Biography
DeCourcy Squire was a Quaker civil-rights and antiwar activist who after being arrested at a Vietnam War protest for sitting in front of a police van, refused to participate in court proceedings. Angered by this the judge found her guilty on the initial disorderly conduct charge and sentenced to her to the maximum of 30 days plus an additional nine months in jail for contempt of court. In jail she began a hunger strike that lasted 62 days until she was released by an emergency vote of the parole board. She was later arrested with seven others who broke into a government building to destroy draft records and locate documents exposing the FBI's illegal surveillance against activists. Her and the group were convicted and sentenced to twenty to thirty months which she served at the Alderson Federal Womens Reformatory in West Virginia. She later became a physical therapist and a lifelong war-tax resister and anti-hunger organizer.
The contemporary Friends Journal report states that Squire and Suzanne Williams refused bail as a middle-class privilege and remained jailed throughout the Rochester trial. Its February 1971 account places Squire at the federal women's institution in Alderson, West Virginia. It does not establish when that custody began or when she was released.
Original document 1234, PDF page 20; Original document 1234, PDF page 23.
Friends Journal’s November 15, 1971 prisoner report listed Squire as released after completing the sentence for destroying Selective Service records.
