Homer A. Jack

Homer A. Jack (May 19, 1916 – August 5, 1993) was an American Unitarian Universalist clergyman pacifist and social activist who helped found the Congress of Racial Equality and National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE).

Early life and education

Jack was an only child to active socialist and freethinker parents. His grandparents had immigrated from central and eastern Europe to escape oppression and poverty. Like his parents, the child Jack was a radical nature-worshiper who distrusted organized religion. He met Esther Rhys Williams at Munroe High School, in the early 1930s, and the two married in 1939. The marriage would produce two children and end in divorce in the early 1970s.

Though in 1940 Jack received a Ph.D. in biology from Cornell University, he decided to enter the Unitarian ministry. In 1944, he graduated from Meadville Theological School in Chicago.

Career

While in Chicago, Jack led efforts and rallies to prevent the United States' entry into World War II and fought racial segregation. He was active in the publication of Rochester's No-War News and the Fellowship of Reconciliation and helped organize the anti-war 1942 Chicago sit-in and the anti-segregation Journey of Reconciliation.

From 1942 to 1943, he served as a Unitarian minister in Lawrence, Kansas, where he spoke out against Lawrence's "violently anti-Negro and anti-labor" stance. From 1970 to 1983, he was the secretary general of the World Conference of Religions for Peace in New York. Simultaneously, from 1973 to 1984, he chaired the NGO Committee on Disarmament, Peace and Security at the United Nations Headquarters. He also remarried, to German Quaker Ingeborg Belck.

Published works The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi (editor) (1951) The Gandhi Reader: A Sourcebook of His Life and Writings (editor) (1956) Religion and Peace, Papers from the National Inter-Religious Conference on Peace (editor) (1956) Disarmament Workbook (1978) Disarm - or Die: The Second U.N. Special Session on Disarmament (1983) Mature Spirit: Religion Without Supernatural Hopes (co-authors Vincent Harding and Philip F. Mayer) (1987) World Conference on Religion and Peace (1993)