The Eighty-Year Experience Of A Grass Roots Citizen

Chester Graham’s life does not easily lend itself to a thumbnail sketch. Born in 1892 on a Pennsylvania family farm, Graham witnessed the first automobiles and plowed the land with a team of horses. He left home and worked an assortment of jobs to put himself through Oberlin College, including rail-riding itinerant farmhand, laundry-service provider, caretaker, and boarding-house chaplain.

During world war one (Chester insisted on using the lower case), he served in Italy in the Ambulance Service, along with his Oberlin classmate and friend Robert Hutchins, later an influential president of the University of Chicago. The experience cemented his commitment to pacifism and subsequent identification as a Quaker.

Accompanied by his family, Graham directed a Danish-influenced folk school in Michigan, pastored a community church, and was the radio voice of the North Dakota Farmers Union. He was dedicated to economic justice, civil rights, and the cooperative movement, and he worked with well-known contemporaries such as Walter Reuther and Norman Thomas on labor issues. Influenced by Martin Luther King Jr., Graham helped train volunteers in non-violent direct action for the 1961 Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and participated in Freedom Movement activities in Montgomery, Alabama. A committed engaged citizen, he lobbied legislators on issues of human dignity and human rights.

Following his retirement at age 70, he was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, where he met singer/songwriter and activist Holly Near, who included him in her song “Oh America”, from the Indochina Peace Campaign pre-election tour (Hang in There, Redwood Records, 1973; used by permission):

   I sang my song of protest to the war that we wage
   I met a man named Chester, over 80 was his age
   He introduced Tom Hayden and he welcomed George and Jane
   He said he’d spoken out against the war
   Over the radio back in 1954.

Chester Arthur Graham died in 1988.