Norma Becker (1930–2006) was a founder of the

Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee During the mid-1960s, the New York Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee coordinated anti-war parades which involved perhaps hundreds of organizations. Leader Norma Becker was a member of the established War Resisters League. Chairman David ...

, which drew tens of thousands to protest the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...

, and of the Mobilization for Survival coalition. She served as chairperson of the pacifist

War Resisters League The War Resisters League (WRL) is the oldest secular pacifist organization in the United States. History Founded in 1923 by men and women who had opposed World War I, it is a section of the London-based War Resisters' International. It continues ...

from 1977 to 1983. Born in the Bronx in 1930, Becker graduated from

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...

in 1951. She began teaching social studies at a Harlem junior high school and received her master's degree in education from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in 1961. In 1963, as she said later, she was "recruited into the civil rights movement by Sheriff 'Bull' Connor of Birmingham labama" Appalled by media accounts of Connor's use of dogs to subdue civil rights demonstrators, Becker went South to teach in the summer Freedom Schools. Over the next years, she rose to leadership in the burgeoning movement against the war in Vietnam. In 1965, she helped to start the Peace Parade Committee. In 1970 she was on the working committee of War Tax Resistance, a group that was practicing and advocating tax refusal as an anti-war measure."A Call to War Tax Resistance" ''The Cycle'' 14 May 1970, p. 7 In 1977, after the Vietnam War ended, Becker helped create the Mobilization for Survival, which linked the emerging movement against nuclear power to opponents of nuclear weapons and the wider antiwar movement. On June 12, 1982, the "Mobe" drew some 700,000 people to Central Park, in what

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

later described as "a boisterous and festive call for the end of the nuclear arms race."

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