Colman McCarthy, Journalist Who Waged Peace in the Classroom, Dies at 87
For decades, he wrote a syndicated column in The Washington Post promoting nonviolence. That became the subject of a course he taught for nearly 40 years.
Colman McCarthy, a pacifist who wrote a crusading column in The Washington Post for nearly three decades and taught nonviolence to high school and college students, urging them to oppose war, capital punishment and the consumption of meat, and to hand out carrots on Halloween, died on Feb. 27 in La Romana, a city in the Dominican Republic. He was 87.
His death, at his son John’s home, where he had been living, was caused by complications of pneumonia.
Mr. McCarthy’s topics in his column and in the classroom were lofty: peace, poverty, capital punishment, animal rights and, as he put it, the “war-preparation economy.” He was opposed to all violence — no exceptions. He would not stand for even “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which he considered a battle hymn about bombing people.
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