She’S A Rebel Without A Pause Attack Won’T Deter Moscow Activist

Like most kids, Lori Graves had a rebellious streak.

She’d come down with fake illnesses to get out of church services attended three times a week with her Southern Baptist parents. She’d pack her dolls in a flowered suitcase and threaten to run away from her Memphis, Tenn., home after butting heads with her strict mother.

So much for innocence.

In just a few months, the 29-year-old activist with a lilting Tennessee drawl has been arrested four times and spent a dozen days in jail for a smattering of hot-button causes.

This month may top them all.

Tuesday morning, she awoke to find a Molotov cocktail had ignited the porch of her Moscow home. A cross burned in her front yard and a vicious note in her mailbox warned her to stay out of Coeur d’Alene.

She doused the fire before police arrived, but remains shaken and angry.

A day earlier, a Moscow judge dismissed indecent exposure charges against her for walking around town bare-chested to protest a law that lets men go topless, but not women.

And last week, Graves became party to a multimillion-dollar civil suit.

While protesting the Aryan Nations parade in Coeur d’Alene last July, Graves was arrested after she refused to allow police to search her backpack. Charges against her were dropped. But Graves and Jonathan Crowell - a 23-year-old also arrested for refusing to submit to a backpack search - are suing the city for $6.8 million, alleging violations of constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

In a few weeks, Graves goes to trial in federal court on misdemeanor charges of blocking a Forest Service road - part of an Earth First! protest of logging in Idaho’s Cove-Mallard roadless country. She expects to get jail time.

Is she crazy?

“You know, I’ve thought that,” her 22-year-old stepsister, Becca Carpenter, says, somewhat in jest. “I think she’s testing herself, finding out what she’s interested in. But I think the arrests just happened. I don’t think she was looking for it.”

Yet Carpenter worries. “Until (the Molotov cocktail) I would have said I was really proud of her. Now I’m a little scared.”

Graves’ stepfather, William Carpenter, isn’t at all comfortable with her style.

“She’s an intelligent girl, she’s not always doing intelligent things,” says the retired Memphis firefighter.

Scott Kirsch, Graves’ undergraduate adviser at the University of Memphis, isn’t surprised by his former student’s activism.

“Some people come to the conclusion they can’t just sit back,” Kirsch says, “because if they do, they become a mundane cog in the machine.”

Graves explains it this way: “It feels good to be an activist. When you see what’s screwed up out there, it feels good to stand up to it.

“If you look at when change has happened - the civil rights movement in the ‘60s, women’s suffrage, even times when governments have been overthrown - you have to challenge authorities that exist if you want to change the situation.”

Public reaction to this week’s attack on Graves’ home has included some skepticism, according to police. But friends and family generally marvel at her courage to go to jail for issues she thinks are important.

Though he worries, her biological father understands, Graves says. Divorced from her mother when Graves was 2, he now teaches math and accounting in northern Mississippi. A “good old liberal Democrat,” he gave Graves her first taste of the great outdoors, taking her camping as a kid.

Her Republican mother and stepfather wish her protests didn’t include going to jail, she says.

“My mom really didn’t get the topless thing,” Graves said. “She still changes clothes in her closet.”

They strongly agreed on her decision to protest the Aryan Nations parade in Coeur d’Alene. “Growing up in the South, we both understand the need to stand up to the racists, to the Nazis,” Graves said.

Differences among family members are not accidental.

“My parents encouraged that we question everything and make up our own minds and find our own way,” Carpenter says.

Graves traveled for a year after high school and began dabbling in activism, protesting outside Memphis fur shops and attending abortion rights rallies. She later organized a Gulf War protest and worked on behalf of U.S. Sen. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat. That work left her disenchanted; the reality of politics violated her ideals.

Travel continued via college exchange programs while she earned her bachelor’s degree in geography and biology. She says she became more and more angry about environmental issues as she noticed the names of the same multinational corporations linked over and over again to environmental and economic despair.

Graves moved to the Palouse in 1995 to get her master’s degree in environmental science at Washington State University. And she stumbled into one of the most contentious logging battles in the Inland Northwest.

Earth First! members took her to central Idaho where, for a decade, they have been fighting to stop chain saws on the fringes of the largest roadless area in the continental United States.

She stood on a ridge, looking out across the Cove-Mallard area, and into the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. “On a basic, primal, emotional level, that place had an effect on me,” Graves says. “I’ve never seen anything so big or wild in my life and to see the destruction firsthand …”

Graves just gets by financially, by working part time at a group home for people with disabilities. She insists her lawsuit against Coeur d’Alene is about excessive force by police, not money.

“I’m 5-feet-4. I weigh 105 pounds. Did it really take three or four burly cops to throw me to the ground and put me in a pain hold?”

If any money is won, it will be put toward forest activism, Graves says.

Some find it hard to have sympathy for Graves, who they believe courts trouble. Local police dispatchers have received numerous calls from residents, some expressing shock at the attack on Graves’ home, others suspecting the whole thing was a ruse.

“I think they are victims, but we’re not closing the door on anything,” said Moscow police Capt. Don Lanpher.

Friends emphatically insist it’s impossible the attack was staged. Graves was having no trouble getting press attention before the incident.

When she speaks out, “it’s not a sense of ‘hey look at me’ - she’s not trying for that at all - it’s ‘hey, look at this or listen to that,”’ says Greg Mullen, a University of Idaho student who also came to Coeur d’Alene to protest the Aryans.

Graves is fearful after the attack. She said she’s had violent dreams ever since.

“I never expected someone would come to my house and do this. For the rest of my life, for my career as an activist, it will be in the back of my mind. I won’t let it silence me, but it will always be there.”