Valley Friends Meeting

09/02/2026

Did you know Quakers played a role in Gandhi's spiritual journey, and that Gandhi's ideas later influenced Quakers in return?

Gandhi’s interest in religion, which began in his childhood with his devoutly Hindu mother, deepened quickly when he moved to South Africa as a young lawyer in 1893. As part of his religious exploration, Gandhi became friends with a small group of Quakers in Pretoria. Though he rejected Christianity, the Quakers encouraged Gandhi’s study of comparative religion. Learning about Quaker pacifism also reinforced Gandhi’s emerging belief that justice cannot be achieved through violence.

That connection deepened through Gandhi's decades-long friendship with British Quaker Horace Alexander. Gandhi stayed with Alexander at Woodbrooke Quaker study center in Birmingham during his negotiations with England in 1931, where he attended meeting for worship. The experience inspired Gandhi to incorporate silent meditation into the prayers at his ashram, and Alexander remained a trusted friend throughout India's journey to independence.

The influence flowed both ways. Quaker author Richard Gregg helped introduce Gandhi's ideas to the West, in turn inspiring Civil Rights organizer Bayard Rustin, a key advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. Today, there are many humanitarian and peacebuilding organizations that are founded jointly on Quaker and Gandhian principles.

08/16/2026

"A fella ain't got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big soul, the one big soul out there that belongs to everybody," he said.

~~~

What he witnessed he could never forget.

On September 28, 1919, Will Brown, a 40-year-old African American meat-packinghouse worker, was lynched by an angry mob.

An estimated 5,000 to 15,000 (depending on sources) people watched the murder in front of the Omaha Courthouse in Nebraska.

Among the witnesses was a young Henry Fonda, who was left in tears, horrified and enraged.

Fonda was across the courthouse, at his father's print plant. Since he was just a young teen, he was unable to do anything but what he witnessed would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Greetings, everyone, this is Jon. A lot of things on my mind lately, so I wanted to reshare this post from 2020. One of the books I read growing up was John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

The lead character of the book was Tom Joad, who became one of my early heroes, when he said:

"I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where—wherever you look. Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys holler when they're mad an'—I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build—why, I'll be there too."

In the movie, Henry Fonda played Tom Joad.

~~~

Henry Jaynes Fonda, the son of printer William Brace Fonda, was born on May 16, 1905 in Grand Island, Nebraska. The young Fonda was a bashful, short boy who worked part-time in his father's print plant and imagined a possible career as a journalist, according to his biographies.

“Nebraska-born actor Henry Fonda was 14 years old when the lynching happened . . . He watched the riot from the second floor window of his father’s shop,” according to Nebraska Studies.

The incident a young Fonda witnessed was the infamous Omaha Courthouse Lynching of 1919.

The size of the crowd was estimated as between 5,000 and 15,000 people, according to Nebraska Studies.

Other sources state it could have been more than 20,000 people, which would make it one of the largest individual spectacles of racial violence in the nation’s history.

There were also reports that some groups actually had picnics.

Fonda watched in horror as Brown - [sensitive readers may want to skip the next paragraph due to the graphic description]

~~~~~~
- was dragged into the street, lynched, shot, then his body burned and dragged again through the streets, this time from a vehicle, as spectators took turns taking photographs, which, along with pieces of the rope used, were sold for 10 cents each.
~~~~~

The Peace Page won’t go into the more graphic details described in the history journals, but there is information online, which includes photographs, which were used as postcards.

"It was the most horrendous sight I’d ever seen,” said Fonda years later in an interview. “We locked the plant, went downstairs, and drove home in silence. My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope."

“Brown’s guilt or innocence remains unknown. He never had the opportunity to prove what he uttered with his last words: ‘I am innocent,’” according to History Nebraska.

After Brown’s murder and the riot, the grand jury issued 189 indictments,” according to Menard. “Only a few of the arrested were ever prosecuted, mostly on minor charges. Two exceptions were charged for Brown’s murder. They were found not guilty after brief jury deliberation. From atop a burned police car, one of them shouted, ‘We have showed the ni**er what a northern mob can do.”

“Despite the presence of thousands of people, few cooperated with law enforcement; a conspiracy of silence protected the participants,” according to History Nebraska. “Collective guilt prevented individuals from identifying or denouncing fellow rioters. Witnesses without recollections and jurors unwilling to convict were the riot’s progeny. Short-lived voices of condemnation were heard, but mostly a consensus of acceptance of lynching, even approval, was typical in Omaha and other cities.”

Few “people had the conviction or courage to speak up and challenge or to simply be a witness to the inhumanity,” wrote Palma Joy Strand, professor of law at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Fonda would remember what he witnessed for the rest of his life, something that would influence the way he thought.

According to writer Sean Hogan, "Henry Fonda left Omaha and became a movie star, but Will Brown never left Fonda."

This memory would change Fonda forever and influenced the roles he would later take as an actor, reliving some of the moments in his mind and wondering, if he was able, what he might have been able to do.

“During Fonda’s long career, at least two of his best movies — ‘Young Mister Lincoln’ and ‘The Ox Bow Incident’ — featured lynchings as major plot points,” according to Nebraska Studies.

In “Young Mr. Lincoln,” according to Hogan, "The movie features an attempted lynching eerily similar to the lynching Fonda witnessed: A mob tries to break into the jail, so they can lynch two young men. Lincoln blocks the jail’s doorway with his body and threatens the mob . . . There’s real rage in Lincoln’s voice; is Fonda imagining himself standing between Will Brown and the mob that murdered him?"

In the “The Ox-Bow Incident”, Fonda again is only an observer but laments, “Man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurting everybody in the world.”

Hogan concludes in his article, Fonda chose "characters who stood between the innocent and the mob. He chose roles that brought him back to the night of September 28, 1919. Why? Why go back to 'the most horrendous sight' he’d ever seen? Maybe the answer is in the memory: 'It’s not like doing it in the daytime.' Men do things at night that they’d be mighty ashamed to do during the day. Henry Fonda wanted to turn on the light."

Years later, after Fonda was already a star and history had forgotten Will Brown, Fonda finally turned on the light, revealing his painful memory.

A Californian named Chris Hebert saw the interview with Fonda and went out to locate Will Brown’s unmarked grave in the potter’s field of Omaha’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

“I was watching a TV show that was talking about the actor Henry Fonda,” said Hebert. ”It mentioned that his life was greatly affected by a lynching that took place in Omaha, Nebraska, when he was a boy.

Although he had no connection to Brown or Omaha, Hebert contributed to a grave stone, which had the words engraved, “Lest we forget”.

“When I discovered that William Brown was buried in a pauper's grave, I did not want William Brown to be forgotten,” Hebert said. “I wanted him to have a headstone to let people know that it was because of people like him that we enjoy our freedoms today. The lesson learned from his death should be taught to all.”

“I got the headstone thinking that if I could reach just one person, it was well worth the money spent,” he said. “I am a proud American. I am a person of color. An average guy who loves his wife, his family, and his country."

"I wanted to show there's still some decency left."

"We have to acknowledge the past,” said David Bristow, associate director for research and publications at the Nebraska State Historical Society and editor of Nebraska History magazine. “The past influences everything that came after it. The underlying idea that some people have fewer rights than others, that some people aren't worthy of the presumption of innocence, hasn't entirely gone away."

“We must never let ourselves sink again to this level of inhumanity,” wrote Hebert.

“The invitation of LEST WE FORGET is to pay attention to the racial violence – fast and slow – that surrounds us today,” wrote Strand. “To face up. To witness. To name. To engage in the conversation. To recognize the humanity of everyone in our community. To take responsibility for doing whatever we can to stop the violence, dismantle the structures that cause it.”

In one of his most memorable roles, Fonda, as Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", would say:

"A fella ain't got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big soul, the one big soul out there that belongs to everybody."

~ jsr

08/16/2026

08/12/2026

07/06/2026

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

She said, “You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.”

It was a “messy, grassroots riot against abusive, state-sanctioned authority . . . [an event] led by people who were considered criminals by the ruling government but are now revered as patriots,” according to Google.

Reading the quotes above, you might be thinking 1776, a revolutionary moment in history.

According to Google, “This year, as the United States looks back on 250 years of independence with grand military parades and fireworks, a quieter, fiercer anniversary sits right alongside it. June marks the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising—the moment America’s q***r community decided that the promises of 1776 belonged to them, too."

Hi, this Jon. Remembering the Stonewall Uprising, I wanted to bring back excerpts from Doc’s historical piece on what actually happened and one of the individuals who led the uprising, Marsha P. Johnson. [You can read Doc's full account in the Peace Page archives.]

~~~

“Marsha P. Johnson was a woman before her time. Marsha was born Malcolm Michaels in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1945. However, in 1963 Marsha P. Johnson arrived in New York City with one bag of clothing and fifteen dollars to her name and transformed herself into the woman she wanted to become.”

Marsha and her friend, Sylvia Rivera worked out of Greenwich Village, helping gay and transgender youth within the city to find shelter, food, and acceptance.

According to the National Park Service, “Johnson is often credited with throwing the first brick at Stonewall. In reality, she didn’t arrive at Stonewall until about 2 a.m., long after the uprising began . . . When she got to Stonewall, she encountered shouting, fire and chaos . . . Johnson said she wasn’t afraid of being arrested because she’d spent the last 10 years going to jail simply for wearing makeup on 42nd street. She had nothing to lose. While she may not have started the riots, she was a major player in the LGBTQ rights movement and community during the 1960s, 70s and 80s.”

“Marsha P. Johnson could be perceived as the most marginalized of people – black, q***r, gender-nonconforming, poor,” said Susan Stryker, an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona. “You might expect a person in such a position to be fragile, brutalized, beaten down. Instead, Marsha had this joie de vivre, a capacity to find joy in a world of suffering. She channeled it into political action, and did it with a kind of fierceness, grace and whimsy, with a loopy, absurdist reaction to it all.”

The Stonewall Inn had become Marsha’s home away from home. She defended it, and she defended her fellow LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters from an oppressive police force.

~~~

It was June 28, 1969.

It was the day when the New York City Police Department’s official policy of harassing LGBT+ citizens came back to bite them.

The 1960s were not an easy time to live outside the sexual mainstream . . . according to an article found in the New York Times, persecution of gay people and criminalization of their activities were still official policy. Same-sex dancing in public was prohibited. The State Liquor Authority banned bars from serving gay people alcoholic beverages. People could be charged with sexual deviancy for cross-dressing. Police enforcement was often arbitrary, often vicious.

The Uprising, or riot as some call it, began in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when police officers raided the Stonewall for the second time in two nights. As the officers began to arrest people for violating various discriminatory laws, such as the city’s questionable “gender appropriate clothing” law. The patrons, fed up with the harassment, fought back.

Speaking in an interview with CNN near the end of her life, Marsha said, “We had enough police harassment.”

“We were just saying, ‘no more police brutality’ and ‘we had enough of police harassment in the Village and other places,’” she continued.

~~~

[The Stonewall Uprising lasted for six nights in total, starting on Friday, June 27, 1969, and winding down on Wednesday, July 2, 1969.

"Stonewall was the shot heard round the world... crucial because it sounded the rally for the movement,"
according Lillian Faderman, Eminent LGBTQ+ Historian.

While Martha P. Johnson didn't throw the first brick to start the uprising, eyewitnesses confirm that once she arrived, she was a fierce and fearless participant, according to PBS.

Historian David Carter noted that as the nights wore on, she was seen right on the front lines, shouting at police, and was even witnessed climbing a lamppost to drop a heavy bag onto the windshield of a police car.

Her real genius, however, “was recognizing that a six-night street riot is meaningless unless you turn it into a permanent movement.

“While many of the middle-class, cisgender gay activists of the era wanted to tone down the movement to look "respectable" to mainstream America, Marsha and her close friend Sylvia Rivera refused to let the most vulnerable q***r people be left behind.”

Google calls her, the “Architect of Community Care."

“She represents a foundational American ideal: that a revolution isn't just about fighting against an oppressive government; it's about building a community that takes care of its own when the system fails them.

“Marsha P. Johnson is remembered not because she sparked a flame on June 28, 1969, but because she spent the rest of her life keeping the fire of liberation burning for the people who needed it most.”]

~~~

Back to Doc's story:

“Marsha P. Johnson left a legacy. Gay bars are now open to all within New York City and beyond in the United States. The Stonewall Inn is now listed as a National and Historic Landmark for the role it played in the Gay Rights Movement. Marsha P. Johnson’s contributions to the LGBTQ community have been considered invaluable. She lives today as a hero in the minds of Qu**rs everywhere.

“She was the ultimate survivor,” said Elle Hearns, a human rights activist who created an institute bearing Marsha’s name. “I don’t think Marsha has left anything behind besides the permission for us all to be free.”

As she said, “You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.”

~