Resistance

    “Marie Equi was the most interesting woman that ever lived in this state, certainly the most fascinating, colorful, and flamboyant,” Oregon contemporary of Marie Equi

Labeled as “a stormy petrel of the Pacific Northwest” and “a whiskey-loving firebrand,” Dr. Marie Diana Equi (1872-1952) was clubbed by police as she went to the aid of a pregnant cannery worker on strike, physically assaulted by a mob when protesting America’s push into World War I, and imprisoned in San Quentin two years after the Armistice for supposedly having violated the 1918 Sedition Act. The daughter of Italian and Irish immigrants who grew up in the mill town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Marie dropped out of school at a young age to work in a textile factory. She eventually received schooling in Italy and was able to secure a medical license and open a practice in Portland, Oregon.  She mainly ministered to the poor but also performed abortions for rich women to support her work, which included dispensing birth control information at a time when that was illegal. A lifelong lesbian, she and lover Harriet Frances Speckart raised a daughter Mary. An avowed socialist, suffragette, and free thinker, Marie engaged in an affair with Margaret Sanger and lived for ten years with radical labor activist and feminist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the so-called “Rebel Girl” of Joe Hill’s Wobbly anthem.  In 2019 Marie Equi’s contributions were recognized at the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk.  Some 113 years before, Marie was among the medical corps volunteers who treated victims of the Golden City’s devastating earthquake.

I first learned about the remarkable Marie Equi from a book Cory Hagelberg lent me, “Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition” by Jeff Biggers, the author of several volumes about the Appalachian labor wars. A legacy as old as the nation’s birth, resistance has taken many forms: fights against British oppression, slavery, Indian removal, the exploitation of workers; and on behalf of free speech, environmentalism, and civil rights for women, minority groups, and the poor. Author Biggers (below) described himself as “the grandson of a black lung-afflicted coal miner in southern Illinois who lost his family’s ancestral homestead and farm to strip-mining.” In 1984, at age 21 Biggers was a cellmate of Reverend William Sloane Coffin after both were arrested in Washington, DC, for protesting apartheid in South Africa at that government’s embassy. “Resistance” contains colorful quotes by activists Mary “Mother” Jones (“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”) and Fannie Lou Hamer (“If I fall, I will fall five-feet-four forward in the fight for freedom”), as well as this banner seen during the January 2017 Women’s March: “A Woman’s Place Is in the Resistance.”  A 2015 biography by Michael Helquist is subtitled “Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions.”

Corey Hagelberg (below) came to know Jeff Biggers when the author was an artist in residence at Corey’s duneland cottage in Miller. During that time he worked on the script for a dramatic production, “Ecopolis Southshore,” about the potential to transform Gary into a veritable urban utopia through the development of community gardens. It was performed at the Community Progressive Church, located in the shadow of the abandoned Gary Emerson School, whose pastor, Curtis Whittaker, was involving the community in efforts to reclaim the land for sustainable use. Biggers has recently written a play with similar themes that will be performed at Indiana University Northwest and other locations in connection with an ambitious project in the works known as the Midtown Resilience Tour.  “Ecopolis Southshore” contained these lines, uttered in the church production by Walter Jones and Sam Love:

    Walter: The Region gave us so much, has so much to offer. It reminds us that hope dies last, that hope resists.  Tough, resilient, steely.  You wind up being people who make things work, because that’s all you’ve got.

    Sam: Sure, we’re polluted, poisoned, and there’s nowhere to run. But this is my home. We want to do the immediate planting of tiny acorns, rather than blathering beneath a decaying tree about all the good things that could be done.  Just do it.