Activist an icon in war-addicted world
Publication date: May 2, 2008
Tom Pahl Lewis, a Catholic artist, was sketching a civil rights protest in 1964 at a segregated amusement park in Baltimore when he noticed the crowd around him becoming hostile toward the demonstrators. Concerned his silence would signal consent, he picked up a sign that read “Jim Crow stops here” and stood with those calling for desegregation.
That moment would set him on a path that combined art, social criticism and protest that would last until his death April 4 at his home in Worcester, Mass. Lewis, 68, died of a heart attack.
Convinced that war was incompatible with Christianity,
Lewis became deeply involved in antiwar activities beginning in the 1960s. He participated in an iconic event for the Catholic antiwar movement when he joined Philip and Daniel Berrigan and six others who burned draft files at a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Md.The group became known as the Catonsville 9, and their protest inspired hundreds of draft board actions across the nation in opposition to the Vietnam War. The Catonsville action was “the best piece of performance art since the cleansing of the Temple,” said Melkite Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, homilist at Lewis’ funeral.
Born in Uniontown, Pa., Lewis grew up in postwar suburbia. He attended Catholic high schools where he played football, developed a passion for art, enlisted in the National Guard and by his own description emerged “a very conservative person.” But that conservatism was tempered by his growing awareness of costly truths involving war and peace. The list of issues that commanded his attention included the civil rights movement, the nuclear arms race and war in Iraq. He was arrested numerous times for nonviolent civil disobedience and spent more than four years in prison for his acts of conscience, three of them for his role at Catonsville.
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