Honor Resisters Who Have Been Imprisoned or Prosecuted
A campaign can recognize and honor resisters who have been imprisoned for the cause—singling them out for respect. In this way the campaign inverts and subverts the government-promoted convention that makes jailbirds objects of shame.
Example Women’s Tax Resistance League
The Women’s Tax Resistance League made a point of honoring those who had done time for the movement. An American woman who visited her counterparts across the ocean observed:
It was a queer sensation in those days to look upon sweet and ladylike young women… and to know that they had actually been prisoners. It was not long before they were looked upon as something sacred, as those who had made special sacrifices for the cause, and they wore badges to show that they had been prisoners and in every place were given the post of honor until their numbers mounted up to the hundreds.
Example Beidenfleth Farmers
I mentioned earlier the case of farmers in Beidenfleth who eagerly tried to get themselves indicted for tax resistance (see Take Other Forms of Mass Action in Response to Arrests: Beidenfleth Farmers). Those who succeeded were honored:
The Beidenfleth Heifer Case developed into a regular popular festival. Maidenly hands strung garlands about the necks of those enviable peasants who had achieved the honour of receiving a writ.
Notes and Citations
- Colby, Clara Bewick “Suffragists and English Relief” Washington Herald 18 October 1914, p. 7
- von Salomon, Ernst Fragebogen (English translation, Doubleday, 1955), p. 134