In class: 1. newspaper article referring to burning of a draft card. Note how it concludes with "you can't burn what you hate." Question: so what's the point?
2. continuing with the "On the Rainy River" graphic organizer. Remember that you must have complete sentences. Weave textual evidence, which has been set off with quotation marks, into your response.
Review of strategy: 1. read the questions 2. read the assigned text. 3. reread and find the evidence that supports your response. 4. check for capitalization, spelling, grammar and punctuation. Remember that this is equivalent to two writing grades. Due Thursday at the end of class.
On May 17, 1968, a quiet suburb of Baltimore became the flash point of the movement to end the Vietnam War.
Nine members of the Roman Catholic Church broke into a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Md., and stole hundreds of files containing the draft records of young American men about to be sent to Vietnam. Using homemade napalm, the group — which became known as the "Catonsville Nine" — set the papers on fire.
Later that year, they would be tried and convicted of destroying U.S. property, destroying Selective Service files and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967. But their trial made Catonsville a focal point of anti-war rebellion.
The Catonsville action was organized by the now-deceased Father Philip Berrigan, who earlier that year had joined three other people in pouring their blood on another set of draft files.
Other members of the group included Mary Moylan, George Mische, Tom Melville, Marjorie Melville, John Hogan, David Darst and Tom Lewis. Father Daniel Berrigan — the ninth member — was recruited by his brother, Philip, to take part in the action, which began when they infiltrated the Selective Service offices on Frederick Road.
"We had been briefed as to the location: second-floor office. Two of the women of our group engaged the women in the office in conversation as the rest of us went for the files," Berrigan says.
The activists, however, met with some resistance, and a Selective Service clerk, Mary Murphy, had to be physically restrained.
"We took the A-1 files, which of course were the most endangered of those being shipped off," Berrigan says. "And we got about 150 of those in our arms and went down the staircase to the parking lot. And they burned very smartly, having been doused in this horrible material. And it was all over in 10 or 15 minutes. The police had been summoned, and we were found in a circle around the fire."
Dean Pappas, a longtime political activist from Baltimore, helped the Catonsville Nine make the napalm from soap chips and gasoline.
"For us in the anti-war movement in 1968, the Catonsville Nine action had a tremendous catalytic effect," Pappas says.
He credits the Catonsville affair with dramatically increasing the level of activity and interest among anti-war protesters.
"If somebody had told us a year before that we'd have 3,000 people in the streets of Baltimore marching against the war in Vietnam, we would have been incredulous — 'No, that can't happen.' And it did," Pappas says.
For Stephen Sachs, the U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland who led the prosecution against the activists, justice was served once the convictions were handed down.
"You can't just burn what you hate," Sachs says. "The key to democracy is process."
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