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"In Defense of Others, In Defense of Faith: The Camden 28 Trial and the Vietnam War" with Michelle Nickerson

When the FBI arrested twenty-eight people in connection to a break-in at a Camden, New Jersey, draft board in 1971, the Bureau celebrated. The case should have been an easy victory for the department—the perpetrators had been caught red-handed attempting to destroy conscription documents for draftees into the Vietnam War. But the results of the trial surprised everyone, and in the process shook the foundations of American law, politics, and religion.

In Spiritual Criminals, Michelle M. Nickerson shares a complex portrait of the Camden 28, a passionate group of grassroots religious progressives who resisted both their church and their government as they crusaded against the Vietnam War. Founded by priests, nuns, and devout lay Catholics, members of this coalition accepted the risks of felony convictions as the cost of challenging the nation’s military-industrial complex and exposing the illegal counterintelligence operations of the FBI. By peeling away the layers of political history, theological traditions, and the Camden 28’s personal stories, Nickerson reveals an often-unseen spiritual side of the anti-war movement. At the same time, she probes the fractures within the group, detailing important conflicts over ideology, race, sex, and gender that resonate in the church and on the political Left today.

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About Michelle Nickerson

Michelle Nickerson is a Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She teaches courses on the history of women and gender, U.S. politics, social movements, cities and suburbs, and American religion. 

In 2012 she published Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press),which documents the grassroots activism of conservative women in Cold War Los Angeles and explores the impact of that activism on the emerging American right.  She also co-authored a volume of essays called Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region (University of Pennsylvania Press).  Nickerson is currently currently finishing her latest book on the history of religion and politics in the long 1960s called, “Spiritual Radicals:  How the Camden 28 put the Vietnam War on trial, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Follow Dr. Nickerson on Twitter: @MicNick11. For more information about her work, visit michellenickerson.com.

This event was co-sponsored by the Corboy Law Center, School of Law, the Gannon Center for Women in Leadership, the Loyola Chicago Department of History, and the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage.