Rice, Megan

RICE, MEGAN (1930-2021). A foremost peace activist in religious circles, Sister Megan Rice, Society of the Holy Child of Jesus, was fearless in her opposition to the making of weapons by the United States and advocated nuclear disarmament.

Megan Gillespie Rice was raised in the Morningside Heights district of New York, daughter of a physician and a homemaker who later got a doctorate in history. Both her parents had been active in the Catholic Worker movement, and Megan followed their path, attending church with them at the famed Corpus Christi chapel on the Columbia campus. Hearing rumors about the creation of atomic weapons, she was stunned to learn of their use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her uncle, among the earliest US soldiers to reach Hiroshima after the Japanese surrender, described the unprecedented horrors to her. She later explained that this event shaped the course of her further life.

Taking her final vows in 1955, at age eighteen, she later gained a master’s degree in cell biology at Boston College before moving to Africa to teach in Ghana and Nigeria. From the 1980s onward, her trips back to the United States were marked by participation in a variety of antiwar actions, mainly at military installations. She was arrested more than thirty times and served several prison sentences for trespassing. By 2005, she had joined the Nevada Desert Experience, a movement created to protest the production of mass murder devices at Vandenberg Air Force Base. In 2011, she was arrested again, at the home of the Air Force drone warfare project. At age eighty-two, she was arrested with other activists for breaching security at the Y-12 Oak Ridge National Security Complex. Waiting trial and appeal, she served two years in prison before being released in May 2015. “I had to do it,” she explained. “My guilt is that I waited 70 years to be able to speak what I knew in my conscience.”

Sargent, Carole. Transform Now Plowshares: Megan Rice, Gregory Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli (forthcoming)