“The New Beachhead Is in Secondary Education”: Campaigns Against Junior ROTC in Baltimore

Abstract

Peace historians have long neglected the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), a high school military training program that celebrated its centennial in 2016. This article thus fills a gap in the literature on resistance to militarism by investigating a series of anti‐JROTC campaigns in the city of Baltimore, beginning in 1979. Drawing from archives, oral histories, and the mainstream and activist press, this article argues that activists ultimately failed to prevent the JROTC from being established there because their antimilitarist, ideological messages did not connect with pragmatically minded school board members. The article also demonstrates that a poor economy and a changing public mood created challenges for those who wanted to demilitarize public schools. Although the JROTC ultimately established a beachhead in Baltimore, the struggles of these activists—led by Frances Donelan of the American Friends Service Committee—were an important phase in the history of the post‐Vietnam peace movement.