FILM ADVISERS
ACTIVIST ADVISERS
ROBERT P.J. COONEY
Bob was a 20-year-old draft resister in 1971 when he was hired by the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Palo Alto where he learned about organizing and movement building, and especially about nonviolence. During his first trial for refusing induction, the jury was hung when one woman, dressed up to look like a juror, refused to convict. At his second trial, he was found guilty but he continued organizing against the war until it ended. In 1977, he co-edited The Power of the People, an illustrated history of “active nonviolence in the United States” with Helen Michalowski. His studio, Robert Cooney Graphic Design in Point Reyes Station, produced books and publications for over twenty years. In 2005, he published the award-winning book, Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement. Bob has worked on several documentary films including Ken Burns’ Not for Ourselves Alone, Ruth Pollak’s One Woman, One Vote, and Martha Wheelock’s California Women Win the Vote and Forward Into Light.
STEVE LADD - Distribution Consultant
Steve brings over thirty years of experience helping media makers successfully develop, market and distribute social issue documentaries, including Academy and Emmy Award winning programs. After hearing David Harris, Joan Baez and Ira Sandperl speak on the UC Berkeley campus, Steve turned in his draft card (twice) during the Vietnam War but was never prosecuted. He was a leader in organizing a nonviolent anti-war group at UC Berkeley that collected several thousand draft cards. He later served as Field Director for War Resisters League/West in San Francisco. In the early 1980’s, he became a founding member of the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.
ROBERT LEVERING
Robert was a full-time peace activist from 1967 to 1973, helping organize mass demonstrations and nonviolent civil disobedience actions for the New Mobilization Committee to End the War, Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice, the Honeywell Project, A Quaker Action Group and the American Friends Service Committee. He turned in his draft card and refused the induction physical but was not prosecuted. He has written eight books, including best-sellers The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, Everybody’s Business and A Great Place to Work and coauthored Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work for” list for 20 years. He founded Great Place to Work Institute, a global research and consulting firm. Active in his local Quaker meeting, he is also on the board of Peaceworkers, whose mission is to support, strengthen and promote nonviolent movements for peace and justice and nonviolent peacemaking efforts around the world .
BARBARA MYERS
Barbara Myers is an independent journalist whose work has focused on film and articles set in Vietnam, China and Rwanda, including The Other Conspirator, The Secret Origins of the CIA’s Torture Program and the Forgotten Man Who Tried to Expose It. Her anti-war and social justice work ranges from 1970's participation in the Indochina Peace Campaign to recent work mentoring young Rwandans in their quest for higher education.
LEE SWENSON
Lee was fortunate in the late 1950s to find Kepler’s Books with the great Gandhian activist/storyteller Ira Sandperl behind the counter, who influenced him and many others. In the early 1960s, Lee was part of a small circle of friends opposing nuclear fallout shelters and atomic testing in the Pacific, and advocating war tax resistance. He refused the draft in 1960 while learning the history and great possibilities of nonviolent direct action, but was not prosecuted. As the war in Vietnam took its brutal course, opposing and resisting the war became the central focus of his activist work. Lee was involved in the October 1967 Stop The Draft Week nonviolent sit-ins and served time in Santa Rita Prison. He became Director of the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in 1969 in Palo Alto, was editor of the Simple Living newspaper for the American Friends Service Committee, and later became Executive Director of the Farallones Appropriate Technology Institute. For the last 25 years, he has been the Co-Director with Vijaya Nagarajan of the Berkeley-based Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources.
HISTORICAL ADVISERS
STEWART BURNS
Stewart Burns is an activist historian and a leading scholar of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (author of To the Mountaintop) and the Black freedom movement. Following a 1968 workshop at Institute for the Study of Nonviolence (taught by Ira Sandperl) Burns returned his draft card, refused induction, and organized in the Palo Alto Resistance and the Institute. When the war ended he earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, served as an editor of the MLK Papers, taught at Stanford and Williams, and now chairs Ethical & Creative Leadership in the Ph.D. Program at Union Institute & University. He has published ten books, including a history of the Montgomery bus boycott made into the Image Award winning HBO film “Boycott."
MICHAEL STEWART FOLEY
Michael Foley, a native New Englander, is Professor of American Civilization at Université Grenoble Alpes, in France. He is the author of Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War and editor of Dear Dr. Spock: Letters about the Vietnam War to America’s Favorite Baby Doctor, among other books, as well as a prize-winning essay about Johnny Cash and the Vietnam War. He is a founding editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, and has served as historical advisor on the prize-winning film, The Camden 28, and on the celebrated television series, Mad Men.
MELVIN SMALL
Melvin Small is a distinguished professor of history emeritus at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan after receiving his BA from Dartmouth College. Over the past two decades he has concentrated his research and writing on the postwar era, with an emphasis on the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and Presidents Johnson and Nixon. A former president of the Peace History Society, Small has written the award winning Johnson, Nixon and the Doves (1988), Democracy and Diplomacy (1996), The Presidency of Richard Nixon (1999), Antiwarriors (2002), and At the Water's Edge (2005), among other books.
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