A few days after the crisis ended, Wilma and I, together with Mary Allen, a professor from the womens college of Tulane, founded an organization that we called the New Orleans Council for Peaceful Alternatives. We met alternately at Dillard and at Tulane. Mary, who was close to retirement, was a pacifist and had been a member of the American Socialist party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas since her student days. Colleagues of hers from Tulane joined us, as well as a group of leftist students, two women from an Orthodox Jewish congregation, a number of Quakers and Philip Berrigan, a Catholic priest, who together with his brother Daniel became the driving force of the Catholic peace movement in the midsixties. However, the New Orleans Council, although it was by no means Communist, was rejected by other Catholics who had worked with us in the civil rights movement but were vehement anti-Communists and supported the Cold War. We organized several demonstrations against nuclear weapons that proceeded peace-fully, although counter-demonstrators tried to provoke us. Unfortunately, few blacks participated. They felt that the peace movement did not have anything to do with the struggle for racial equality. When a few years later King took a stand against the Vietnam War, many blacks were critical of him. For many people our group was also probably too academic. Ben Smith, one of the two civil rights lawyers who worked with the Council, had been jailed in the course of his activism, talked about war crimes and the Nuremberg trials, and Stephen Ambrose, who later was a leading American military historian, spoke about nuclear war.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 106