Ira Sandperl

• Comment: There seems to be enough here in the references to document the article DGG ( talk ) 22:43, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

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Ira Sandperl (March 11, 1923 – April 13, 2013) was an American anti-war activist and educator. He influenced students and heroes of the anti-war, civil rights, and peace movements, including Martin Luther King Jr., David Harris, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Daniel Ellsberg, Thomas Merton, and Joan Baez with whom he formed the Institute for the Study of Non-violence. The organization had an influence on the civil-rights and peace movements through the 1970s.

Early life

Sandperl was born in St. Louis, Missouri where he was raised and lived until university. He attended Stanford University but dropped out after his attempts to join the armed forces in the ambulance corps was denied because of a childhood bout with polio. As a student there he tried to generate sympathy among the faculty for the Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. He left to Mexico returning after World War II to Palo Alto where he taught meditation and Sunday school classes at the Palo Alto Friend's Church, lectured at Stanford, and worked at Kepler's bookstore.

Social and political involvement

In his life Sandperl worked with leaders of the Free Speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War peace movement and organizations of similar interests. In the bay area he was a fixture at Kepler's, a bookstore that became a center of counterculture, drawing the youth and students of nearby universities to listen to his ideas of non-violence and fascinations with Mahatma Gandhi.

At a quaker meeting in Palo Alto in 1959 Sandperl met Joan Baez when she was a senior in high school. Through their interests in various philosophies and political causes they developed a friendship and in 1965 founded together the Institute for the Study of Non-violence in Carmel Valley, California with Sandperl running the general operations and funding coming from Baez. The school invited a small number of students each year (in order of applications received) to learn the principles of nonviolence, partake in readings, meditation, and discussion. Some local residents of Carmel were frustrated by the image that the school represented and fought the school from continuing operations. The episode is recounted in Joan Didion's essay "Where the Kissing Never Stops" first published in 1966 under the title "Just Folks at a School for Non-Violence" in The New York Times Magazine. and reprinted in her Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

In 1966, Sandperl accompanied Baez to Grenada, Mississippi to join in a campaign to help desegregate local schools with Martin Luther King Jr. King visited them two years later in Santa Rita prison, where the two served 45 day sentences for sitting in at the Oakland, California draft induction center, saying that he made the visit "because they helped me so much in the South". King also famously sent members of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to study with Ira on the subjects of organizing and non-violent tactics.

The nationally famous catholic monk and non-violent activist, Thomas Merton, met with Sandperl and Baez in December 1966 at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky where he lived. Their discussions strongly influenced Merton and his changing philosophy of activism despite being a monk and he wrote about them in his journals and his book New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton also kept up with Mr. Sandperl through correspondence during his travels through Asia from 1966 through 1967 considering Sandperl an authority on Ghandi's teachings of non-violence.