Frances Crowe, 100, an activist for peace who resisted U.S. going to war
In 1945, when she was at home in New Orleans ironing a place mat, Frances Crowe was alarmed to hear on the radio that in its efforts to end World War II, the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb instantly vaporized tens of thousands of people and ultimately killed as many as 135,000.
She immediately unplugged her iron and went looking for a gathering spot or peace center, to find likeminded people with whom she could share her distress. Unsuccessful, she went into a used-book store, where she searched for material on nonviolence. The bookstore owner suggested Tolstoy.
“So I started reading a collection of Tolstoy’s essays on war and violence,” she recalled years later, “and, you know, that kind of set my direction.”
She was 26 at the time. For the next three-quarters of a century, she would dedicate herself to trying to make the world a more peaceful place.
Crowe died Tuesday at her home in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was 100.
Her daughter, Caltha Crowe, said Frances Crowe had taken to her bed several days ago, a highly unusual development for this energetic centenarian. She said her mother stopped eating and drinking and said, “This body is no longer livable.”
For decades, Crowe was a fixture in the peace movement and in multiple causes for social justice that swirled around Northampton, the college town where she raised her family.
Crowe was an instinctive pacifist for almost all her life. Her professional activism began in 1968, when she started counseling young men facing the draft during the Vietnam War about becoming conscientious objectors. Fifty years later, she was arrested for protesting the expansion of a natural gas pipeline through a state forest in western Massachusetts. She was 98 and in a wheelchair.
“Somebody just told me that at my age, the way to be happy was to play cards all day, and I said, ‘Hogwash!’” she said in November. “People my age can afford to take risks, to be arrested. After you’ve raised your family, now is the time for us, the elders, to act.”
A tiny, sprightly woman with a thick mop of white hair, a pleasant smile and a polite manner that belied her determination, Crowe was arrested so often that she lost track.
“Not enough,” she said when asked how many times she had been booked. “But probably around 100.”
Her list of causes kept growing. She embraced actions against apartheid in South Africa and against the B-1 bomber. She made financial contributions to a cancer clinic in Iraq. She fought for a sustainable environment and rigorously sought to reduce her carbon footprint, eating locally grown food, avoiding buying items that were overly packaged and leaving her car in the driveway, except to take bottles to the recycling center.
In her later years she wrote a memoir, “Finding My Radical Soul” (2014), and protested the nation’s war efforts by refusing to pay federal income taxes. She put her house and other assets in a trust. The government then docked 15% of her Social Security check each month.
She gave a third of her tax savings to international peace organizations, a third to American peace organizations and a third to the Northampton public schools.
As she looked forward to her 100th birthday, she told The Times: “I don’t want a party. I want an action that will accomplish something.”
On the day she turned 100 — March 15, 2019 — hundreds of well-wishers swarmed into downtown Northampton. She led a celebratory march in her wheelchair; marchers carried signs supporting the Green New Deal and calling for an end to gun violence and war.
“I see so many young people,” she said, “which gives me great hope.”
During World War II, she worked in the personnel department of Bell Labs in Manhattan. Her future husband, who had earned his medical degree and was training to be a radiologist, joined the Army. At one point he was stationed in the Panama Canal Zone, so she moved to New Orleans to facilitate their visits. They were married there.
“I supported World War II,” she told The Times. “It was Hiroshima and the bombing of Dresden that helped me reach the decision that war was not the answer.”