Joan Baez
Alberto Vinicio Baez (Abo) , 2020
30 x 20
in
When it came to nonviolent activists as role models, Joan didn’t have to look any further than her own home. She was a still a teenager when she joined her pacifist father, Albert, in passing out anti-war leaflets outside a movie theater showing “On the Beach,” the classic 1959 movie about the aftermath of a global nuclear war.
“He was a professor at Stanford and invited me to go with him,” she recalls. “It was organized by the American Friends Service Committee, the active branch of the Quakers.”
Born the son of a Methodist minister in Puebla, Mexico, Albert became a Quaker after the family immigrated to the United States. While at Stanford, where he earned his doctorate in physics, he co-invented the X-ray reflection microscope, which is still used to this day for the examination of living cells.
During the Cold War arms race in the 1950s, he turned down lucrative offers to work in the defense industry, devoting himself instead to education, research and humanitarian causes. He served as the first director of science education for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris and later, in retirement, as president of Vivamos Mejor, a nonprofit formed in 1988 to help impoverished villages in Mexico.
“With a role model like that,” Joan says, “it’s no surprise that I fell so naturally into nonviolent activism.”
