https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/17/obituaries/megan-rice-dead.html
Sister Megan Rice, Fierce Critic of U.S. Nuclear Arsenal, Dies
at 91
Arrested
more than 40 times, she was best known for her role in the 2012 break-in at the
Oak Ridge nuclear complex in Tennessee.
Sister
Megan Rice in 2012. She served two years in prison for breaking into a uranium
storage site. “Please have no leniency on me,” she told the judge at her trial.
“To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest honor you
could give me.” Credit...Shawn Poynter for The New York Times
By Clay Risen
Oct. 17, 2021, 3:20 p.m. ET
Sister Megan
Rice, a Roman Catholic nun who was arrested more than 40 times for protesting
America’s military industrial complex, most spectacularly for breaking into one
of the world’s largest uranium storage sites, died on Oct. 10 at the residence
of her religious order in Rosemont, Pa. She was 91.
Her order,
the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, said in a statement that the cause was
congestive heart failure.
Sister Rice
was a leading figure among antiwar activists, especially the cohort of nuns and
priests who saw protesting nuclear weapons as part of their religious calling.
She was
already 82 when, in 2012, she and two other antinuclear activists, Greg
Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli, hiked through the night over a steep ridge to
the outskirts of the Y-12 National Security Complex in
Oak Ridge, Tenn.
They used
bolt cutters to get through three rings of barbed wire and approached the
complex’s newest storage building, a windowless white-concrete hulk that had
been billed as the “Fort Knox of uranium.”
They
splashed blood against the walls and spray-painted slogans like, “The fruit of
justice is peace” and “Woe to an empire of blood.” They lit candles and read an
“indictment” against the American nuclear arsenal.
They were
surprised at how lax the security was. Several of the cameras that should have
captured their approach were broken or turned off, and it took almost half an
hour before a single guard approached them. When he did, they broke a loaf of
bread and offered him a piece. He refused.
The three
activists were arrested and charged with trespassing and “destruction and
depredation” of government property. When they refused to plead guilty,
prosecutors added a charge of sabotage, carrying up to 20 years in prison.
“Please have
no leniency on me,” Sister Rice said during the trial. “To remain in prison for
the rest of my life would be the greatest honor you could give me.”
They served
just two years and were released after an appeals court vacated the sabotage
convictions — though Sister Rice said she would have gladly stayed in prison
longer.
“It would be
an honor,” she told a reporter for The New
York Times soon after her release in 2015. “Good Lord, what
would be better than to die in prison for the antinuclear cause?”
The episode
at the nuclear complex was just one of many efforts by Sister Rice to take on
the American military, a career that led to some 40 arrests — even she lost
count — going back to the 1980s. And it was the capstone to a life steeped in
progressive Catholicism.
Sister
Rice left a jail in Maryville, Tenn., in 2012 after she was released on her own
recognizance. Michael Walli, left, was arrested with her for breaking into a
uranium storage site. Credit...Adam Brimer/Knoxville News Sentinel,
via Associated Press
Megan
Gillespie Rice, who pronounced her first name MEE-gan, was born on Jan. 31,
1930, in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, to a family deeply
involved in the Catholic progressive movement. Her father, Frederick Rice, was
an obstetrician-gynecologist, and her mother, Madeleine Newman Hooke Rice, was
a homemaker who later received a doctorate in history from Columbia.
Both of her
parents were active in the Catholic worker movement and were close friends with
its founder, Dorothy Day, who
Sister Rice remembered visiting her family’s home in Morningside Heights.
Morningside
Heights, home to Columbia University and venerable religious institutions like
Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary, was fertile ground for Sister
Rice’s religious awakening. Father George Barry Ford, a leader in New York’s
civil rights movement, preached at Corpus Christi Church on Columbia’s campus,
where her family worshiped, and ran her elementary school.
During World
War II, Sister Rice heard rumors about another side of her community: the
professors from Columbia who were working on a top-secret government project.
Its nature was revealed on Aug. 6, 1945, when the Americans dropped an atomic
bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and dropped another on Nagasaki three days later.
She recalled
her mother thanking God for the attack; it meant that her uncle, who was to be
part of the invasion of Japan, would now be spared. He went anyway, in the
first wave of soldiers to reach Hiroshima after Japan surrendered, and he told
her about the horrors he had encountered.
Megan joined
the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in 1947 and took her final vows in 1955.
She studied biology at Villanova University, and received a master's degree in
cellular biology from Boston College. She then moved to Africa, where she
taught in elementary and secondary schools in Nigeria and Ghana.
She leaves
no immediate survivors.
Starting in
the 1980s, she made frequent trips to the United States, often to participate
in antiwar actions.
Sister Rice
left Africa for good in 2003. Two years later she moved to Nevada, where she
joined an antiwar organization called the Nevada Desert Experience. She was arrested in 2009
during a protest against a missile test at Vandenberg Air Force Base (now
Vandenberg Space Force Base) in California, and in 2011 for trespassing on
Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, home to the country’s drone warfare program.
She traveled
to Tacoma, Wash., in 2011 to observe the trial of several antiwar activists,
including Sister Anne Montgomery,
an 84-year-old nun, for trespassing on a nuclear submarine base. The trial
inspired Sister Rice to plan a similar action of her own.
The protest
at Y-12, a year later, made Sister Rice an international celebrity, and she
used the spotlight to bring renewed attention to America’s efforts to modernize
its nuclear arsenal.
“Sister
Megan’s only regret about Y-12 was that she didn’t do something like that
earlier,” said Carole Sargent, the author of the forthcoming book “Transform
Now Plowshares: Megan Rice, Gregory Boertje-Obed, and Michael Walli.”
The complex
shut down for two weeks, and Sister Rice’s incursion spawned Congressional
hearings, where representatives thanked her for calling attention to the site’s
poor security.
“That young
lady there brought a Holy Bible,” said Representative Joe Barton, Republican of
Texas. “If she had been a terrorist, the Lord only knows what would have
happened.”
It was not
the response Sister Rice was hoping for, but it didn’t stop her. After her
release, she continued her antiwar activism, joining regular demonstrations
outside the White House and the Pentagon.
Spending on
nuclear weapons, she said in a 2019 interview is
“one of the root causes of, say, poverty in the United States, and therefore of
crime.
“It’s a root
cause of many other issues because so much money is going into them.”
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment