The alumni newsletter of Antioch College Fall 2004
The alumni newsletter of Antioch College Fall 2004
Meet recent graduate Barbara Bick ’04. She entered Antioch in 1945 and now, almost 60 years later, has received her diploma. She is a peace activist, feminist, and writer who was suspended from the College in 1947 for leaking government documents to the press while on co-op and returned to Antioch nearly 6 decades later to complete her degree. Her senior project documents her experience in Afghanistan, where she was doing humanitarian work when the September 11 attacks on the US occurred.
Although she wasn’t physically present at her commencement ceremony, Joan Straumanis ’57 shared the story of Bick’s suspension and ultimate return to Antioch in her address to the Class of 2004. The story goes something like this. Bick’s third co-op job was in Washington DC, at the Office of the Alien Property Custodian. In the beginning of WWII, Germany held many properties within the US. The Alien Property Custodian was charged with seizing and disposing of these enemy holdings. One of these German corporations was I.G. Farben, which produced the murderous gas used in Nazi extermination camps. The top managers of Farben had become naturalized US citizens, a common practice among German executives. Bick’s boss, a fellow Antiochian, had discovered that the Custodian was returning Farben’s assets to its Nazi managers, who were now considered American citizens. Outraged, Bick’s manager, Joanne, confided that she was leaking this story to I.F. Stone. When a personal crisis prevented Joanne from delivering documentation to Stone, she asked Bick to serve as her courier.
Bick accepted the task, took the documentation home with her, and told her parents what she had agreed to do. The consensus was that leaking the documents and exposing the Custodian was the right course of action. Bick’s father drove her to Stone’s house and accompanied her inside to deliver the information.
The story hit PM shortly after and the FBI began an investigation to determine who had leaked the documents. Although very frightened, Bick made it through the interrogation, finished her co-op and returned to Antioch. She studied another term and left for her next co-op in San Francisco. Then, she received a letter from Antioch’s administration, asking her to return to campus for a meeting regarding the Washington co-op.
At the meeting, Bick told the truth about what had happened, and was shocked when the College suspended her. Fearing prosecution for her actions and wanting no further publicity, Bick left Antioch quietly. Her life went on. She never returned to school.
After leaving Antioch, Bick continued on her activist path. She was a founding member of Women Strike for Peace, a network of women who promote nuclear disarmament, civil rights and peace. She later was an associate at the Institute for Policy Studies where she continued to work for multiculturalism, women’s rights and peace. This work lead to her involvement as co-founder of the Public Resource Center and co-founder and co-director of the Conference for Alternative State & Local Public Policies, both based in DC. In the mid-eighties, Bick became the founding president of Friends of St. Elizabeths.
More recently, Bick has been deeply involved in support of the women of Afghanistan. She first visited Afghanistan during the Afghan-Soviet conflict on the invitation of the Women’s Union of Afghanistan. “I had just turned 65 and thought I might not have many more opportunities like this. Of course, I had no idea what the situation there was. I learned about it and decided to go on the adventure.” Her interest deepened after her initial trip, and when the Taliban rose to power she became involved with NEGAR, a group advocating for the rights of Afghan women. On August 28, 2001, Bick returned to Afghanistan with a NEGAR delegation visit areas controlled by the Northern Alliance.
Bick toured villages and refugee camps, where she found that the women were living in extreme poverty, but with more freedom than those living under the rule of the Taliban. She met with Northern Alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani and his wife, urging Rabbani to include a declaration of women’s rights in any future Afghan constitution he may support. The delegation also persuaded Rabbani’s wife to walk down the streets without a burka as an example to other women.
While in Afghanistan, Bick stayed in Khoja Bahauddin, at a Northern alliance outpost accessible only by helicopter from Tajikistan. “We were the only women and only Americans.” Also staying in the outpost were two Al Quada operatives posing as Arabic journalists, and the Northern Alliance general Ahman Shah Massoud.
On September 9, Massoud finally agreed to meet with the two men who had been waiting weeks to “interview” him. During the meeting one man detonated an explosive hidden in his belt, instantly killing himself and Bick’s friend, Mohammed Asim Suhail, who threw himself in front of Massoud to protect him. The second man succeeded in killing Massoud and himself using a bomb hidden in his camera. When Bick returned from errands outside the compound, she saw smoke and immediately knew something was wrong.
In the aftermath of the attack, Bick became desperate to leave. It was four days before she was able to escape from the country, still unaware of the losses suffered in New York and Washington. On September 13 she learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon while at a hotel in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. A week later she made it home.
After returning to the US, Bick began work on a political memoir about her experiences in Afghanistan. After meeting Joan Straumanis, Bick decided to return to Antioch. She stayed on campus for a month, participating in Ann Filemyr, Associate Professor of Journalism/Communications and Environmental Studies, intensive memoir class. “I wanted to see if I was really going to be serious about the memoir. The timing was just right.”
Bick describes her experience much like a writer’s retreat. She stayed in the President’s house, took her meals in the caf and strolled through Yellow Springs. “I basically just read and wrote and did class work.” Although the solitude helped her focus on her writing, Bick liked meeting more people in Yellow Springs, particularly retired faculty. After leaving Antioch, Bick went to the relative seclusion of her cottage in Martha’s Vineyard to complete her manuscript. “It’s the way writing should be done, to get away and keep the ordinary business of life to a minimum.” She hopes to have it completed this fall and begin to look for an agent.
You might catch a glimpse of Bick on the big screen, where she appears briefly in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 confronting a Taliban leader. “When the Taliban first came to power, they sent a representative to DC to try and get the US government to support them. He was invited to speak at a very elite club of retired ambassadors and high policymakers. People wanted to come in to accuse and ask questions, but it was a closed meeting. I was allowed in as a board member of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, so I tucked a burka into my briefcase and when it was time to ask questions I pulled it out and tried to put it on and ask him about the treatment of women in his country.”
Last December, Bick returned to Afghanistan for the third time. While there, NEGAR’s petition for women’s rights went before the Loyajirga to be considered for inclusion in the new constitution. She also visited Massoud’s grave. She still keeps in touch with the friends she made in Afghanistan, and is still working hard to share their story with the rest of the world. 