Ron Carver’s 2019 book, Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans who Opposed the War, is based on an exhibit he curated for Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum. The exhibit has been shown at dozens of universities and museums in the U.S. and Vietnam. The companion book was translated into Vietnamese in March 2023.
The day after he graduated high school Carver joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, working first in SNCC’s Atlanta Communications Department and later in rural Mississippi.
Carver’s successful campaign efforts over the decades since include supporting American GI resistance during the Vietnam War; halting the slaughter of dolphins by the tuna industry; fighting the senseless shutdowns of paper mill, cutting tool, microwave oven and auto factories; winning relief and a labor agreement for truck drivers who were abducted while fighting to form a union in Mumbai—and compensation for Chinese workers who were beaten for “stepping out of the lunch line.”
Carver has been relentless in seeking justice for Gilberto Soto, a colleague who was assassinated in El Salvador in 2004. Ron worked with IPS’s Global Economy project to prevent a Canadian/Australian company from opening a gold mine in El Salvador that would have put the country’s primary water source at risk.
He has designed and directed campaigns while working with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the UE, the UAW, the Communications Workers of America, and as founder and director of the Teamsters’ Office of Strategic Campaigns under the union’s first reform president.
An accomplished photographer, Carver’s work documenting the human faces of these struggles has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Himeji, Japan; Taipei; Mexico City; HCMC, Vietnam; and in the United States.
