This interview was conducted in December of 2016 by the Grand Rapids People’s History Project.

Fr. Paul Milanowski talks about how he got involved in doing anti-Vietnam War work in the mid-1960s, his involvement with doing draft counseling, doing tax resistance and other actions that took place in the late 1960s in Grand Rapids.

Paul eventually decided to do a self-imposed exile in Canada in the early 70s to work with the young men who had resisted the Vietnam War by going to Canada instead of subjecting themselves to the draft.

Fr. Milanowski continued to do social justice work around civil rights, anti-nuclear and Central American solidarity in the early 1980s. At one point in the mid-1980s he moved to London during the Reagan years and did work with a parish that provided free meals and found housing for those on the street.