Cynthia Foster, at 99; was rebel against war, bias for almost a century

Cynthia B. (Wilder) Foster climbed her last mountain -- 1,832-foot Mount Watatic in Ashby -- at age 91. She didn't stop driving until she was 96, and she never stopped fighting for social justice, attending rallies well into her 90s.

"Cynthia was fiercely independent, one of those old New England women who did for themselves," said Andrea Bird of Waltham, wife of Mrs. Foster's stepgrandson.

When Mrs. Foster died Feb. 1 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center following a massive stroke, she was still engaged in her longtime battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the use of her federal taxes for military spending, Bird said. She was 99 and had been living at Mount Pleasant Home in Jamaica Plain.

Until three years ago, she had lived on her own in the Jamaica Plain house that had been her home for most of the past six decades. Before she left, she had survived a mugging on the street, suffering a broken hip that healed without a replacement.

A member of the New England War Tax Resistance for many years, she wore its red and white button "every day of her life," Bird said. The button says "Don't Pay War Taxes" and bears the likeness of Henry David Thoreau, who spent a night in jail for protesting the use of taxes to finance the Mexican-American War.

Mrs. Foster's battles with the IRS were legendary.

In 1984, the Globe reported that Mrs. Foster demonstrated in front of the Union Warren Savings Bank opposite Boston Common after the IRS had notified her a levy would be put on her savings there for nonpayment of taxes.

"I refuse to support this insane military madness," the Globe quoted her. "It must be stopped. I will not throw my money down this bottomless pit, down a rathole. I am pleased to say that today the IRS is getting only a bit over $100 because I have contributed my savings to life-supporting, peace-promoting, community, and human service organizations."

Bird said Mrs. Foster would often quote John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian Universalist minister born in 1879: "War is the quintessence of evil. It is the greatest of all evils, because it contains all other evils within itself."

War was not the only issue Mrs. Foster protested. Racial discrimination was high on her list. When she was studying art at Boston University in 1927, an African-American student from Washington, D.C. was banned from attending a dance at the request of several Southern students. Mrs. Foster had invited Francis Syphax to the dance the previous year, but because of the Southerners' protest, the student was not allowed to return, Bird said.

Mrs. Foster, a talented painter, responded by leaving BU and enrolling in the School at the Museum of Fine Arts. She produced many paintings, but because she never felt she was good enough to be a great artist, she gave it up several years ago, Bird said.

Mrs. Foster joined the Community Church of Boston, a Unitarian Universalist church, in 1924, four years after its founding.

"Cynthia was a voice of reason in times of contention and a voice of contention when we were too comfortable," said the Rev. David Carl Olson, who was minister there from 1998 to 2005.

In the 1940s, the Globe said: "She picketed segregated dime stores, department stores, and lunch counters in Washington, demonstrated at bus stations and at a segregated YMCA until the management flooded the ventilating system with ammonia fumes to drive her out. In 1963, she was among the 250,000 who marched on Washington for equal rights [the Rev. Martin Luther King 'I Have a Dream' march]. In 1971, she led 3,000 people to a demonstration on Boston City Hall Plaza to protest the Vietnam War."

The Community Church honored her in 1984 with the Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Award for Social Justice, but she initially refused it, saying she didn't deserve to be in the ranks of previous winners such as attorney William Kunstler, according to news reports in the Globe. After the pastor persuaded her to take it, telling her she was the board's unanimous choice, she received a standing ovation from 100 guests.

Mrs. Foster might have inherited her sense of social justice. She was born in Ashby, the youngest of Albert and Adeline Wilder's four daughters. Her mother had underwritten the cost of publishing a biography of Stephen Fritchman, a radical Unitarian minister, according to Olson. A sister, Dorothy of Ashby, was also a social activist until her death in 1992 at 93.

After she married Carl Anthonsen in 1938, they moved into the house his family had bought in 1922 on Spring Park Avenue in Jamaica Plain. Her husband also supported liberal causes.

He joined protests against the controversial executions of anarchists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco and "attended rallies for the condemned radicals on Boston Common, kept an extensive diary of the trial, and even viewed their bodies after they had been executed in 1927," according to the Associated Press.

In 1949, the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where they lived for about 15 years. Anthonsen died in 1966.

In 1976, she married Emery Foster, a former lay leader of All Souls Church in Washington, and the couple moved to Jamaica Plain. Foster died in 1979.

Mrs. Foster was a woman of modest means, Bird said, but she contributed what money she could to organizations promoting social causes. Last fall, she traveled to Ashby for the dedication of a new wing of the library to which she had contributed. She gave her Jamaica Plain home to the American Friends Service Committee, and she donated her body to BU Medical School.

A stepgranddaughter, Carol Hebb of Salem, said she had given 30 boxes of Mrs. Foster's papers to Harvard's Schlesinger Library. Among them are letters to Syphax, her African-American friend from BU.

Mrs. Foster also leaves a stepdaughter, Edith (Foster) Hebb of Elmira, N.Y.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. April 15 at Community Church of Boston.

The date of the service -- traditionally the last day to file income taxes -- was not deliberate, said Carol Hebb, but is "very ironic."

Bird said, "Cynthia would have loved it. Anything to draw attention to a cause."