James W. Douglass
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Through Amazon (company), Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis
Douglass's best-known work is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Published in 2008 by Orbis Books, it was the result of over a decade of research and writing. After receiving favorable publicity on TV, the book briefly reached Amazon.com's Top 100. Douglass's thesis in the book is that the Kennedy assassination was the work of a conspiracy, ordered by unknown parties and carried out by the CIA with help from the Mafia and elements in the FBI, to halt Kennedy's effort to end the Cold War after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Touchstone Books, a former imprint of Simon & Schuster, issued a paperback version in 2010.
Theology of nonviolence
Douglass has been a frequent author on nonviolence and Catholic theology, with many books and essays to his credit. Four of his monographs, published from 1968 to 1991, were reprinted in 2006 by theology publisher Wipf & Stock.
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Activism
Douglass was a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii who first engaged in civil disobedience to protest against the Vietnam War.
In 1975, Jim and Shelley Douglass founded Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action to protest against the construction of a Trident missile nuclear submarine base on the Kitsap Peninsula in the U.S. state of Washington. The Douglasses, joined by other activists seeking to prevent the installation of Trident missiles, formed a small intentional community, the Pacific Life Community, near the submarine base. Their goal was
to "seek the truth of a nonviolent way of life," both personally and politically. Personally we tried to confront our racism, sexism, consumerism — all the isms that allowed us to violate others. Politically, we chose to experiment with nonviolent actions resisting Trident, a system that seemed to epitomize all the violence of our society.
This nonviolent protest later extended to protesting against the White Train which carried nuclear missile parts to Bangor Trident Base.
The Douglasses subsequently moved to the Ensley neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama, to establish Mary's House, a "house of hospitality" for homeless or indigent people in need of long-term health care.
Douglass has traveled to the Middle East on several peace missions. In 2003 he joined a Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq and stayed with civilians during the U.S.-led invasion.
Douglass is a member and co-founder of Religious Leaders for 9/11 Truth, an organization that questions the "official story" about the 9/11 attacks.
Investigative journalism
In the 1990s while commencing his work on JFK and the Unspeakable, Douglass was also doing investigative journalism for Probe magazine (1993-2000). The magazine was formed by Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination in the wake of the JFK Records Act. Many of Probe's articles, including several by Douglass, were anthologized in the 2003 book, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X.
The assassination of Malcolm X and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. were Douglass's two main areas of research for Probe. His articles, "The Murder and Martyrdom of Malcolm X" and "The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis", were included in The Assassinations anthology and are also available on the Kennedys and King website. Douglass wrote the King article after attending, as a Probe correspondent, every session of the Loyd Jowers civil trial in Memphis in late 1999. The trial was the culmination of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the King family against "Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators".