Juanita Nelson
 Juanita Nelson has devoted her life to activism in the areas of social justice, passivism, non-violence and peace. Over seven decades she has led by example, challenging racial discrimination and US government support of war as a response to perceived national and international threats.
Nelson challenged Jim Crow on a train ride from her native Cleveland to Georgia at the age of 16. As a student at Howard University, she teamed up with friends including Pauli Murray and Maida Springer and was arrested sitting in at a lunch counter in 1943, seventeen years before the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins.
A founding member of the Cleveland Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, (CORE), Nelson met her life-time partner, Wally Nelson, when she interviewed him in jail in 1948 where he was serving time as a conscientious objector.
What followed were decades of non-violent direct action as the two of them supported, maintained and organized efforts to build a war resisters movement in Georgia, New Mexico and ultimately Deerfield, Massachusetts, helping form the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters. Nelson has focused on the area of income-reduction for effective war tax resistance, insisting that our entire economic life is tied to violence. Until a fall suffered this winter, she continued to live in the house she and Wally Nelson built with salvaged materials and without electricity or plumbing, growing the majority of her food while practicing self-sufficiency as social action.
Nelson is a founding member of the farmers market and Valley Community Land Trust. She created an annual Free Harvest Dinner on the town green, now in its eighth year, which feeds more than 700 people while encouraging local food consumption. She implemented the Week of Winter Fare, which promotes winter farmers markets and the preservation of fresh local food for winter consumption.
Nelson is a member of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, a coalition of local, regional and national groups supportive of war tax resistance. She is active in its Speaker’s Bureau and a sought-after commentator on issues around pacifism, social action, and war tax resistance.
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