From time in the jailhouse to class in the schoolhouse

It was Mar 22, 1969. Sister Joann and five priests, an ex-nun, an ex-priest and another sympathizer or two broke into the Dow Chemical Plant and, in Sister Joann's words, "trashed it." It was no random act of destruction—it was an anti-war protest, and the participants were quickly arrested.

The woman-of-God was charged with five federal felonies and sentenced to four years in prison. Thirty-six years later, she's changed her title from Sister Joann to Ms. Malone and shifted her attention from the government to its future officers, educating students in a peace studies class at Blair. And the ex-con-turned-teacher is not a rarity in MCPS or even in Blair, whose own principal was once behind bars.

Taking one for the team

Principal Phillip Gainous remembers when, about 40 years ago, he was arrested for his participation in a protest against segregation. Then a college student at Morgan State University, Gainous took part in a peaceful demonstration against a nearby movie theater that practiced a white-only policy.

Anyone willing to risk arrest would enter the theater, refuse to leave and be arrested by waiting police officers. Gainous was among those who chose to walk into waiting handcuffs, and he remained behind bars for four days before being released.

"The scary part," he remembers, "was when you were co-mingled with the real criminals."

Now Gainous believes that his past arrest benefits him as a school official, because it helps students to see that their walkie-talkie-carrying, suspension-giving leader was once the one defying authority. "It seemed to, for some students, make me more real," he says, "and I guess remove some of their stereotypical thinking about, you know, 'goody stuff.'"

North Carolina's troublemaker

Like Gainous and social studies teacher Joann Malone (who ended up serving only a week of her sentence and six years of probation), social studies teacher George Vlasits has also spent time on the other side of jailhouse bars. "I've been in probably six or seven county jails in North Carolina," says Vlasits. His arrests have been for "some civil rights things, mostly anti-war," he says, with one 23-day prison stint for "allegedly assaulting a police officer," emphasis on "allegedly."

The assault, says Vlasits, was "a real frame-up" by law enforcement with the purpose of simply getting a political troublemaker off the streets. Vlasits spoke at a rally of around 500 protestors demonstrating against the lack of choice in the 1968 presidential election, in which all three candidates supported the Vietnam War. He supposedly assaulted the officer during the break-up of the demonstration.

Vlasits' North Carolina reputation was based on numerous arrests for conspicuous participation in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and for civil rights. He is proud to have been the first public draft resistor in North Carolina, a federal crime for which he was sentenced to five years in prison. Vlasits was detained in a county jail for an unusually long 60-day stay while his paperwork was being processed. Because the guards let him out of his small cell only four or five times during the two-month period, and then only for showers, Vlasits was not overly upset when it came time for his transfer to the federal penitentiary.

There, says Vlasits, he was confined only at night and was free to exercise and relax during the day. The prison, a maximum security facility, was actually less frightening than state jails, Vlasits says, because it housed mostly "white-collar criminals" in for offenses like tax evasion.

He emphasizes that the federal penitentiary was still a dangerous place, however, and he followed his own advice to "make friends with people who you thought you could trust." Groups help to ensure the safety of their members, he says. Loners were frequently targets of violence or sexual assault.

But the worst part of the prison experience, pervasive in the federal, state and county jails, was "a feeling that you had absolutely no control over anything in your life," he says.
He served four months of his sentence before his case was overturned on grounds that he had been illegally denied conscientious-objector status.

Vlasits' most recent arrest came in 1984 during his first year as a teacher in Montgomery County. He and some of his fellow demonstrators, including other Montgomery County teachers, were arrested in front of the South African embassy, where they were demonstrating against Apartheid.

The arresting officers, who were mostly African American, empathized with the Apartheid protestors and were extremely kind to the inmates for the short periods they had them in custody. "They were very gentle," recalls Vlasits, remembering how the cops offered to get them drinks upon arrival at the police station.

Vlasits doesn't regret going to prison for his beliefs. "Would I do it again?" he muses. "Sure. Jail is no fun, but if the cause is right, I'd do it again now. If it were necessary, and I thought it were necessary, I'd do it now. I certainly don't regret anything at all."

Passing the torch

Senior Nate Pancost, a member of Blair's Socialist Club, has also taken part in protests and understands the desire to stand up for beliefs regardless of the consequences. "I think it's really cool," he says of school officials like Malone, Gainous and Vlasits. "It means that they gave the government the finger and said, ‘this is what we think, and we don't care what you're gonna do to us.'"

While he doesn't believe the number of politically active students today reaches the level of student demonstrators back in the '60s, Pancost says that the tide is turning. "I think it's getting started," he says.

Society hasn't reached its boiling point yet, but, for instance, "if people realize that the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea," Pancost thinks American could see a replay of the '60s protest trend. "I don't think conditions have gotten bad enough again," he says. "But I think they will, and when they do, people will wake up and then it will happen again."