Remembering Charlotte Adams' Wednesday vigils against the Vietnam War

In 1965, when I was seven years old, my mom and dad drove a '57 Chevy Bel Air with three kids and all their belongings from Madison, Wisconsin to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sometime that fall, Lyndon Baines Johnson visited the state. My folks left us with a babysitter and went to the Raleigh-Durham airport to protest his arrival.

"Why?" I wondered aloud as they were leaving. Why would anyone protest against the President of the United States?

"Because of the war in Vietnam," my mother said.

"We're at war?" I asked, astonished. "How long has this been going on?"

In the afternoons after school, and on summer days, I liked to ride my bike downtown and around the UNC campus. On Wednesdays, there would be some people standing in front of the post office on Franklin Street to protest the war. They just stood, mostly. I don't remember any chants or signs, at least in the beginning.

"That's Charlotte Adams," my mom would say, admiration in her voice. "She started that vigil."

Over the next few years, I got to meet Charlotte Adams once or twice. She seemed old to me then--a contemporary of my grandparents. I vaguely recall a strong mix of defiance and southern propriety.

The Wednesday afternoon vigil grew as the war grew--from a few lone souls braced against the occasional redneck epithet, to a sizable crowd, and then, in 1969, to a line that stretched all the way up one side of Franklin Street past Sloan's Drugs at the other end of the block, then back down the other side of the street all the way to where Silent Sam, the obligatory statue of a Confederate soldier, stood watch over the entrance to the campus.

Around that time, it became clear we were going to win. We were going to stop the war.

Tonight, as I signed up for a Wednesday vigil to support Cindy Sheehan, I thought of Charlotte Adams, and googled her name. Would anyone remember a brave, defiant lady anti-war activist from the 1960s?

Charlotte Adams died July 28, 2005 at the age of 102 and, as I read tonight, is well remembered in her community.

I'm on the other side of the country now, but I hope some of those who will be standing at Chapel Hill's downtown post office this Wednesday--honoring Cindy Sheehan and demanding that the Iraq war be brought to an end--will take a moment to remember Charlotte Adams, and to take inspiration from her example.