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Norman Morrison’s Self-Immolation

Back in the day on November 2nd, 1965, Norman Morrison, a thirty-one year old Quaker set himself on fire outside the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War. Earlier that day, Morrison had been reading an article by a priest about the bombing of a South Vietnamese village. He turned to his wife and asked “What can be done to stop the war?” When the pacifist Quaker was alone with his one year old daughter, he decided to drive from his home in Baltimore to Washington D.C. to carry out the dramatic act. In plain view of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon, Morrison doused himself in kerosene and died in the resulting flames. In her memoir, Norman’s widow Ann Morrison Welsh details her struggle with her husband’s death and how she finally found closure after a 1999 trip to Vietnam introduced her to a people who were deeply touched by his sacrifice.

She writes that the flames that engulfed her husband did not flicker and burn on like “a candle, perhaps, in the darkness – that shows the way that we cannot foresee.”

For Uprising, this is your truth professa’ saying it’s no mystery why they conceal our people’s history