Righteous anger

‘Righteous Anger’, based on interviews, press cuttings and Juley’s contemporary diaries, gives an insight into the motivation and morality of one anti-nuclear protester over a decade of non-violent direct action against Cruise missiles. It also offers much more besides. Juley Howard, a serious and sincere sixth former who intended to study Religion and Politics at university, first visited Greenham Common in 1983 and nine months later went there to live. Juley completed her A-levels while living in the Women’s Peace Camp with its daily brutal evictions and all the difficulties entailed, and remained a regular churchgoer. Later she went to university to study Theology while breaking the law almost every weekend. Juley felt a moral imperative to stop nuclear war and was prepared to die in the process if necessary. She describes the lives and actions of women at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and recounts in detail the court appearances and prison experiences of herself as a young woman. While living at Greenham, Juley used to travel within the UK and abroad to talk about nuclear weapons and the Peace Movement and ended up at what was virtually a conference for terrorists in Libya, addressed by Colonel Gaddafi. Juley’s hunger for justice and thirst for knowledge also led her to travel mainly on her own, in war-torn Central America and in First Nation northern Canada. She visited feminist Women’s Lands in the USA and met Native Americans fighting for land rights. She was also one of three British women who made their way through miles of desert to the US Nevada nuclear test site, arriving at Ground Zero to stop the countdown of the second to last British test only seven minutes from detonation. Juley’s anti-nuclear convictions led her to support the Western Shoshone Native American people, who were exploited and dispossessed by US Government mining and nuclear testing on their native lands. In order to raise awareness of the plight of the Western Shoshone, Juley and fifteen other women who had been at Greenham broke into the grounds of Buckingham Palace in 1993 in the hope of persuading the Queen to stop nuclear tests on Western Shoshone land. Juley’s story is inspiring and an important first-hand account of one woman’s struggle to live with her conscience.