Career
Houser joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the 1940s and worked with it until the 1950s. It sponsored education and activities related to civil rights for African Americans and the end of segregation.
In 1942 with fellow staffer James Farmer, and activist Bernice Fisher, he co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago and served as its first executive secretary. The co-founders, Farmer, Rustin and Houser, were influenced by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's ideas on nonviolent civil disobedience and decided to apply the same methods in their work for civil rights. In 1946 Houser, along with Dave Dellinger, Igal Roodenko, Lew Hill, and others, helped found the radical pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Revolution. In 1947, after the Supreme Court's finding (in Morgan v. Commonwealth) that segregation in interstate travel was unconstitutional, Houser helped organize the Journey of Reconciliation, a plan to send eight white and eight black men on a journey through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky to test the ruling. The protest brought a great deal of press attention to CORE and to the issue of segregation in interstate travel. In February 1948 George Houser received the Thomas Jefferson Award for his work to bring an end to interstate segregation.
In 1948, Houser was the secretary of the Resist Conscription Committee. He described the RCC as a temporary group of pacifists, whose purpose was to gather names of people who were willing to resist conscription. The group circulated a statement which read, in part:
Conscription fails to prevent war, foments further warlike preparation by our opponents, and denies fundamental freedoms of the individual necessary to democracy. This violates our deepest convictions that no person should be forcibly coerced into adopting a military way of life. We believe human beings are fit for something better, something nobler than slavery and training in the mass extermination of their fellows.
In 1949, Houser moved to Skyview Acres, an intentional community in Pomona, New York, and in 2010 he moved to California, where he still lives today.
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