Alice Herz
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Alice Herz (1883 – March 26, 1965) was the first of eight activists in the United States known to have immolated themselves in protest of the escalating Vietnam War, following the example of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức. A longtime peace activist, she attempted suicide on March 16, 1965 in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 82 and died of her wounds ten days later. According to Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge (2006), it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson's address to Congress in support of a Voting Rights Act that led her to believe the moment was propitious to protest the Vietnam War. But despite her death, the war continued for another ten years.
A German of Jewish descent, Herz was a widow who left Germany with her daughter Helga in 1933, saying that she anticipated the arrival of Nazism long before it started. Alice and Helga Herz were living in France when Germany invaded in 1940. After spending time in an internment camp near the Spanish border, Alice and Helga eventually came to the United States in 1942. They settled in Detroit, where Helga became a librarian at the Detroit Public Library and Alice worked for some time as an adjunct instructor of German at Wayne State University. The pair petitioned for, but were denied, U.S. citizenship due to their refusal to vow to defend the nation by arms. Helga Herz later reapplied and was granted citizenship in 1954.
Herz wrote a last testament, which she distributed to several friends and fellow activists before her death. The testament specifically refers to her decision to follow the protest methods of the South Vietnamese monks and nuns, whose acts of self-immolation had received worldwide attention. Confiding to a friend before her death, Herz remarked that she had used all of the accepted protest methods available to activists--including marching, protesting, and writing countless articles and letters--and she wondered what else she could do. Evidently, Herz decided to make self-immolation her final act of protest. Japanese author and philosopher Shingo Shibata established the Alice Herz Peace Fund shortly after her death.
