Mary Morello
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Mary Morello (born in 1924 in Marseilles, Illinois) founded in 1987 the anti-censorship group Parents For Rock And Rap. She is sometimes referred to as Tipper Gore's nemesis in the 1980s battle over music censorship.
She earned a masters degree in African and Latin American history from Chicago's Loyola University in 1954. She spent the rest of the decade teaching English in Germany, Spain and Japan, circling the globe on a freighter.
[edit] Biography
From 1960-63, she lived in Kenya, where she married her husband Ngethe Njoroge, a Kenyan revolutionary who later was the first Kenyan delegate to the United Nations. He was a guerrilla in the Mau Mau uprising (1950-1960) that freed Kenya from British rule (1963)
In 1964, she moved to Harlem, New York, where she gave birth to son Tom Morello, born May 30. (By this time, she was separated from her husband.) Tom is known from the Geffen Records band Audioslave and as former band member of Rage Against the Machine and Lock Up. He eventually grew up to be one rock's all-time greatest guitarists, ranking #26 on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of such.
In the 1960s, Morello was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and NAACP. She is also a long time activist for the Chicago Urban League.
Mary and her son moved to Libertyville, Illinois, a small suburb north of Chicago in 1965. She took a job at Libertyville High School teaching social studies.
In 1987, she quit her teaching job after 22 years, and founded Parents For Rock And Rap.
In 1991, she and many others battled against legislation being proposed in Washington titled S.983, or "Pornography Victims Compensation Act." (Later retitled S.1521.). The legislation was officially Dead-On-Arrival, because of grass-roots anti-censorship activism. On June 24, 1996 she received the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award in Arts and Entertainment for her work with Parents For Rock And Rap.
In the fall of 1991, she began a volunteer teaching job at the Salvation Army Rehabilitation Center in Waukegan, Illinois. She has also been involved in the Cuba Coalition in Chicago, which works toward lifting the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
In a Rage Against the Machine concert in 1994, she introduced them as the "Best Band in the Fucking Universe".
She is also known for her involvement in the 1999 debate on the incarceration of death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted (some believe wrongly) of the 1982 shooting of a Philadelphia police officer. "When a cop is shot, someone must be found guilty," Morello has said. "As my son Tom says, '... all rational thinking goes out the window.' A cop being killed is no different than any other person being killed. They choose their profession."
[edit] Private life
She has made three trips to the Soviet Union, through Siberia and Mongolia.
