Sarandon, Glover Talk Peace: PEOPLE

By C. Young

Tuesday December 11, 2001 01:00 PM EST

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Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover joined poets and writers in New York at a reading to raise money for Madre, an organization that supports grassroots women's groups around the world, PEOPLE reported. Both dressed in black, Sarandon and Glover read from a letter to President Bush written by Phyllis and Orlando Rodriquez, who lost their son in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. "Your response to these attacks does not make us feel better. This is not the time for empty gestures to make us feel better. We must find peaceful national solutions to terrorism," they wrote. Glover also read from a 1967 speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which explained that he opposed the Vietnam War because he believed it had destroyed the hopes of the poor at home and abroad. "Martin Luther King often used a dream as a vehicle in which we can imagine what we can be, not who we are," said Glover afterwards. "We have to find the words of those people who have led through nonviolent action. We have to take those words and listen to them and reinvigorate those words for the crisis we are in now." Madre will distribute money to the Afghan Women's Network (AWN), the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and the Afghan Women's Education Center (AWEC).