decided the idea of black men being with white women would be cause too much outrage and be too dangerous. Many of the men who took part in the original Freedom Ride were men who had also been imprisoned for being Conscientious Objectors and refusing to work in the labor camps. Other In 1948, Nelson cofounded the Peacemakers. This was a national organization dedicated to active non-violence as a way of life. He and his wife Juanita began their practice of refusing to pay taxes used for armaments and killing, they did this for the rest of their lives. They did so alongside civil rights activist Eroseanna Robinson, who worked on both desegregation and the war protest movement. The three were dubbed the "Elkton Three" after they were arrested together while trying to integrate a restaurant in Maryland. Over time, the Nelsons came to adopt the income-reduction method of war tax refusal. They cut their expenses dramatically — building a house with salvaged materials and without electricity or plumbing, and growing the majority of their own food on a half-acre of land. Eventually they came to live on less than $5,000 per year. The Nelsons joined a (controversially interracial) communal home with fellow-Peacemakers Ernest Bromley and Marion Bromley in Gano, Ohio, where they would live until 1956. In 1948, Wally helped to organize the Cincinnati Committee on Human Relations, which worked to desegregate institutions there. In the early 1950s Nelson served as the first national field officer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). For this job he directed many workshops on non-violent direct action in Washington D.C. He left CORE after the organization took a more conservative turn in 1954. In 1957 the Nelsons spent a few months at the racially integrated Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, and continued to work with that project for the next decade. Starting in 1960, the Nelsons worked with Operation Freedom, which helped to support black Americans who were facing organized reprisals and boycotts from white supremacists if they attempted to register to vote. In 1968, he fasted once again, for 21 days, this time in support of the United Farm Workers campaign for just wages and working conditions for Farm Laborers. The Nelsons began to experiment with more deliberate voluntary simplicity in an off-the-grid home in Ojo Caliente in New Mexico in the early 1970s. They moved to Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1974,