Biography
Ernest Bromley was an American minister, Quaker and civil rights and peace activist. A founding member of the Freedom Riders, he played an active role in protests of racial segregation in the Southern United States. He also organized rallies in Cincinnati which protested the Vietnam War and segregation. Bromley was also a pioneer of the modern American tax resistance movement. In 1942 he refused to display a "defense tax stamp" on his car. He redirected the $7.09 cost of the stamp that would have gone to the war effort and gave it instead to Methodist overseas relief. He was jailed for 60 days and lost his position as minister. He produced and edited a local newsletter called Peacemaker for many years. Peacemakers was the name of an organization that he and his wife Marion helped found that encouraged pacifism and resistance to war taxes and the draft. Peacemakers developed a fund for families of people imprisoned for acts of conscience. He also worked to desegregate Coney Island and the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. In the 1970s, the Internal Revenue Service tried and failed to seize the Bromley home for non-payment of taxes. In 1977 the War Resisters League gave the Bromleys its annual Peace Award. At 78, he was arrested again in 1991 for attempting to scale the White House fence in protest of the war in the Persian Gulf. He passed away in 1997 due to complications from cancer, remembered for his contributions to the anti-war movement.
The Catholic Worker’s July–August 1975 report says the IRS seized the Gano Peacemakers house near Cincinnati on January 31, 1975 and auctioned it May 28 in a disputed tax assessment against the Peacemaker and Ernest Bromley. The report says Ernest had not been paid for his editorial work and distinguished Gano Peacemakers as a separate entity. Page 4 reports a June 18 Cincinnati council request for congressional inquiry and a projected late-September eviction, while Dorothy Day on page 8 states the Bromleys had not yet been evicted. These are dated contemporary stages of the property dispute, not a new imprisonment or proof of the eventual final outcome. Source: https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/e47d99685e4e417d411cf7ee99fd06d6cfad4111.pdf#page=1
