JOAN BAEZ

Submitted by Rita Salner

Joan Baez is the daughter of Albert Baez and Joan Bridge Baez. Her father, who died in 2007, was a physicist who co-invented the x-ray microscope and is the author of one of the most widely used physics textbooks in the U.S. His refusal to work on the “Manhattan Project”, as well as to work on defense industry jobs had a profound effect on Joan.

Albert Baez’s work took him and his family to many parts of the world, including Baghdad, Iraq. The poverty and the abuse of humans and animals moved ten year old Joan, and the memories stayed with her. Later, the family lived in Palo Alto, Ca. where her father was a professor at Stanford, University. With her Mexican last name, and her dark coloring, Joan was subjected to racial slurs and discrimination. One of her teachers, pacifist Ira Sandperl, became a friend and long-time mentor.

In 1956 Joan heard young Martin Luther King, Jr. speak about non-violence, civil right and social change. She later linked arms with him to protect African American schoolchildren in Grenada, Mississippi, joined him on his march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama and at his March on Washington, where she sang, “We Shall Overcome”. She was also active in the Free Speech Movement, and in California’s migrant farm workers fight for fair wages and safe working conditions.

Joan Baez became highly vocal about her disagreement with the Vietnam War. She and Ira Sandperl founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in 1965 and she encouraged draft resistance at her concerts. In Dec. of 1972, she joined a peace delegation in a trip to North Vietnam to address human rights and to deliver mail
to American POW’s. While she was there she experienced the ‘Christmas bombing’ of Hanoi, which lasted for eleven days. Her album, “Where Are You Now, My Son” included recordings she made from an underground bomb shelter. She was extremely disturbed by the human rights violations that she observed and later paid for a full page advertisement, published in four major U.S. newspapers, criticizing the communist regime.

Baez has also been prominent in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. She has performed in benefit concerts since 1978 to help defeat discriminatory laws and to support gay, lesbian and transgender causes.

A strong supporter of President Obama, Baez continues to oppose the war in Iraq, the death penalty, and to support community farms and other methods of overcoming poverty.