Biography
Molly Rush is a Pittsburgh peace and social-justice organizer and the founder of the Thomas Merton Center, which has anchored progressive movement work in western Pennsylvania since 1972. A mother of six, she joined the original Plowshares action at the General Electric plant in King of Prussia on September 9, 1980, becoming one of the eight defendants who launched the modern Plowshares movement. She was the only mother and the only person whose primary identity was that of a community organizer rather than a Catholic religious or clergy member. After the King of Prussia conviction she continued decades of organizing through the Merton Center on issues from nuclear disarmament to U.S. military intervention in Central America to police accountability. Her memoir, Molly Rush: Becoming Nonviolent, recounts the action and the movement it began.
On September 9, 1980, eight Catholic peace activists — Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Carl Kabat, Anne Montgomery RSCJ, Molly Rush, Elmer Maas, John Schuchardt, and Dean Hammer — entered the General Electric Re-entry Systems Division plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where Mark 12A nuclear warhead nose cones were manufactured. They hammered on two of the nose cones and poured their own blood on documents, in a literal enactment of the prophet Isaiah's image of beating swords into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4). They were arrested at the scene and went to trial in Norristown the following year. Convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and criminal mischief, they were sentenced in 1981 to terms of 3 to 10 years; the case was on appeal for ten years before they were resentenced in 1990 to time served (just over a year). The action launched the modern Plowshares movement, which has carried out more than 100 symbolic disarmament actions worldwide since.
