Mary Morello

Mary Morello (born 1924) is an American activist who in 1987 founded the anti-censorship group Parents For Rock And Rap.^[1] She is sometimes referred to as Tipper Gore's nemesis^[2] in the 1980s battle over music censorship.

Biography

Mary was born in 1924 in Marseilles, Illinois. In 1954 she earned a masters degree in African and Latin American history from Chicago's Loyola University. She spent the rest of the decade teaching English in Germany, Spain and Japan, circling the globe on a freighter.^[3]

From 1960 to 1963, she lived in Kenya, where she married her husband Ngethe Njoroge,^[4] a Kenyan revolutionary who later was the first Kenyan delegate to the United Nations. He was a guerrilla in the Mau Mau uprising (1950–1960) that arguably led to Kenya's independence from British rule.^[5]

In the 1960s she was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and NAACP. She is also a long time activist for the Chicago Urban League. In 1964 she and her husband moved to Harlem, New York,^[6] where she gave birth to son Tom Morello.

After her divorce when Tom was one year old,^[5] she and her son moved to Libertyville, Illinois, a small suburb north of Chicago in 1965. She took a job at Libertyville High School teaching social studies and US history.^[3] In 1987, she quit her teaching job after 22 years, and founded Parents For Rock And Rap^[1] an anticensorship counterweight to Tipper Gore's PMRC.

She made three trips to the Soviet Union, through Siberia and Mongolia.

In 1991, she and many others battled against legislation being proposed in Congress titled Pornography Victims Compensation Act, numbered S. 983, or, later, S. 1521. The legislation was not enacted, because of grass-roots anti-censorship activism. On June 24, 1996 she received the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award^[7] in Arts and Entertainment for her work with Parents For Rock And Rap.

In the fall of 1991, she began a volunteer teaching job at the Salvation Army^[8] Rehabilitation Center in Waukegan, Illinois, where she taught adult literacy. She has also been involved in the Cuba Coalition in Chicago, which works toward lifting the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

In a Rage Against the Machine concert in 1994, she introduced them as the "Best Band in the Fucking Universe". For the Rage Against The Machine reunion, she did this memorable appearance once again, on August, 24th 2007.

She is also known for her involvement in the 1999 debate on the incarceration of death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted (some believe wrongly) of the 1982 shooting of a Philadelphia police officer. In an editorial she said:

"When a cop is shot someone must be found guilty. As my son Tom says, "...all rational thinking goes out the window." A cop being killed is no different than any other person being killed. They choose their profession."^[9]

In 2007 she had a podcast together with Cindy Sheehan called The Mary Morello and Cindy Sheehan Show.^[10]

References