Joan Baez |
November 6, 1981
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Joan Baez
American folksinger, guitarist and songwriter; Founder, Institute for the Study of Nonviolence; Founder and President, Humanitas International Human Rights Committee
Club Introduction
Welcome to this regular Friday meeting of The Commonwealth Club of California. Our guest speaker today, while renowned as a singer and a musician, has devoted much of her adult life to the philosophy of nonviolent activism. A confirmed pacifist, reared in a Quaker home, she was prominent in the Antiwar and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s. And during that decade, she co-founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.
She is currently president of Humanitas International Human Rights Committee, an organization she established in 1979. The staff and members of the Humanitas are, in our speaker's words, nonviolent in belief, nature and practice, and are fighting for the basic rights of individuals regardless of ideology; for the rights to life, justice, religious belief, and free expression; for the right to refuse to kill.
Over the past five years, our speaker has undertaken fact-finding missions to a number of foreign areas, including Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. After a trip to Southeast Asia in 1979, she launched a campaign in cooperation with the San Francisco Examiner and KRON-TV to raise one million dollars in emergency relief aid for destitute Vietnamese and Cambodians. That campaign reached its goal in less than two months.
In June of this year, she traveled on a five-week six-nation tour of Latin America to view firsthand the human rights situation throughout that region and to show support for the growing movement of nonviolent activism in Latin America. Upon returning, she summed up her trip with, "Repression is alive and thriving in Latin America." Please join me in welcoming our guest speaker today, whose topic is entitled, "Human Rights in the 80s: Seeing Through Both Eyes." Joan Baez.
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