Biography
Juanita Morrow Nelson was a journalist who met Wally Nelson in 1948 while interviewing him in jail as a journalist; began their lifelong relationship and joint war tax resistance practice that year. In 1959 she became one of only six people imprisoned for war tax resistance in the U.S. between WWII and the Vietnam War. Arrested as the "Elkton Three" for restaurant desegregation in Maryland, she was a long-running NWTRCC presence and co-builder of the off-grid Deerfield homestead. She continued speaking publicly into her 90s.
Dorothy Day’s July–August 1975 On Pilgrimage column places Juanita and Wally Nelson at the June Peacemakers sessions at Tivoli, discussing war-tax refusal and nonviolent action. Day recalls their earlier practical support for Koinonia in Georgia during racist attacks. The column documents community and peace activity without another exact arrest or release date. Source: https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/e47d99685e4e417d411cf7ee99fd06d6cfad4111.pdf#page=2
Nelson’s first-person account dates her bathrobe arrest to June 16, 1959 and reports that contempt charges were later dropped. It separately recalls nine actual days in Cincinnati jail over desegregation. Those nine days are a documented subtotal from that earlier stay, not a complete custody history. Her account.
The 2015 obituary collection identifies Wally Nelson as Juanita Morrow Nelson’s lifelong partner. The reproduced Boston Globe obituary explicitly corrects its earlier descriptions of them as spouses: friends said the couple never married. The collection also recalls that she met Wally while reporting on segregated jail conditions during his conscientious-objector prosecution and identifies her as a co-founder of Peacemakers in 1948.
