Biography
Joe Gump was a Chicago-area Catholic peace activist who—alongside his family—participated in civil-rights work and later became deeply engaged in anti-nuclear organizing through the Plowshares movement. His public activism is often described as a late-life intensification of earlier commitments to faith-based justice and nonviolence.
His best-known arrest stemmed from a direct-action anti-nuclear protest on August 5, 1987, when he and Jerry Ebner entered a missile silo site near Butler, Missouri, poured blood in the shape of a cross, and sabotaged elements of the site’s electrical and alarm systems as a symbolic act of “disarmament.” They were arrested, convicted, and Gump received a 30-month federal prison sentence. He remained identified with the movement’s broader effort to treat nuclear weapons as a moral emergency rather than a normal instrument of state policy.
