Peacemaking Lineage
These sadly defunct pioneering organizations offered healing and rescues for oppressed women and LGBTQ+ individuals in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Caribbean. These grassroots groups were some of the first rescue-healing organizations of their kind ae. they were run by people who were not connected to wealth and power. They were rooted in peer counseling and ingenious action plans (like shuttling vulnerable people out of the country on tourist cruise ships--things that could no longer be done after 9/11). These groups became casualties of the AIDS crisis (which took the lives of our leaders and workers) and the severe challenges in funding anything that concerns vulnerable poor people-of-color and LGBTQ people.
- Lee Donald Stern (1915-1992), a Quaker leader in the Alternatives to Violence Project;
- Ruth Revels (1936-2016), a Lumbee Elder with whom I studied restorative justice practices through talk circles;
- Amos N. Wilson (1940-1995), with whom I studied trauma-informed care;
- Llaila Afrika (1946-2020), with whom I studied peace-centered African holistic health;
- Dr. Joseph "Joe" Morton (1935-2016) who introduced me to the academic study of peace and conflict;
- Maechi Chandra Khonnokyoong (1909-2000) and Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu (1906-1993), my foremost Buddhist teachers; and
- The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (1910-1985) with whom I studied as a child at the Beauvoir School one summer and who became a lifelong friend.
All of these people of diverse religious and non-religious belief systems (Buddhist, Baptist, Quaker, Episcopal, Jewish, Agnostic, and Atheist) helped shape my lifelong vision for peacemaking.
Subsequently, in addition to my present nonprofit work, across the last 30-plus years, I did the following work in peacemaking and anti-war advocacy:
- I was a youth fellow in a joint program sponsored by the United States Institute for Peace and the District of Columbia Arts Center.
- I was one of five Program Managers for an anti-violence initiative in Philadelphia called Children’s Behavioral Health Interventions.
- I was a Mindful Movement Instructor II at the Kennedy Krieger Institute where I helped ensure the fidelity of mindfulness for a research study at a public school.
- I was the Director of Operations for Baltimore's Inner Harbor Project where I wrote the organization's anti-violence mediation handbook and helped train youth how to apply the work of the handbook within workshops for Baltimore City's law enforcement officers and business leaders in Baltimore's downtown district.
- I led peacemaking peer support groups and writing workshops at the Lorton Correctional Complex in Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C.; at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (MCIW); at the Ohio Reformatory for Women; and at other incarceration facilities.
- I designed and led restorative justice, mindfulness, and life science programs for violence prevention at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, the 29th Street Community Center, the Chick Webb Center, Penn North Kids Safe Zone, and many other community centers, and recreation centers.
Internationally, I co-founded three pioneering international anti-violence NGOs and co-led rescue and healing operations in active war zones or in postwar, conflict-laden areas:
1. Genders Within International Rescue League;
2. The Innerground Railroad Project; and
3. Rak Kun Kham Phes Project (รักคนข้ามเพศ/Rạk khn k̄ĥām pheṣ̄).
These sadly defunct pioneering organizations offered healing and rescues for oppressed women and LGBTQ+ individuals in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Caribbean. These grassroots groups were some of the first rescue-healing organizations of their kind after the mid-20th century Civil Rights movement. They were founded and run by people who were not connected to wealth and power. They were rooted in peer counseling, mutual aid, and ingenious action plans (like shuttling Black lesbian village women in West African accused of being witches--without exaggeration--out of the country on tourist cruise ships--things that could no longer be done after 9/11). These groups became casualties of the AIDS crisis (which took the lives of our leaders and workers) and the severe challenges in funding anything that concerns vulnerable poor people-of-color and LGBTQ people.
I am a longtime mediator with extensive experience in conflict resolution. There are many terms and approaches for working through conflicts outside of (or adjacent to) the criminal justice system and the courts (like mediation, negotiation, arbitration, dispute resolution, conflict management, conflict transformation, and transformative justice). I have lived through, studied, and often applied many of these shifting concepts and practices in my work since the late 1980s.
I earned a certificate from the Center for Conflict Resolution in Chicago. For many years, I was a member of the Conflict Resolution Education Network/National Institute for Dispute Resolution, and a member of the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution.
Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray
LIFE-LONG INVESTIGATIONS
Themes
My purpose in life is to live compassionately and contemplatively for peace, nonviolence, healing, justice, and creative freedom.
For all of my life—even during my childhood—I have been interested in three humanistic and humanitarian main themes:
- How healing and peacemaking restores our minds, bodies, and spirits in the wake of trauma and violence;
- How community organizing, community healing, and community education uplift collective wellness in a way that enhances the good of the human species as a whole despite and because of our cultural differences; and
- How people on the social, economic, and political margins of societies--especially children and youth--survive and thrive despite fluctuating power and powerlessness.
Everything I do are vehicles to uplift people and work through these themes.
Research
In addition to an interdisciplinary BA in English, Peace Studies, Philosophy and Religion, and Theater Arts from Goucher College, I hold an MA in science writing and poetry from Johns Hopkins University; and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, Education, and Dance (with a specialization in mindful movement) from the Ohio State University.
At OSU, under Dr. Maletic's direction, I was the first person in the world to notate and analyze two movement forms: (1) The 52 Blocks/52 Blows, an African American martial arts form, and (2) Voguing, an African American and Latina/o LGBTQ dance tradition. In my movement documentation and analysis, I used Labanotation, Motif Description, and Effort-Shape Analysis to document how the dancing embodied different ideas of community and personhood.
Under Dr. Gerbes' direction, I wrote a thesis on the humanist idea of community in the choreography of Doris Humphrey for which I received the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars. I also researched improvisation in African American vernacular dancing and created an evening-length showcase of structured improvisations featuring multiple Black social dance traditions from the Lindy Hop to BBoy/BGirl.
I specialize in using data-driven ethnography and community participatory fieldwork to uplift community health and wellness.
As with my formative study with Baba Chuck Davis, my health studies, STEM, and artistic endeavors have often intersected. I have always integrated science and healing with the arts.
I am now actively writing and researching how to survive and thrive through violence.
A Longtime Disability Rights and Anti-Violence Advocate
I am a lifelong disability rights, anti-violence, and anti-war advocate. These vocations arise from my firsthand experiences.
Diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum and hyperlexic as an infant, I first began reading newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, and full-length books at the age of 2½ and writing poems and diary entries (which I called "Letters to God") at the age of 3.
At 4, my mother took my writings away from me, fearing that they revealed the considerable violence (burning, beatings, sexual assault, and verbal harassment by multiple family members) to which I was subjected during my infancy and toddler years.
At 5, my mother, effectively, sold me to a known predator, child sex trafficker, actor, director, and theatrical agent named Kenneth Warren Daugherty, a man who was never brought to justice for his many crimes against children.
For two years off and on, from the ages of 5 to 7, Mr. Daugherty drove me to "auditions" in various states on the East coast and in Los Angeles and Las Vegas where I was raped with other children as well as filmed and photographed being harmed by men like Raymond St. Jacques, Matthias Herrmann, and Thomas N. Trager.
To my knowledge, none of these men (and others whose names I still do not know and the fewer women who co-committed and enabled their crimes) has ever been held to account for their crimes against children. Each man whose name I say here spent considerable time and effort trying to silence me (especially in the 1980s and early 1990s) when I spoke out about their crimes.
After entering foster facilities again at around 8 years old, I was twice brutally gang-raped at the final foster facility to which I was interned, sustaining body-altering, lifelong injuries. I was attacked so severely because I refused to shut up about the atrocities committed against me and other children.
Now even into my older years, I refuse to be silent. My voice is the greatest antidote to the poison of their power. Predators and annihilators crave total power. For them there is no greater power than victims' and survivors' complete silence and painful disappearance.
Their next greatest power is their total control over marginalized and vulnerable people. They live and breathe to control because their deepest illness is that they are, in fact, incredibly out-of-control.
Predators' third greatest aim is dehumanization. That is why predators so often do more than physical and verbal harm. They lust for emotional torture: debasement and humiliation. Jokes, insults, bullying, and torture go hand in hand with their other crimes.
My mother was correct: I have been speaking out in multiple platforms against violence since my toddler years--in writing, as a community organizer, and as a public speaker.
I sharpened my anti-war advocacy in my international nonprofit work in West Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and China.