And I did listen to him.
  • [00:01:19.48] RUSS FULLER: Well, there were some who did. Oh, my it's good to see you.
  • [00:01:27.96] JANE PACHECO: All right, so Don, we have some mats, if you need to put the maps down. Or there's carpet spot on that side.
  • [00:01:37.59] DON HULTQUIST: [INAUDIBLE]
  • [00:01:39.02] JANE PACHECO: OK, all right, just going to let you know. Are you joining us?
  • [00:01:44.19] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: We were having a conversation a little bit about how the-- when ICPJ started. There was just beginning to be an interaction between Catholics and Protestants, starting from the Civil Rights Movement. And I want to finish with that conversation.
  • [00:01:59.94] JANE PACHECO: Sounds good, OK.
  • [00:02:01.72] DON HULTQUIST: Where do you want us?
  • [00:02:02.34] JANE PACHECO: Right here, let's go gather around the table, make sure we get enough seats here. We might need one more.
  • [00:02:09.15] KATHY ST CLAIR: Jane, you people where you want them and I'll--
  • [00:02:12.33] JANE PACHECO: You know what? It's perfectly fine. This is a pretty powerful recorder.
  • [00:02:22.87] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: And it is recording now.
  • [00:02:24.93] NANCY HULTQUIST: I have that on my refrigerator. [INAUDIBLE] But she looks like that. That's exactly what she's doing, and laughing.
  • [00:02:32.50] RUSS FULLER: [INAUDIBLE]
  • [00:02:37.90] NANCY HULTQUIST: She is long gone, I assume.
  • [00:02:39.87] RUSS FULLER: What?
  • [00:02:40.80] NANCY HULTQUIST: I assume she's long gone.
  • [00:02:42.67] RUSS FULLER: I think so.
  • [00:02:45.52] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: So we'll just go around the table, and you can say that too in your introduction, but we also want your voice on it, so that as they're [INAUDIBLE]. So I'm Chuck Warpehoski. I serve as the Director of Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice.
  • [00:03:00.88] RUSS FULLER: I'm Russ Fuller. I was here of the beginning.
  • [00:03:05.29] NANCY HULTQUIST: I'm Nancy Hultquist. We moved to Ann Arbor in 1964 and got involved with Interfaith very, very early, probably by 1967, maybe '68 at the latest. And we left in 2002.
  • [00:03:20.36] DON HULTQUIST: Don Hultquist. I remember it clearly, going to the first meeting, where Barbara, at one of the church-- I don't know if it was the Methodist or Baptist Church. And Barbara held forth. And I was impressed, and I came home. Told Nancy all about it, and we were hooked.
  • [00:03:50.61] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: Kathy, why don't you introduce yourself.
  • [00:03:53.13] KATHY ST CLAIR: I'm Kathy St Clair. I'm a volunteer for the 50th anniversary project.
  • [00:03:59.32] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: So the conversation that we had just started, and realized we should get this on the recorder too, before you came in, was about how Interfaith had changed. And Russ was sharing-- maybe you can repeat some of this stuff now that we've got the recorder going, about how now we take the connection that Protestants and Catholics are talking, or those relationships between the Jewish and the Christian communities almost for granted. But it wasn't necessarily that way at the very beginning. So, you had a couple--
  • [00:04:31.42] RUSS FULLER: Well, Barbara and I came back to Ann Arbor in 1955. And I was active with the Ann Arbor Council of Churches, which was a very strong organization here then, and with the Ann Arbor Ministerial Association, both of which were Protestant.
  • [00:04:55.58] And there was there was really no contact I had with the Catholic clergy in town. I knew a few Catholic people, but we didn't talk faith. And I had begun to get somewhat acquainted with one rabbi, Harold White. But I would say from '55 until '60, that was just the way it was. And the Council of Churches was very active with a World Order group that did a lot of social concerns.
  • [00:05:42.40] I had grown up in Kansas City, Missouri. And I think we were like a great number of Protestants at that time. We didn't-- we had a prejudice against Catholics, as much as against Jews or blacks. That was the reality of it. And I think we were very active in the Disciples of Christ Church there, but we would no more have done something with a Catholic congregation than with a black disciple congregation. It was a segregated world.
  • [00:06:21.02] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: So when did that Protestant-Catholic breakdown start to happen? Or the connections start to emerge?
  • [00:06:30.04] RUSS FULLER: I'm not quite sure.
  • [00:06:31.96] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: When did you start having some of those connections between Protestants and Catholics?
  • [00:06:35.47] RUSS FULLER: Well, my first place of having much contact was in getting involved with the civil rights concerns of the late '50s and early '60s in Ann Arbor. And I found myself picketing city hall next to a Roman Catholic priest. That just had never happened to me before.
  • [00:07:01.36] And I got to know several priests, mostly younger priests, who were active in the civil rights concerns. And Rabbi White was very active with those things as well. And we just-- we gradually found we could work very well on civil rights concerns in that way.
  • [00:07:28.69] When we had a Civil Rights Coordinating Committee that met every week for years, there were a couple of Catholic priests on there. There was a rabbi. There were black people, there were white people. And we were from various organizations. But the task we felt we had to work on together was bigger than our differences.
  • [00:07:56.05] And so, in 1965, we invited a group of religious people down to our house for a-- to explore doing more things together. We had Catholic and Jew. We didn't think of having Muslims at that point. There was not a very visible Muslim community. And together, we were able to say let's start with an Interfaith Council for Peace.
  • [00:08:35.95] And more and more, we found that on the issues that concerned us most, it was not only easy, but it was very advantageous to be working together.
  • [00:08:51.07] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: Don and Nancy, did you have any experiences about where the interfaith of Interfaith Council was easy and where it was hard?
  • [00:09:04.32] NANCY HULTQUIST: That's not my expertise.
  • [00:09:06.29] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: OK.
  • [00:09:07.74] NANCY HULTQUIST: My early involvement was more technology, by using a manual typewriter to do a lot of [INAUDIBLE] his work.
  • [00:09:19.73] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: We'll come back to that story.
  • [00:09:26.55] DON HULTQUIST: When I came here, I think in the summer of '63, to interview for a job we had at the seminar at the university, I remember getting the newspaper, and there it was, fair housing, open housing, I think they'd just passed something. You probably know what it was. But it was something about open housing in the city.
  • [00:09:56.14] And I thought well, that's pretty good. But I was not involved with that. But when we're through with this, I'd like to continue that same theme of how Interfaith Council for Peace got me doing things politically, doing things religiously with Russ's church, and doing things politically at the university that kind of got me into trouble.
  • [00:10:33.78] So that when I was trying to think of what we did, I had a hard time sorting out did I do that with Interfaith, or the church, or the politics, or whatever.
  • [00:10:50.37] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: So then, as you're telling the story of especially the Protestant-Catholic divide 50, 60 years ago, what's present in my mind is all the animus and the tensions around the Muslim community today. What do you see that's the same and what do you see that's different?
  • [00:11:16.76] RUSS FULLER: As I said, I don't think there was a visible Muslim presence in Ann Arbor. There were obviously Muslims here, but there was not a visible community. I think between Protestant and Catholic, as I was growing up, there still was the old bugaboo that if we have too many Catholics around they'll take over the place and we'll have the Pope ruling us.
  • [00:11:58.08] You would never have thought then of somebody saying, hey, we're all for the Pope. And now you'll find-- you'll find people of all sorts who say good for Francis, there's a real Christian hero.
  • [00:12:18.03] I think the international tension between America and the Near East, and the nations that are predominantly Muslim there, that very much colors relationships and fears today. The fears are different than they were with Catholics. But no, we were starting at about the same time that America was getting used to its first Catholic president.
  • [00:12:51.00] And it was no small thing. If you go back to 1928 and 1932, Al Smith was-- he was not very popular in the Protestant community, Democrat or Republican. Al Smith was too much a Catholic. And I think today, you will find it in the more mainline Christian groups today, I think you'll find a good deal of respect for some of the things they know about Islam.
  • [00:13:33.30] But you'll also find that most the people know very little about Islam. And I think out of those churches today, you're more likely to hear we need to get together, we need to talk together, we need we need to understand one another, we need to learn to live with one another.
  • [00:14:00.08] So it's kind of a different cultural window that we're looking into today, in terms of Muslim relationships. And it's nice to know that Interfaith is one place where there's a lot of work being done on that.
  • [00:14:24.40] CHUCK WARPEHOSKI: Thank you for letting me take over the conversation for a little bit. We got started in the other room and I wanted to make-- it was good history that I didn't know and well said, so I wanted to make sure we got some of it on the interview. I'm going to hand things back over to Jane. It sounds like you already knows some of the stories you want to tell. So, have fun.
  • [00:14:41.95] JANE PACHECO: Sounds good. I'm going to make sure this is-- OK. So I do not need to necessarily interview you. If we just want to have a conversation, that works just fine. You have some notes, so I want to make sure that we are able to talk about those things, for sure.
  • [00:15:07.12] DON HULTQUIST: Why don't you direct us in a direction to begin with?
  • [00:15:11.32] JANE PACHECO: OK.
  • [00:15:12.89] DON HULTQUIST: I think that'd be helpful.
  • [00:15:14.50] JANE PACHECO: All right. I think it would be nice to hear a little bit about that first meeting and some of the very first acts that you did together as a group, what that looked like, and what kind of momentum that started. We heard a little bit from Bart Beavin, and John Powell, Mary Hathaway, some of the folks that came from the early days. And they spoke about specific events that stood out in their mind.
  • [00:15:46.60] John Powell talked about when the group was in Dearborn, and they had a prayer vigil at the shareholder meeting, and what sort of impact that had on the movement. And just a little bit about the memory of that, if we could start there, that would be fine.
  • [00:16:11.11] DON HULTQUIST: I'd like to ask Russ, could you clarify how much anti Vietnam War activity there was before ICPJ?
  • [00:16:26.11] RUSS FULLER: Say that again, Don.
  • [00:16:29.74] DON HULTQUIST: I don't know if there was a lot of anti Vietnam War activity, meetings, protests, and then ICPJ solidified or the other way around.
  • [00:16:48.04] RUSS FULLER: I think the beginning, I would say, around '63 or '64, the Ann Arbor Council of Churches, was it's rather strong World Order Committee-- Barbara was a member of that-- they had become concerned about that war. And Barbara knew the people working through the Council of Churches or that.
  • [00:17:18.85] Barbara was obvious-- was at that point focusing mostly on the family. But she had some concerns. And I was deep in the civil rights thing. But some of these people began to say to Barbara, you should be doing something about the Vietnam War.
  • [00:17:38.95] And Barbara was at a point where she was able to translate one experience into another. She saw a picture of a Vietnamese child running with Napalm flames behind. And she thought, that could be a Kit, that could be my daughter. And she told that story many times, but jarred her to a place where she felt she had to do it.
  • [00:18:14.89] So she started working more with some of these people with Council of Churches group. But then, I would say by '60-- by '65, there were certainly a number of religious people in Ann Arbor who were concerned about the war. But the Council of Churches was having some problems in being too aggressive about that, because some churches were not comfortable with it.
  • [00:18:49.50] And so, we called together just a group of people that we knew that were concerned. Bart Beavin was one of them. And sat around our table and said, what should we do? And the feeling was very quickly, we need an interfaith group to work on this.
  • [00:19:09.88] JANE PACHECO: Because at the time, there wasn't anything like that in the area.
  • [00:19:14.45] RUSS FULLER: Not in the area. I think there already was nationally a group. Because by '66 or '67, Barbara had brought Interfaith into CALC, Clergy and Laity Concerned, which was a national organization.
  • [00:19:35.87] And I don't know what year, but some place in there, she got Interfaith Council to become the Ann Arbor branch of CALC. And she started going then to CALC Steering Committee meetings. And that was where she met people that not only helped invigorate her concerns, but also that she was able to get to come to Ann Arbor and help us stir up things.
  • [00:20:09.72] JANE PACHECO: And so where were those meetings held?
  • [00:20:12.31] RUSS FULLER: Well, chief among them would have been our good friend, William Sloane Coffin, who at that time was at Yale, helping young men burn draft cards and getting himself into legal trouble. And then he became the pastor of Riverside Church in New York.
  • [00:20:43.90] And at Riverside Church, he established a-- I can't recall the name of it, but it was essentially a peace and justice arm of that church. Hired Cara Weiss, a leading Jewish citizen to take charge of it. And they started-- they started holding seminars, and all, and brought people all over the country to talk about it.
  • [00:21:15.52] So, we began to move very quickly into it, in part because of our own needs, but in part because we were really influenced by this wider wave of concern.
  • [00:21:31.68] JANE PACHECO: I understand.
  • [00:21:32.44] RUSS FULLER: Is that what you're thinking of?
  • [00:21:33.12] DON HULTQUIST: Yes.
  • [00:21:34.78] JANE PACHECO: At some point, William came to Ann Arbor.
  • [00:21:38.20] RUSS FULLER: We had him here a number of times. And they were very rich experiences. He was a man with such a gift of language and such a memorable voice when he spoke. And we were able to get him in touch with not just the piece and justice community, but when he was here, we'd try and open up and do as much as we can for the sake Ann Arbor clergy. And so, he became known to a number of people here.
  • [00:22:12.79] JANE PACHECO: So how was the work received in the beginning? You had these feet on the street. You were building momentum. It's my understanding there was a lot of consciousness raising, and education, vigils. How did the community react?
  • [00:22:33.37] DON HULTQUIST: Let me add one thing. At that point, we were at Church of the Good Shepherd. And I was activated partly by Coffin, whenever he came. And that was just powerful to hear him. But I still remember there was a leader at Church of Good Shepherd-- I can't remember his name, but if I--
  • [00:23:03.73] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
  • [00:23:05.23] DON HULTQUIST: No, I don't want to mention who it was, because he--
  • [00:23:08.50] RUSS FULLER: All right, might not have been him.
  • [00:23:09.70] DON HULTQUIST: But he was a leader in civil rights. And I tried to get him going on Vietnam. And I can remember him saying, no, that is just kind of take the energy away from the Civil Rights Movement. Don't mess with that.
  • [00:23:30.07] And so he wouldn't sign anything. I don't know how he ended up on the topic. But I think that was quite typical of a number of leaders. Go ahead, Russ.
  • [00:23:44.67] NANCY HULTQUIST: Can I add something to that?
  • [00:23:46.00] RUSS FULLER: Yeah.
  • [00:23:46.91] NANCY HULTQUIST: We were at Church of Good Shepherd, but we were very much opposed to the war. And that Sunday, I think that person that you're talking about, got them to sing "Onward Christian Soldiers." And we walked out and never went back. So that's how he ended up at Memorial Christian.
  • [00:24:05.80] RUSS FULLER: It's interesting that that hymn became less and less acceptable in churches, mostly around the Vietnam War. I think that we really had to have a group that was not directly responsible to or representative of the churches. So Interfaith Council invited people from churches to be a part of it, invited churches to support it, but you would not have been able to do it if you made yourselves accountable to those congregations, because those congregations were not united in their attitudes.
  • [00:24:57.01] And a great number of people had problems with it. They had problems because the whole anti-communism scare. They had problems because you don't take issue with your government, you support your government. And there were big concerns because so many of us were involved in the Civil Rights Movement that it was hard to give yourself to some other big movement.
  • [00:25:32.43] In the case of Barbara and I, Barbara became staff and devoted almost full time to Interfaith. And I kept working with civil rights. But I couldn't be as involved as she was, and still do the civil rights thing, and still be pastor of a congregation. So I think a lot of people who were deeply concerned for civil rights had a hard time seeing energy taken away to deal with the war.
  • [00:26:07.98] DON HULTQUIST: Probably the most emotional protest I went to was-- what's the church in Washington?
  • [00:26:18.57] NANCY HULTQUIST: The National Cathedral.
  • [00:26:19.54] DON HULTQUIST: The National Cathedral, where Martin Luther King addressed. And I'm almost positive that this is where he said the greatest purveyor of military evil in the world is our government. Oh, and then all of the sudden he was-- he didn't bring the whole Civil Rights Movement with him-- but all of a sudden it was much easier to [INAUDIBLE]
  • [00:26:54.36] My chronology may be way off. I can't remember what comes first. But I think it was at that meeting that we were to walk across the bridge, whatever that bridge is, to the--
  • [00:27:12.51] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
  • [00:27:13.71] DON HULTQUIST: To the cemetery.
  • [00:27:16.42] JANE PACHECO: Arlington.
  • [00:27:18.30] DON HULTQUIST: Arlington Cemetery, and have a service there. I know Barbara was there. I don't think you were there.
  • [00:27:27.08] RUSS FULLER: I don't recall being there.
  • [00:27:29.05] DON HULTQUIST: Anyway, there was a court order that no words could be spoken at the cemetery. And Coffin was there, I think-- almost positive Martin Luther King was there. And then no one said a word. We gathered around the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And then a rabbi said in a very loud voice, Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And that was powerful. And then we walked back.
  • [00:28:15.26] But just let me add one more-- again, the chronology is [INAUDIBLE]. But at one point, people were talking to Barbara-- I don't know if Barbara was talking to people about her running for Congress. Am I not correct?
  • [00:28:32.60] RUSS FULLER: [INAUDIBLE]
  • [00:28:33.92] DON HULTQUIST: And that she would challenge Marvin Esch, who was in [INAUDIBLE] as a poet and economist.
  • [00:28:44.47] RUSS FULLER: Quaker peace people, deeply committed, always involved.
  • [00:28:50.23] NANCY HULTQUIST: Run against Wes Vivian, not Marvin Esch.
  • [00:28:53.70] DON HULTQUIST: Oh, yeah, right, against-- challenging the Democrat, Wes Vivian And again, I don't know where to draw the line. Interfaith Council was not political, but it certainly got involved in political things. And out of that group of people, Elise Boulding, who was herself a powerful speaker, decided to run.
  • [00:29:26.74] So I don't know why, but they picked me to go have a meeting with the Democratic leadership in the city to tell them a bunch of us were going to be working against Wes Vivian. That was--
  • [00:29:43.45] NANCY HULTQUIST: She was going to be a write-in candidate.
  • [00:29:45.09] DON HULTQUIST: Write-in candidate-- that was not a happy meeting. That's not my kind of thing. And I can remember, people were just really angry-- "How can you do that? He's going to lose." They were right, he lost. And we got a Republican, who was very supportive of the war, Marvin Esch.
  • [00:30:10.41] So anyway, again, I see all these things mixed up. And I know ICPJ was not political, but it was.
  • [00:30:23.26] RUSS FULLER: It was, yes. Partly just on Interfaith's own, but partly because of-- in great part because of working with the national Clergy and Laity Concerned group, there were many, many trips to Washington to lobby with our congresspeople. And Barbara found out very early on that she knew a lot more than the people in Congress did about the Vietnam War.
  • [00:30:57.97] And they would go again and again to talk with our representatives there to make some sort of a witness. A bunch of them were arrested for having a circle of prayer and refusing to leave. They were in the rotunda of the Capitol. And many of them were sent to jail that night. Barbara was included.
  • [00:31:28.70] DON HULTQUIST: Was or was not?
  • [00:31:30.76] RUSS FULLER: What?
  • [00:31:31.27] DON HULTQUIST: Was?
  • [00:31:32.14] RUSS FULLER: Barbara was arrested and sent to jail. Her biggest complaint was not that she went to jail, but she found out in the morning that on the men's side of the jail, William Sloane Coffin had led the men in singing all night long, the "Hallelujah" chorus and hymns. And she'd missed out on that.
  • [00:31:57.04] But Martin Luther King, when he came out formally against the war, did it against the advice of most of his counselors. And I think it was not that they were not against the war, it was that they were against dividing your energies. You can't tackle two fronts at once. And King decided there was no way, it had to be done. You had to say it.
  • [00:32:28.78] And that lost King a lot of support initially. But I think it also brought more support to things like Interfaith. Now, we were in the middle of the civil rights struggle. In the late '60s, that was a very busy time, with riots in cities and all kinds of upsetting things. And it took a lot of energy to just deal with that.
  • [00:33:12.22] But it was about that period that most of our black friends, who had been working with us in civil rights, were coming to the conclusion that black people ought to be together doing this on their own, and the white people should do it on their own. And I remember in Ann Arbor, the Civil Rights Movement sort of broke into two sections.
  • [00:33:42.43] Later on, I think it was easy to say when you were against the war, black people are paying a bigger price than they should have to proportionately in this country to fight that war. But I think most black leaders were so concerned for their own struggle that not a lot of them followed King, in terms of really active anti-war things. But it was a split in a lot of ways, and a very understandable one, I think.
  • [00:34:24.44] NANCY HULTQUIST: I want to piggyback on-- you said that Barbara knew more about the Vietnam War than many of the congresspeople. She began collecting books and materials. And somewhere she got an old bookmobile-- I think we called it the Peace-mobile-- and put books on there. I remember being involved with that. I don't remember what I did, but I remember being on the bus a number of times.
  • [00:34:48.47] And I don't know whether people were able to check the books out or just what. But there was quite a collection of books. And it drove around the city. Had you heard about that?
  • [00:34:58.65] JANE PACHECO: Uh-uh.
  • [00:34:59.33] NANCY HULTQUIST: And I think they called it the Peace-mobile, not the bookmobile.
  • [00:35:03.63] JANE PACHECO: So she purchased it, or somehow-- somehow it became--
  • [00:35:07.79] NANCY HULTQUIST: I think it got loaned to her. It was an unused one or something, I don't remember. And it was just for a few months that she had that, but it was--
  • [00:35:14.93] DON HULTQUIST: That was the Vietnam summer.
  • [00:35:20.60] RUSS FULLER: Barbara had an exceptional skill for organizing and making things happen. That was just one of her particular skills. There were a lot of people in the Interfaith who came up with all sorts of ideas. And it's amazing how often those ideas got well organized and something fruitful happened out of it.
  • [00:35:54.47] DON HULTQUIST: Let me give an example of that. I think after the first meeting I went to, and it was a series of local clergy leaders, I remember a young Catholic priest, a young priest, standing up and saying something-- whatever we do, we have to make sure-- and I can't remember what he said, but the whole crowd shrugged, no, no, that's not so. And Barbara-- do you remember what priest that would have been?
  • [00:36:36.95] RUSS FULLER: I can't remember.
  • [00:36:38.12] DON HULTQUIST: But very, very young one. And then he became one of the leaders of the group. Barbara got-- well, after that, I talked to Barbara for a few minutes about I can't remember what. And Nancy remembers, I got a telephone call when we were living on Chandler. And she said, it went on, and on, and on.
  • [00:37:08.68] And after that, I was part of the organization. She must have spent half an hour telling me what role I might be playing.
  • [00:37:23.80] JANE PACHECO: So what did the followers look like? Were there students, family people, elderly people? Was it an intergenerational movement?
  • [00:37:37.78] RUSS FULLER: I'd say it was quite intergenerational. You had-- I'm terrible at recalling names right now. They'll appear in the middle of the night. But you had people like the Bouldings, who were well-known in the city for peace activism. Though, there was another family, a professor--
  • [00:38:03.66] NANCY HULTQUIST: The Bloods?
  • [00:38:04.69] RUSS FULLER: What?
  • [00:38:05.17] NANCY HULTQUIST: The Bloods?
  • [00:38:06.64] RUSS FULLER: The Bloods, Peter and Margaret Blood, who were very much in the middle of it, again out of the Quaker community. There was a professor who had a Japanese wife.
  • [00:38:27.01] DON HULTQUIST: David Bass.
  • [00:38:27.94] RUSS FULLER: The Bass's, yes. David Bass. Now these were, as most people would think, older people. But you had the Hultquists with a young family. The Rucknagels were with a younger family at that time. I would say it was intergenerational. We began to pick up a lot of people who were not particularly affiliated with religious groups, but wanted to work for peace.
  • [00:39:04.38] It became a powerful mix of people, I'd have to say. And people with-- people with ideas, people with imagination.
  • [00:39:18.61] DON HULTQUIST: That's right, we were all--
  • [00:39:20.98] RUSS FULLER: I just remember the importance of some of the events. I think particularly of a night, and I can't think whether it was a New Year's night or not, but we gathered at First Methodist Church, and lit candles, and walked down to St. Thomas Church for a service. There was a huge crowd out that night. And I remember so many demonstrations on the plaza there by the federal building, on Liberty.
  • [00:39:57.91] And I remember that more and more, in those situations, we would see people across the street filming us. And it became very obvious we were being watched at these things.
  • [00:40:14.92] JANE PACHECO: Who was watching?
  • [00:40:18.07] RUSS FULLER: They didn't identify themselves.
  • [00:40:20.85] DON HULTQUIST: Helicopters would hover overhead at meetings.
  • [00:40:25.27] RUSS FULLER: There were people-- there were police people, you knew some of that. There were other people that were, I would just say, informants. When after the war we got our files from the Michigan State Police, most of it blacked out, but it was obvious that some very amateurish people had collected information about us, that was often utterly wrong. And I don't know who they were, but they gathered it up, and they sent it to the police.
  • [00:41:01.30] JANE PACHECO: Were you ever afraid for your family, by the actions you were--
  • [00:41:05.41] RUSS FULLER: I don't think we ever were. I don't think we ever were. But we weren't-- it wasn't that far after, and we had strong memories of the McCarthy era, and you were aware that the powers that be are powers. They do have power.
  • [00:41:29.89] And I guess I would have expected trouble more from an arrest or from some sort of an official warning or something. We didn't have that. But we were all aware that we were being watched at those rallies.
  • [00:41:55.33] DON HULTQUIST: I want Nancy to describe her role.
  • [00:41:59.30] NANCY HULTQUIST: Remember those were in the days there were no computers, no cell phones, no copy machines. And Barbara was always wanting to send out all kinds of stuff. And the only way that she could send stuff-- I typed. They did have sheets with-- what was it-- 33 names, or 33 labels, on the piece of paper.
  • [00:42:22.68] And I could type an individual sheet. And I type fairly fast and accurately. And so over, and over, and over, and over, and over I typed the names. And there were more than 33 names. I don't know if she had 150 names or more. And I was home with five kids, five young kids.
  • [00:42:42.40] And that was my early role. I didn't go to Washington. I couldn't leave the kids. We went on some walks around Ann Arbor, I think a New Year's Eve walk one time, starting at maybe MCC and going to one of the other churches, the Congregational Church. And we had the kids in strollers and stuff, I think probably with candles. I don't remember the candles.
  • [00:43:08.92] But anyway, my role was to keep the mailings going. And lots and lots of individual envelopes I had to type for more important people that wouldn't get a mailing label, like to Rabbi-- who's the one in Boston that you used all the time? That was in-- [INAUDIBLE]
  • [00:43:30.22] RUSS FULLER: I can't get the name.
  • [00:43:35.31] JANE PACHECO: So you had five children at home.
  • [00:43:38.35] NANCY HULTQUIST: Yeah.
  • [00:43:39.07] JANE PACHECO: How over the years have your children described this time? Or how has it played out in their lives? Did they ever talk about that?
  • [00:43:49.64] NANCY HULTQUIST: Not the early stuff, but I think we have-- all of our kids are a little bit active against things, but they're not to the extent that we ever were. Would you agree with that?
  • [00:44:08.52] DON HULTQUIST: Yes, and that didn't come directly from-- I keep saying ICPJ-- is that--
  • [00:44:17.90] NANCY HULTQUIST: It was ICP at first.
  • [00:44:18.66] DON HULTQUIST: --the old name? What was the--
  • [00:44:20.20] RUSS FULLER: It was the Interfaith Council for Peace, and then became Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice.
  • [00:44:24.97] DON HULTQUIST: OK, but knowing Barbara, eventually we met Russ. And pretty soon, we were in his congregation. And we are always on the edge of it theologically. But over and over, we'd say, boy, he gave that sermon directly to us, didn't he? And then we'd talk to some who are quite conservative. They'd say, oh, he was speaking to me this time. And we never figured out how he did that. I still don't know.
  • [00:45:02.19] But I have to say, I thought I was having trouble. I was trying to get tenure at the medical school. And my chairman was-- and my dean were very, very conservative politically. The medical students went on strike. They would not go out of class, for a couple of days anyway.
  • [00:45:34.36] So they asked faculty members would they also go on strike. Here's where I'm going to get into trouble. And that's not ICPJ, but it's what ICPJ did to me that got me in-- So, I said yes, I would, but that I would make up, whenever they wanted, those lectures. And I put up a sheet and signed my name. And pretty soon, maybe half the department signed it.
  • [00:46:17.50] The next morning, early-- ring-- "This is Dr. Christiansen, please come to my office." I figured I was in real trouble. And he said, I've talked to Dr. Hubbard, the dean of the-- and we've decided that given this situation, that was a wonderful idea. I'm so amazed. It took them off the hook. We still lectured. There was a big disruption. The faculty was not split.
  • [00:46:57.91] But Barbara almost got me into trouble. And shortly after, I was up for tenure. And the day it was up for tenure, and the faculty were meeting to vote, I was in Washington, DC at one of the protests. And I kept wondering, I wondered if they know where I am. But they voted OK.
  • [00:47:24.77] So, again, I'm beating that idea, but it wasn't just the group. It extended into politics. It extended into the university. One other story I have to tell. One night, afternoon, I got a call from-- who? Who'd I get a call from?
  • [00:47:50.11] NANCY HULTQUIST: The dean.
  • [00:47:51.21] DON HULTQUIST: The dean's office, and said there's going to be a big protest on campus. And Sheriff Harvey was then the sheriff. And he hated anyone with long hair. It didn't matter if they were protesting, long hair was enough to beat them. And he was-- he eventually got to jail himself. He didn't jail himself, he was taken to jail.
  • [00:48:20.50] Anyway, the dean said, there's going to be a big protest. There's a lot of toughs from Detroit coming in. Harvey is ready to go after that. We want the medical faculty to stand in between the protesters and the sheriff. I cannot believe that they would do that now.
  • [00:48:50.68] So we did that. And it went off smoothly. There was enough of a buffer. So again, I would never have done that if Barbara hadn't gotten after me and gotten me on that [INAUDIBLE].
  • [00:49:09.03] RUSS FULLER: Well, Barbara had a power to do that. I've done a lot of thinking since her death last summer. Barbara didn't push me, but she sure opened and showed me the doors to do a lot more than I would have, if she hadn't been there influencing me, and I think a lot of other people.
  • [00:49:35.49] Don Rucknagel, who was on the medical faculty, did find several others with sympathy in the medical family. And I know he pushed-- what was it? Physicians for Social--
  • [00:49:50.33] DON HULTQUIST: Responsibility.
  • [00:49:51.11] RUSS FULLER: --Responsibility, he worked with that group. And I think as the thing went on, Interfaith began to say to city council, there are things you could be doing too. And they would go to Dow, or Monsanto, or the big 3M company, to their board meetings, and speak. They would get a share or two, so they could get into a board meeting.
  • [00:50:30.26] And in increasing ways, they began trying to push the city council. And one of those ways was to try and say we're against a certain kind of weapon. And I remember they're going to city council, usually not getting a positive response, but occasionally they did. And it was a religious, and it was a moral, and it was a political issue.
  • [00:51:10.45] Interfaith sent three representatives to the Paris Peace talks in the early '70s, which were bringing together people from both sides in the Vietnam conflict, with some Europeans, to talk about how to solve the thing. And three people, including Hathaway, city council, were sent by Interfaith for that. And it got more publicity because a city councilman went along.
  • [00:51:54.16] And I just think it developed in a push for-- wherever there was a way of trying to push for action, whether it was the political field, or some non-religious venue, or some religious thing, they were trying to use whatever platform they could to speak out against the war, and to teach people what was really going on. That was a big part of it. People didn't realize what we were doing in Vietnam. So a lot of the job was an educational one.
  • [00:52:35.71] DON HULTQUIST: To expand that just a little bit, I remember Hathaway-- and I can't remember his first name-- was a strong Republican.
  • [00:52:47.20] RUSS FULLER: Yep.
  • [00:52:48.21] DON HULTQUIST: And I and a lady, I can't remember who, went to visit one of the regions of the university to push for something. So that was another direction that it was organized by ICPJ.
  • [00:53:16.26] RUSS FULLER: There were just-- there were efforts by various people in the council who had this group of friends or that group of friends, and they'd be pushed to push out against their circle of friends or people they worked with. And another group could go another direction. It became a multiple kind of thing. But it needed a lot of typing address labels too. It needed a lot of that kind of work.
  • [00:53:50.52] NANCY HULTQUIST: Every week, it was really.
  • [00:53:53.37] RUSS FULLER: My youngest can recount stories of big mailings coming home to be stamped. And you were old enough to stamp envelopes. And I think there were other families, where their kids helped out, where young people were involved in parading down the street with signs. I think it stayed a pretty good mix of ages that were involved.
  • [00:54:28.80] And the Wesley Foundation of the Methodist Church gave them their first office. Barb even had a little tiny room. I mean, it was a tiny room. And they operated out of there for a long time. Then they moved into a room that was about twice that size, at our church. And they began having their Steering Committee meetings at Memorial Christian Church.
  • [00:54:58.68] So Nancy and I would always be there. We could hear some of the discussions. We weren't members of the Steering Committee, but we got in on a lot of it. And people from the Steering Committee would come across and speak to Nancy and me.
  • [00:55:11.56] NANCY HULTQUIST: Eventually, I got on the Steering-- I was treasurer for a number of years on the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, until I left.
  • [00:55:22.79] RUSS FULLER: It was fun being around the church when that Steering Committee came in. There were all these interesting people.
  • [00:55:29.51] JANE PACHECO: So in the '70s, as the-- I know you brought on additional issues. How was that decided?
  • [00:55:43.82] RUSS FULLER: Well, that became the lifeblood of Interfaith, really, the ability to take on other issues. As the war was winding down, there were groups who said-- and I guess this was when we added the J, but there were people who said, well, we all ought to work on this issue too. And one of them was the CROP Walk. And there was a Baptist pastor. And Michael and Al from our congregation, who put together the first CROP Walk. And I think that was-- I think that was '75 or so, right about then.
  • [00:56:32.92] JANE PACHECO: '74.
  • [00:56:36.37] RUSS FULLER: And that goes on now. But there was also a food and justice task force that was formed. And little by little, they looked for things that disturbed the peace or made peace harder to achieve, and would tackle that-- disarmament in general. And out of that would come the concern for cluster bombs, and can we get at the people who are making those cluster bombs, and make them ashamed of doing it, and make them stop? Can we go to their board meetings?
  • [00:57:15.72] The people that were there saw the possibilities of this kind of cooperation for other issues. And I think that's what's kept Interfaith going for 50 years, the fact that it could rise to something new. And in some ways, what was done for a period in the '70s, has come back in new strength in food concerns in Interfaith now. And if they'd stuck to Vietnam, as most of those groups around the country did, they'd be gone by now.
  • [00:58:01.78] But they were able to keep going, and see the issues that made for justice, and the realization that without justice, there's not going to be peace. And I just-- Barbara and I have been so proud of these later years of Interfaith, as we could observe the vitality and the talent of younger people, willing to come on at salaries that are not what those staff members are worth at all.
  • [00:58:39.01] DON HULTQUIST: Russ, how independent each of the task forces?
  • [00:58:46.27] RUSS FULLER: Well, each of the task forces is responsible through the Steering Committee. And they report at Steering Committee meetings. And we have had-- we have had some times when there was real conflict, where a group would decide they were working on an issue, and they would want to go out it in a way that the Steering Committee felt was not in keeping with our move.
  • [00:59:21.31] And I can remember some of the last years I was on the Steering Committee, we had some tough negotiations to go through that way. So there is a line of responsibility. It's more likely to be felt in terms of method than the name of the concern. But if your tactics are not peaceful, are not respectful of human rights and human persons, then that's not going to help us promote peace. And so we've got to find another way to address it. And I think there's been a lot of wisdom in that Steering Committee for doing that.
  • [01:00:07.95] JANE PACHECO: Well, there's no shortage of injustice.
  • [01:00:11.55] RUSS FULLER: No. And it's not hard for any of us who care deeply about something to lose our bearings and start attacking things in ways that are really not in keeping with our general mood. I mean, all of us are susceptible to that. And I think the Steering Committee has had to be sensitive to how we address the issues, as well as what issues we address.
  • [01:00:42.79] DON HULTQUIST: When did Tobi join the city council? When was she elected to the city council?
  • [01:00:50.87] JANE PACHECO: Tobi Hanna-Davis.
  • [01:00:53.69] RUSS FULLER: I'm still not getting it.
  • [01:00:54.75] NANCY HULTQUIST: Tobi.
  • [01:00:55.64] RUSS FULLER: Tobi?
  • [01:00:56.53] DON HULTQUIST: When was she elected to the council, to the city council?
  • [01:01:02.11] RUSS FULLER: Yeah, I can't recall.
  • [01:01:05.48] DON HULTQUIST: There was sort of a transition where outliers became central.
  • [01:01:13.63] JANE PACHECO: And it's a continuing transition.
  • [01:01:15.14] RUSS FULLER: Chuck is on city council now.
  • [01:01:17.14] JANE PACHECO: Right.
  • [01:01:17.80] RUSS FULLER: And pretty influential on city council.
  • [01:01:21.23] JANE PACHECO: So the current executive director of ICPJ, Chuck Warpehoski, is on the Ann Arbor City Council. And myself, Jane Pacheco, also staff, is on the city council in Chelsea.
  • [01:01:34.26] RUSS FULLER: Good.
  • [01:01:34.88] JANE PACHECO: So and it's become somewhat of a tradition there. It is my understanding there have been several staff members through the years that have been elected officials.
  • [01:01:46.70] RUSS FULLER: In reality, you can't address peace and justice issues without dealing with the political part of our culture. The political world controls an awful lot of things that either make for peace or make for the lack of peace. And Interfaith, I think, has tried to be sensitive to the ways in which you call political units or organizations to task for either the method they're using or the aims that they declare.
  • [01:02:39.77] At the time when the Klan was visiting Ann Arbor, there was a real attempt to find a way to be peacekeepers in the middle of that. And that meant you had to work with the police department. It took a while to convince the police department that you could get a bunch of volunteer peacekeepers who would be effective. And it worked. It worked beautifully. I mean, it really was an important thing.
  • [01:03:18.33] And I guess I would have to say that I think there are a lot of people who almost had conversion experiences by becoming peacemakers and see what happened.
  • [01:03:32.87] JANE PACHECO: So at the beginning of the conversation, Chuck was asking you a little bit about similarities and differences between then and now. Could any of you speak to that, in terms of our political or cultural climate? What's happening in the United States, in Washtenaw County, beyond how does that look, in terms of a similarity? Maybe not necessarily the anti-war movement, but just peace and justice in general.
  • [01:04:13.00] RUSS FULLER: I would say that-- how to phrase it-- if you look at the Pope's recent encyclical, he speaks about our consumerism culture. And I think much more so now than 40 or 50 years ago, we are an acquisitive, give me, get what I want, consumer society. I think that is such a strong arm of our culture today.
  • [01:05:12.52] The Pope was talking about environmental concerns. And we know now that a lot of the things that we have taken for granted, and that we're free to do, are really very detrimental or even utterly destructive of our environment and the environment we're going to leave to other people. Those, it seems to me, are two major areas that are different in our culture today.
  • [01:05:56.40] They're not unrelated to hunger, or racial justice, or peace and war, for that matter. But it gives a different-- a whole different web of concerns that you have to take account of today. And as has always been the case, there are those who say we don't have to worry about those things, or we don't believe in those things. But I'd say those are two of the big things.
  • [01:06:32.80] JANE PACHECO: And so as you were speaking about civil rights leadership, hesitant to split a focus and be active in the anti-war movement, it came to me that there's a lot of talk these days about the convergence of social justice movements. And there's fear there, the same fear that what might have been there 50, 60 years ago, about splitting the focus.
  • [01:07:10.77] But it seems to me that these issues are very related and may not be able to be addressed unless we converge social justice movements.
  • [01:07:27.87] RUSS FULLER: I think that's very true. More and more, I think the threat of war and political conflict arises, and will begin to arise, over matters of, do we have our share of the water? What's the future of our island country if you keep doing the things that create global warming? We're going to just be washed into the sea.
  • [01:08:11.95] I mean, these are-- these are issues that are very much a part of whether there's going to be war or peace in the future. And if you look at-- if you look at where great masses of the people are today, you cannot expect those people to be ignorant of how high we're living.
  • [01:08:46.17] And one of the great fears for our kind of people is that what you're talking about may mean a sacrifice in our style of living. We don't want to give this up. But is there any way we can keep what we've got and have everybody in the world as fortunate? It doesn't look like there's any way you can achieve that. So are we willing to give up for the sake of others having basic needs met?
  • [01:09:20.76] DON HULTQUIST: I'd like to bring up two things, more personal. But they go back to Barbara again and again. When Barbara took her first trip to Vietnam after the war, as part of the reconciliation, she saw these wonderful embroideries in a little shop in-- which city?
  • [01:09:47.98] NANCY HULTQUIST: Hanoi.
  • [01:09:49.00] DON HULTQUIST: Hanoi. And came back, I think, with two of them the first time. And Nancy saw them and said, oh, can we get-- and Barbara said, well, which one would you like? And Nancy said, really, I'd like them both. So I don't know, did we get one?
  • [01:10:13.30] NANCY HULTQUIST: It might have been her second trip. Anyway, whenever.
  • [01:10:16.35] DON HULTQUIST: My stories are not accurate in detail.
  • [01:10:21.67] NANCY HULTQUIST: Did you say they were made by a Swedish--
  • [01:10:24.04] DON HULTQUIST: Yeah, they were done by a French technique that the French introduced to Vietnam when they were in charge. But the painting of the embroiders were copies of Carl Larsson, the great Swedish artist, because the Swedes beat everybody else into Vietnam to reconstruct.
  • [01:10:52.06] So French technique, Swedish paintings, and as she described, a little old man in Hanoi doing these. And she told us two to three months it took him to do these wonderful things. Anyway, how many trips did Barbara make to Vietnam?
  • [01:11:12.71] RUSS FULLER: Well, she made a total of 13 trips.
  • [01:11:17.48] NANCY HULTQUIST: To Vietnam? Really?
  • [01:11:19.54] DON HULTQUIST: And by the time she brought it back, and others brought it back, often in suitcases and not necessarily declared, our living quarters are filled with these. And each of our kids has one or more of these. So I don't know how that helps the world peace, but--
  • [01:11:48.72] Well, I know one way it was. We were in Stockholm. And Nancy was so anxious to see the real ones, Carl Larsson. And she asked, and said, no, we have none of those on displays in there museum, state museum of art.
  • [01:12:09.57] So we looked around, and we went into a little room, and there they were, hanging in the wall. And Nancy stood so long that eventually they brought in a guard, who stood right next to her. So that's--
  • [01:12:31.76] RUSS FULLER: It's a story of how the world is one. We're all interrelated. The French, the Swedes, the Vietnam, the Americans, we're all tied together in those little embroideries.
  • [01:12:44.07] DON HULTQUIST: They're beautiful. And we exhibit them to our friends in Oberlin. The other one is, I gradually faded away from ICPJ, in terms of working. I was too busy doing my thing, and working hard. But when we retired, the first thing-- was it the first month-- Chuck Booker Hirsch came through Oberlin on his way to the penitentiary in Bradford, Pennsylvania, because he had stepped over the line at School of the Americas.
  • [01:13:35.43] And we asked him, would he like to meet with students. So, yes, he would love to meet with students. So we took him to the big church. What's the brand in the church? Anyway, and he stood in the pulpit, and he--
  • [01:14:00.51] NANCY HULTQUIST: Oh, you mean-- OK, I didn't know which time you were talking about. In Oberlin, the UCC.
  • [01:14:06.00] DON HULTQUIST: UCC. He stood in the pulpit, and he said, for this I could switch from being a Baptist to a UCC.
  • [01:14:17.41] NANCY HULTQUIST: Presbyterian.
  • [01:14:18.38] DON HULTQUIST: Oh, Presbyterian. Sorry. Don't tell him that [INAUDIBLE]. But, anyway, but when we tried to get that group together, we found there was no ICPJ in Oberlin. Oberlin's about 7% of the size of Ann Arbor. So in 2004, I got a group going. And it's still going. And Nancy and I lobbied the ministers. And we got the UCC minister, and the Baptists.
  • [01:15:00.43] JANE PACHECO: What do they call themselves?
  • [01:15:02.27] DON HULTQUIST: Community Peace Builders.
  • [01:15:04.83] JANE PACHECO: Fantastic.
  • [01:15:05.53] DON HULTQUIST: The first-- this is way off topic, but it's direct offshoot. Here is our-- the first program we did, we got the Friends to bring in-- it's right in here-- "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit. Did you see that?
  • [01:15:32.90] JANE PACHECO: Mm-hmm.
  • [01:15:34.03] DON HULTQUIST: And out of our town of 3,000 students--
  • [01:15:39.43] NANCY HULTQUIST: 5,000.
  • [01:15:40.11] DON HULTQUIST: 5,000-- we had 1,000 people come to that exhibit. And we thought, wow. It's been sort of down hill since. And we've never gotten 1,000 people. But we've done a lot of things. I led it for the first five years. And then someone else for five years, and I for one year. And now we have another one.
  • [01:16:07.58] But the one thing we did that I think is listed here, we-- I got really upset with Abu Ghraib, the torture. And we had a program, the Oberlin Initiative to Get Rid Of Torture.
  • [01:16:31.46] And what we did is got our congresswoman to hire, not for pay, but for experience, fire students from Oberlin College to investigate what they could, that was not secretive, was not-- what's the--
  • [01:16:57.78] JANE PACHECO: Classified.
  • [01:16:59.35] NANCY HULTQUIST: She was confused what was classified and what wasn't.
  • [01:17:04.00] DON HULTQUIST: She knew too much, but she didn't know what she knew from classified. So she hired these five students. And they did a wonderful job. And we spoke at various churches. Then she got knocked out of-- well, they redid the congressional--
  • [01:17:32.26] NANCY HULTQUIST: Gerrymandering.
  • [01:17:33.60] DON HULTQUIST: Gerrymandered. And we now have the most conservative member of Congress, because it includes all the rural areas, all the way to Toledo. But anyway, it's still going after 11 years.
  • [01:17:55.13] JANE PACHECO: You've been busy.
  • [01:17:56.59] DON HULTQUIST: And there's no doubt I tried the clone it after ICPJ, but I never told them why I wanted to do it a certain way, because people get tired of hearing, well, we did it this way. But anyway, so that, for me, that's the one thing that I've done to--
  • [01:18:24.31] NANCY HULTQUIST: We have a couple more things to share from our current actions.
  • [01:18:29.26] JANE PACHECO: Yeah.
  • [01:18:29.47] NANCY HULTQUIST: Are we--
  • [01:18:30.02] JANE PACHECO: Yeah, absolutely.
  • [01:18:32.15] NANCY HULTQUIST: I had fun with this one. We had a town-- Juneteenth, do you know what Juneteenth is?
  • [01:18:45.62] JANE PACHECO: Mm-hmm.
  • [01:18:46.85] NANCY HULTQUIST: Just last week. And our current leader of this got these stamps. Not to be used for bribing politicians, there's three different ones. Not to be used for buying elections. Stamp money out of politics.
  • [01:19:33.26] DON HULTQUIST: And it's legal, surprisingly. It's not defacing. They've hired a lawyer. I And they've pushed it all the way.
  • [01:19:44.91] JANE PACHECO: Just for those folks at home, this stamp is an ink stamp that has been stamped on dollar bills and all denomination bills.
  • [01:19:54.67] NANCY HULTQUIST: At Juneteenth, people came to our table and we were just stamping, stamping, stamping. And we had fun. And one guy had some $20 bills, and he wanted it right across Jackson's face.
  • [01:20:08.03] DON HULTQUIST: We have our limits We did $1 bills only. We compromised.
  • [01:20:16.36] NANCY HULTQUIST: I have this-- we bring the stamps with us, just in case you were interested in stamping any money. And it's legal, apparently. And I had stamped some myself. And they have already been stamped, but I stamped these this morning, because I got some money.
  • [01:20:34.13] DON HULTQUIST: One other thing. You have those stickers.
  • [01:20:36.04] NANCY HULTQUIST: Yeah, you mean this?
  • [01:20:38.35] DON HULTQUIST: Our present leader designed this. And had someone make them for $0.75 a piece.
  • [01:20:50.78] RUSS FULLER: Oh.
  • [01:20:52.09] DON HULTQUIST: Have you seen that?
  • [01:20:53.09] JANE PACHECO: I haven't, no.
  • [01:20:53.99] DON HULTQUIST: They're yours to use, however you want.
  • [01:20:56.72] JANE PACHECO: Fabulous, so they're bumper stickers that say, "Wage peace with Iran."
  • [01:21:02.72] DON HULTQUIST: And if you look at the flags, red, white, and blue, red, white, and green.
  • [01:21:10.96] RUSS FULLER: I think a part of the story that probably will never be told about ICPJ is the number of people that have passed through here, and have been encouraged to speak out, have learned something about how to organize some action, and make it happen. How we care about people in various ways. And I think we'll never know how far that has reached out.
  • [01:21:47.36] But there are a lot of people who have been through here who are someplace else now. And if we could gather all those stories, it'd be kind of exciting to see what they've done with the experience.
  • [01:21:58.76] JANE PACHECO: Absolutely. This organization has touched many, many, many lives over the years. Internally we call that ripples of hope.
  • [01:22:08.50] RUSS FULLER: Yeah.
  • [01:22:10.91] JANE PACHECO: And with that, I would like to end on some hopeful notes. I hope that you would share maybe just some closing thoughts on-- you've been speaking out about it, but how your life has changed, and you hope that this organization moving forward will take the next 50 years on.
  • [01:22:38.75] DON HULTQUIST: Well, sure. I think I've already spoken to it. But when I came to-- we came from Los Angeles before we came to Ann Arbor. And as I was leaving, I was encouraged to go to commencement. It was President Johnson, who had just got us deeper into the war. And I refused to go. I felt good. And I refused.
  • [01:23:11.42] So I got here in 1964, and who was the speaker at the University of Michigan? President Johnson. So I again refused. But that's about what my-- I would talk to our kids about things, but I really did not do any visible protesting or anything. So ICPJ taught me how to do that.
  • [01:23:42.96] JANE PACHECO: And your life has been spent speaking out for justice.
  • [01:23:50.09] NANCY HULTQUIST: We are evolving more and more into global warming issues. We really spend a lot of time on, And we've read lots of books at this point on issues of anti-fracking and global warming issues. So we are-- I'm really, really concerned.
  • [01:24:13.58] We've seen a movie, which is fiction, but we're going to show it in July, in Oberlin, in our community, The Day After Tomorrow. Have you seen that? Ever seen it?
  • [01:24:26.66] JANE PACHECO: The Day After Tomorrow.
  • [01:24:27.50] NANCY HULTQUIST: Yeah, it's all fiction, but it's about six or seven years old. And we were shocked when we first saw it. And now, it looks like you--
  • [01:24:38.15] DON HULTQUIST: The Gulf Stream changed his direction. Well, that's fiction. But it did. It has. And the best part of the movie is the vice president in the movie looks just like Dick Cheney.
  • [01:25:00.57] JANE PACHECO: Any final words, Russ?
  • [01:25:04.82] RUSS FULLER: Well, I would have to say that my life has been changed over the last 50 years in many ways, that I can trace to Barbara and to Interfaith, both. And my hope in this current decade is that I can keep growing, and keep learning, and keep finding a way to, in some way, speak out and make an impression for peace.
  • [01:25:53.16] I have been amazed and I have been so impressed with the way Interfaith has been able to work in each of these 50 years. I'd like a lot more people to have the experience of being a part of it, as I have.
  • [01:26:18.44] DON HULTQUIST: I'd like to add one thing. I mean, Barbara had a huge impact on our life, but also, Russ probably had an even bigger effect. I think I heard a few peace sermons over the 28 years we were in the church. Weren't there a few?
  • [01:26:44.89] NANCY HULTQUIST: [INAUDIBLE] the church-- '67 to--
  • [01:26:52.75] DON HULTQUIST: Many years. There were a few peace sermons, weren't there?
  • [01:26:57.88] RUSS FULLER: Yeah.
  • [01:27:02.19] JANE PACHECO: From my perspective, I can tell you that I've only been with ICPJ for about a year and a half, but being able to come in to an organization with a reputation, five decades worth of a reputation for community building, for coalition building, for peacemaking, for speaking out for peace and justice issues in this community, has been such a blessing. It has been such a privilege to work with an organization that has such a long-standing history on the right side of history.
  • [01:27:43.50] It's not an easy job by any stretch, but that has made it incumbent upon us to push forward, and to gather, and to continue to build and maintain. And I wanted to say thank you to the founders, to Barbara, to Russ, to all of those folks, that put all of those years in, that we acknowledge that, and that we hold it in a very special place. And would hope to just be custodians of the movement and keep pushing it forward.
  • [01:28:22.11] RUSS FULLER: There are countless people you could name to whom we're all indebted for that, you know? And they brought different gifts. I remember Margaret Blood saying, at one point, I brought the ideas of things we ought to do, Barbara made it happen. Well, it takes both. All those people who've come with wonderful ideas and thoughts, that could just lead a way and away for us. And somebody who's got the ability to make it happen.
  • [01:29:06.48] And the people whose gift is sometimes doing just the basic work of getting mailings out, getting word out, tending to a website. That in one sense are not glamorous, but they make the glamor happen. Just there's so many people that we've been blessed to work with.
  • [01:29:38.99] DON HULTQUIST: Could I ask a question? So Vietnam, people were so upset. And the money came in to do things. There are lots of crises, but nothing quite as dramatic as that. How does the money come in to keep the organization going?
  • [01:30:06.16] JANE PACHECO: Well, for many, many years, the ICPJ has been reliant upon individual donors. And our individual donors have been with us for a long, long time. Of course, there's always new folks that are learning about the ICPJ, but we have been very fortunate to have the support of our community, in a large part from the individuals. We are also supported by congregations. But the bulk of the donations come through individuals. Well, thank you all very much.
  • [01:30:58.77] RUSS FULLER: Thank you.
  • [01:30:59.83] NANCY HULTQUIST: The place he got these--
  • [01:31:05.33] DON HULTQUIST: You're talking--