As told to Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Photograph by Mark Gilliland
“I was teaching Greek and Latin, and the world was exploding—civil rights, the Vietnam War,” recalls Margaret Phillips. She flung herself into the civil-rights movement—exhorting young, sheltered Mary Institute students to action—and got herself arrested. Later, she married an easygoing physician and had two kids, but she never gave up her quest for justice. She now teaches in the departments of criminology and foreign languages and literatures at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and spends her free hours working to end the death penalty.
I grew up a white Episcopalian in the South, in an area where being a white Protestant automatically puts you at the top of the totem pole. We were blind to a lot of things.
I had a very calm, sheltered, happy childhood—overly sheltered, perhaps. Hard times toughen you.
My parents were both interested in questions of justice—but they didn’t quite know how to go about it.
Physically, I’m scared of just about everything, but getting arrested isn’t scary. As long as you’re doing it for something you feel strongly about, it’s a no-brainer ... as long as you have someone to post bail.
People who have a lot of self-importance drive me crazy. Now, whether that’s true of me and that’s why I don’t like to be around them, I don’t know.
In his wanderings in the fifth century BCE, Herodotus commented very cheerfully that, wherever he goes, people think the gods are on their side. This seems very apropos right now.
My son graduated from high school with a C-minus average. I said, “You are smarter than this!” And he said, “Mom, the purpose of school is to make you stupid. You want me to do well at that?”
The death penalty is an issue in which class, race—all the injustices—play out, and in an arena that is defined enough that you can do something about it.
The fact that you can see what you didn’t do well shows that you are light-years ahead of people who are satisfied—depressing though it can be.
Ideals are sometimes said cynically, but the very fact that people feel a need to articulate something gives me hope.
Self-satisfaction and smugness are deadening.
Whenever there is some measure of justice, even if someone just points a finger eloquently, there’s a certain satisfaction.
Doing good can be an overrated virtue. One always wants to feel good about oneself. That’s the trap.
What should everybody do once in their lives? People should define that for themselves.
I’m glad I went to jail. It was my first experience with people who are hopeless—and I was floored.
Every civilization is going to have crime. It comes from not seeing goals to act for; it’s a lack of ideals for your own behavior.
The Roman world was much more brutal and bloody than ours—but we have the capacity of spreading the bloodiness farther.
Growing up, it kept hitting me: There was no external authority I could look to for vindication. I had to figure it out for myself.
I get so angry, even bitter, seeing CEOs walking off with $2 billion packages after they ruined the company.
You’d think that after living in my skin lo these many years, I’d have a stronger sense of myself.
If the world were perfect and there were nothing more to fight for, wouldn’t it be boring?
