Lifelong activist still hoping country can find its way back

Barbara Hoffman began protesting in the sixties during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era.

She’s been protesting ever since.

That’s six decades of channeling outrage and disappointment into signs and chants and, yes, even into being arrested. In all seasons and in all weather. All of it with the intent of trying to help coax America into turning away from its darkest instincts and toward living up to its lofty ideals.

Instead, sixty years later, the country, in the eyes of more than half of its citizens, is heading in the opposite direction. 

If the fact that the battle for our country’s soul is fiercer than ever had Hoffman exhausted or in despair, she probably wouldn’t have been out in the thirty-degree wind chills on Saturday, once again pointing her sign at passing cars on College Avenue during the latest No Kings Rally in Appleton protesting the Trump administration.

She keeps going, she says, because of the urgency of the moment and because she’s decided not to worry about outcomes. And because, after so many years of speaking out against America’s missteps and outright malfeasance, she can’t not show up during what she sees as unprecedented assaults on our democracy and illegal wars abroad.

“It's always been kind of a gut-level feeling for me of where I want to be,” Hoffman, 79, says. “I never necessarily think about whether or not they're effective. I do it because it feels right and I do not want to be silent in the face of something that's very wrong.” 

Not a born warrior

She wasn’t raised that way, she says. Growing up in small towns in North Dakota and Minnesota in a conservative family, political activism wasn’t exactly instilled in her. College in St. Cloud, Minnesota changed all that when she met fellow students involved with the Wesley Foundation, a campus-based Methodist group for students. It didn’t hurt that the minister at St. Cloud was a loud and proud social justice advocate.

“He was very progressive, and he didn't care about traditional religion so much as getting us students organized to be involved in the justice issues of the day,” Hoffman says. 

But it was also personal. Hoffman’s boyfriend, who would later become her husband, was facing the draft and had registered as a conscientious objector to the local draft board.

“It was highly unlikely that it would have been given to him in a very conservative area in St. Cloud,” she says. “And so we did consider moving to Canada. We wouldn't have known how to do it or where to go or anything, but I think because of our connection to the Wesley Foundation and the Methodist Church, he was granted the status.” 

The protests continued when she moved with her husband to Chicago so she could attend graduate school. There, they became involved with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an interfaith pacifist organization dedicated to non-violent social change. This was about the time of the Kent State murders by the National Guard, so Hoffman became involved in student walkouts and other protests. She says that, while she has rarely felt threatened or unsafe in all her years of protesting, Chicago came the closest.

“We did a lot of training on how to react if we were confronted face to face with counterprotesters or some of the police or the soldiers, so we were prepared for all of that,” she says. “Yeah, probably the scariest was in Chicago. The police would tell you that you needed to move back, but they were a ways away, and I wouldn't move until they came close, because they had all their equipment on and they were coming right at me.”

Arrested in Georgia

The only gap in Hoffman’s protesting timeline came when she opened her own business in the late seventies. She says she became more active again starting in the late eighties and early nineties during the leadup to the first Gulf War. By then, she and her husband were in Neenah and had started their own chapter of Fellowship of Reconciliation. She also became a member of a new group forming at the time, The Fox Valley Peace Coalition.

In the nineties came protests against American action in Central America. Though much of the shift then had gone from Cold War matters to the War on Drugs and democratization, the U.S. Army School of Americas was discovered to have provided torture manuals which had led to human rights abuses in Guatemala and El Salvador. 

“Those were really powerful protests,” Hoffman recalls of the large gathering at The School of Americas base in Georgia. “Thousands of people standing there, holding crosses and being silent when they began naming victims. And it was incredibly powerful.”

Hoffman was arrested along with a hundred others at that protest for trespassing on the base without permission.

“We were taken to a big field that the army used to process us one at a time,” she says. “It took several hours, and then they let us go in the evening, but we received what's called a ‘ban-and-bar letter’ that says, if you get caught doing this again, you will face prison time. We have you on record; we have your fingerprints; we have your identification. And there were many people who did go back and they got six months (of prison time).”

A visit to Iraq

When the forever wars of Iraq and Afghanistan began in the early 2000s, Hoffman’s activism ratcheted up. The war in Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban government came barely a month following the 911 attacks in 2001 and the War in Iraq just a couple of years later. Hoffman joined a group of a dozen other protesters for a peace action in Iraq a year before the Bush administration launched its so-called ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign there. The trip was sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness, which had been taking delegations to Iraq for several years to protest U.S. sanctions.

“This was a 50-mile walk from the Jordan border and went part way into a little town called Rupa,” she remembers. “And from there we took a bus, and the rest of the 50 miles was in the more urban area between Fallujah and Ramadi, and then finally, in Baghdad. And we also spent a little time in Basra to see the effects of the Gulf War and now they were being threatened again. It was less than a year later that the actual invasion took place.”

While she was in Iraq she was interviewed by Iraqi television. She apologized to the people for U.S. leadership and their imminent plans to go to war.

“I told them, the country itself is mostly good people,” she says. “And that was a motivation for me to go on the trip in the first place, to have an opportunity to tell the people there that most Americans did not support what was going to be happening to their country. The leaders were bound and determined to invade. But we were going to try to stop it. We had 10 months to do it, to try to stop that train that had probably already left the station.”

Even before that, though (just three days after 911, in fact) Hoffman had joined a couple of other life-long area activists in anticipating – and then forming a response to – what they felt certain would be the U.S. reaction to 911. That action – a protest at Houdini Plaza – began a monthly event that has now gone on for a quarter century in Appleton.

“Ronna Swift, who was the leader of the (Fox Valley Peace Coalition), and I and the other members of the local chapter met in my kitchen, and we basically said, ‘Well, what are we going to do here?’” Hoffman says. “We're going to have to figure out how we're going to respond to this and make an outlet for people who are against the invasion of Afghanistan. Because it's going to come fast. And so we got a protest together for the following week, and then we did it weekly and some of them were in conjunction with other groups, like some of the Oshkosh peace groups.”

Though it began as a weekly event, that proved too much and now they have held a protest at Houdini on the first Saturday of every month for 25 years.

“It's a general peace vigil,” Hoffman says. “Just trying to tell people, you don't have to do this military thing our country does. There are better ways.”

Taking hope from the rallies

Hoffman says she would love it if the country would find the right path forward. She says the only period she can remember in the past sixty years when the United States came close to finding its moral bearings was during the Obama years. But even then, she’s quick to point out, Obama authorized an ethically dubious drone campaign and was responsible for plenty of immigrant deportations. 

But until then, protesting serves purposes both external and internal. She says she takes plenty of energy and heart from seeing like-minded people making the effort to exercise their civic and moral duty. 

“Being a part of big groups where other people are doing it, and seeing older people, for example, that have trouble walking or in wheelchairs out there with me at a No Kings protest, who really had to go to some effort, yeah, it really inspires me,” she says. “It makes me feel like there is hope. I've always felt like most people are really good, kind people. 

“It's just the leadership. The power does something to these people. Having leadership power in a big, powerful country like the United States makes them all forget how to be kind and decent.”

Which isn’t to say she isn’t occasionally overcome with a sense of outrage over it all, especially, she says, when she witnesses what she considers the erosion of democratic values and the inhumane treatment of immigrants. 

“I have to be able to function so I kind of hold some of those emotions at bay,” she says. “So that I don’t fall apart in despair. Because I think that’s also part of their plan.” 

‘You have to rebuild a culture …’

She says it feels more difficult now with the emergence of Donald Trump and the new brand of politics he has ushered in. She cites, in particular, how disinformation has become a weapon that makes it harder to break through to other people, which, after all, she says, is one of the purposes of protest in the first place. That makes it more important than ever, she says, to avoid worrying about outcomes and merely focus on using her voice.

“It’s more the need to simply speak out and let it go where it's going to go,” she says. “But I need to say something. I need to stand up for what I think is right, and if the outcome isn't what I want it to be, well, I'll just continue doing it anyway.

Hoffman says she understands our country has always been imperfect. Her sign on Saturday was of an image of the Statue of Liberty and it proclaimed the virtues of our founding principles: liberty, justice and democracy. She calls the United States a great experiment at the time of its inception but she notes that even then, while Thomas Jefferson was penning those lofty words in the Declaration of Independence, he was a slaveholder.

“I’m patriotic in that I care very much about my country,” she says. “It is a beautiful country. I treasure the land and all the good people. It’s a mess now but it’s worth trying to fight for.

“I definitely think we can bring it back together. It may not happen in my lifetime, is my sadness. Because I think it's going to take a long time to rebuild, because you have to rebuild more than just who is getting elected. You have to rebuild a culture, because there's some things that are really pretty disturbing about our general culture these days. So it's going to take some time to make that kind of a change, but I am optimistic that it will happen.” 

Lifelong activist still hoping country can find its way back © 2026 by Kelly Fenton is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0