Jim Harney's photos from Iraq often have been used at anti-war demonstrations to illustrate who pays the worst costs of the war
Area peace activists were saddened last month on the December 26 passing of Jim Harney. For WERU Weekend Voices on January 3, Amy Browne assembled the best of Jim's recent talks and interviews into a one-hour program. I do not want any of us to forget this program, so I'm reminding everyone to listen. You go HERE to play or download the program, or go ahead and play it right here:
WERU Weekend Voices 1-3-2009
[Jim] Harney was former Catholic priest, and one of the Milwaukee 14, a group of priests and faith-based peace activists who broke into draft boards and burned about 10,000 Selective Service records with homemade napalm in a protest against the Vietnam War in 1968. They read from the gospel while the records burned. He spent more than a year in jail for his part in that protest.See Jim's writing and more of his remarkable photos at www.posibilidad.org.
In recent years many of us knew Jim Harney through the faces and voices of others that he shared through his photographs and stories. The photographs of people he met in Iraq have adorned pins and posters, putting a real face on war. Jim traveled extensively in Latin America, interviewing and photographing people whose stories might not otherwise be told? the poor, survivors of systemic economic violence, those struggling for change. He accompanied them on their journeys? running with his friends in El Salvador as US bombs rained down on them, sleeping in the mud in the corn fields, crossing the desert with the undocumented.
After learning he had terminal cancer, Harney planned a walk from Boston to Washington DC last summer, to call attention to the plight of the undocumented. He was able to make it as far as Rhode Island.
In December 2008, Jim Harney was given the Sacco & Vanzetti Social Justice Award from Community Church of Boston? an award that over it?s more than 30 year history has also been presented to Howard Zinn, Scott and Helen Nearing, Cesar Chavez and Rachel Corie.
Comments