“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

From January 5-7 I must have seen these words of Dr. King flash many hundreds of times. That happened because over those three days, from 7 am to 5 pm, I engaged in a 72-hour, water-only hunger strike across Broad Street from the Bloomfield, NJ high school. In front of the school was an electronic bulletin board that kept flashing four different messages, over and over. One was this quote with a picture of Dr. King

On the side of Broad St. where I was, behind me as I faced out, was the Board of Education offices for the townwide school district. That was the focus of my hunger strike. I took this action as the latest tactic of a 10-year effort by the Bloomfield Citizens Solar Campaign to get the schools and the town government to put solar panels on their roofs and parking lots.

I took this action because there is a July 4^th deadline nationally for new renewable energy projects to have begun work to be eligible for 30% tax credits. There is immediacy for our town and for others around the country if we are to use this tax credit to advance the urgently-needed shift from fossil fuels to renewables and environmental justice.

Here is fuller description of this action as published in the local Patch publication:

Why did I consume only water and a little salt over a 72-hour period January 5-7? Why did I camp out on the sidewalk in front of the Board of Education building and across from the high school for 10 hours each of those days? What did it feel like to do it, and why did I undertake this particular form of action to press the Bloomfield Board of Education to finally take the necessary steps to have solar panels installed on school roofs and parking lots?

In a lot of ways this was a desperate act. The Bloomfield Citizens Solar Committee has been working to get the schools and the town to take solar seriously for 10 years, and so far there is nothing to show for it. After hiring Talva Energy three years ago to assess possibilities for solar, and after they told the town that solar canopies on the parking lot behind the Municipal Building and the parking lot across from the train station were both financially viable, as well as money savers for the town’s taxpayers, the township government has done nothing about this for close to a year.

But the focus of this hunger strike was the Board of Education. When a new BOE leadership with Kasey Dudley as President came in two years ago, things began to change. It took a  while, but by early November of 2025, two months ago, two proposals had been submitted by Talva Energy and Gabel Associates to organize a Request for Proposals process to find a reputable and responsible solar company to install solar on five roofs that Gabel Associates this past June said were viable for it.

In the meantime, there are federal tax credits for solar projects like this one that expire on July 4^th of this year. In order to be eligible for those 30% tax credits, work has to have been begun by companies by then. So there is a time urgency here.

That is the major reason why I decided to not eat for 72 hours. The Board of Education is not doing the right thing. They are dragging their feet. It was either do something like this or just give up, and after 10 years that’s not going to happen for me and the other members of our group.

I’ve done hunger strikes before, some for weeks, but I’ve never done one at the age of 76 on a sidewalk three days in a row, sun-up to sundown, in the middle of the winter, temperatures from 26 degrees when it began to the mid-40’s when it ended.

When you don’t eat, the hardest time is at the very beginning. Your body is used to eating and when it’s not being fed, the stomach shrinks. If there are a lot of toxins and chemicals in your diet, you’ll get a headache and feel pretty bad as the body feeds on them first. After those are gone, then the body feeds on fat, and after that is gone, it feeds on muscle. I ended up losing about nine pounds over these three days.

Spiritually, when you are not eating for a cause you believe in, it can be positive, even if you are physically weaker. In this case being on the corner of Belleville and Broad for about 10 hours each day turned out to be both challenging and rewarding. Over the three days lots of people walking and in vehicles going by showed me their support by what they said to me or by horn honks or waves out the window. It was very noticeable to me how my spirits would be uplifted when these things happened, as they did many times.

But without question the best thing about this action was the interaction that I and others had with high school students. Each morning beginning at 7 am and each afternoon we passed out half-page leaflets on yellow paper (the sun!) to students, as well as teachers, and we estimate about 1,000 were taken by them. Another 300 were distributed to passersby.

Wednesday afternoon, as we were leafletting for the last time, three different people told us that the hunger strike and the issue of solar panels on the schools was being talked about. This was such a wonderful thing to hear.

We have been saying to the school board and town for all these years that one of the reasons to install solar is to give young people some hope that adults are finally taking action to address the climate crisis, the environmental destruction because of the burning of fossil fuels, that is so serious. For us older people, mainly elders, to be showing this in action via the hunger strike and the leafletting, knowing that for some of them this gives some hope for a decent future, gave me hope.

Mohandus Gandhi, Indian independence leader, engaged in many hunger strikes, and one of the things he said about them, which he called fasting, is that “fasting is the sincerest form of prayer.” I appreciate and agree with that. I continue to pray that, finally, the Bloomfield Board of Education, and the town government, will do the right thing.

 Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21^st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org . More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.