Peter Kellman

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Peter Kellman (born 1946 in Brooklyn, New York) is a lifelong trade union activist who participated in the Civil rights and Anti-war movements of the 1960s, the anti-nuclear/safe-energy, environmental movements of the 1970/80s and is currently part of the New Agriculture Movement of the twenty-first century. He has lived most of his life in Maine. His mother brought him to his first picket line in a baby carriage at a bank where workers were striking management for not recognizing their union. It was the bank Kellman’s Grandfather used, but not that day.

His parents and their friends were the radical activists of their day: communists, socialist and trade unionist. At the dinner table and family get togethers they talked the politics of a just and sane world. The Kellman family moved to Salem, NH in 1952 where he attended grade school and then on to Sanford, Maine in 1959 where he went to High School. In 1963 he attended the University of Maine where he played football and dropped out after finishing his freshman year. In the Fall of 1964 he worked for Helen and Scott Nearing on their homestead in Harbourside, Maine. In early 1965 he went to work for the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) in Voluntown, Connecticut where he participated in and organized demonstrations against the Vietnam War. When the US started bombing North Vietnam, CNVA sent Kellman to Washington, DC to organize demonstrations against the bombing.

Shortly after returning from DC, CNVA sent Kellman to represent them on the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. On the March, Kellman directed a crew of 50 seminarians to set up the tent sites for the marchers. He stayed in Selma after the March and helped build a Free Library. Later in 1965 Kellman volunteered with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Alabama to help organize independent political parties out of which the call for Black Power came. Kellman worked in Sumter County, Alabama on that project.

Returning North after his work for SNCC, Kellman helped organize the anti-draft movement and the Assembly of Unrepresented People in Washington, DC which was the first mass arrest demonstration against the Vietnam War. In 1967, Kellman went into exile in Canada and was arrested for violation of the Selective Service Act on his return to the United States in 1973. Charges against him were later dropped by the Federal Attorney prosecuting Kellman’s case.