Background on Frances Crowe
Randy Kehler, Frances Crowe, and Bill Strickland at a dinner in honor of Margaret Holt, 1985
A founder of the Western Massachusetts branch of the American Friends Service Committee and the Traprock Peace Center, Frances Crowe was a legendary peace activist in the Pioneer Valley or Massachusetts, whose influence extended nationally. An ardent pacifist, she was at the center of resistance to war, nuclear weaponry and nuclear power, U.S. imperialism, and an array of other social justice causes for over half a century.
Born in Carthage, Missouri, in March 1919, Crowe took part in a peace friendship club as a young girl and her convictions only grew after witnessing of a public hanging of a Black prisoner at a local jail. As a young woman, she studied at Syracuse University and Columbia, working in a defense plant during the Second World War, but after learning of the devastation resulting the bombings in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, her commitment to pacifism solidified. Recently married to Thomas Crowe, a radiologist completing his military service in Panama, Crowe immediately began educating herself on pacifism and non-violence.
Frances and Thomas Crowe moved to Northampton in 1951 to enroll their son in the Clarke School for the Deaf. Becoming connected with the Quakers, she began to spend increasing time as a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, War Resisters League, and SANE organizing against war, nuclear weaponry, and nuclear testing. During the Vietnam War, she attended a training session sponsored by the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and formed the Northampton Draft Information Center in the basement of her home -- a center for much of her organizing and activism -- counseling thousands in resisting military service. In 1968, she also founded the Western Massachusetts Branch of the American Friends Service Committee, running it for many years out her office in her basement.
Crowe's first arrest (among many) came after an International Women's Day protest in 1972 at the Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Mass., working with a group she helped to found, Women Against the War. Her commitments and record of arrests only accelerated from there. She was a key founder of the Traprock Peace Center in Deerfield, Mass., and several other local and regional peace organizations, and she was a key organizer for the Nuclear Freeze campaign, the antinuclear movement more generally, opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America, and other causes. Known for keeping a weekly anti-war vigil in front of the courthouse in Northampton, she be became a war tax resister after the first Iraq War, unable to conscience supporting the U.S. military any longer. An activist to the very end, she died on Aug. 27, 2019, at the age of 100.
