[Deathwatch] David Dellinger, protester / radical pacifist, 88

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Lifelong protester David Dellinger dies

By Patricia Sullivan / The Washington Post
May 27, 2004

WASHINGTON -- David Dellinger, a lifelong radical pacifist and one of
the Chicago Seven antiwar demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic
National Convention, died of pneumonia May25 at the Montpelier, Vt.,
retirement home where he lived. He was 88 and had Alzheimer's disease.

Dellinger, who had been protesting since the 1930s, was the oldest of
the seven (originally eight) Vietnam War protesters charged with
conspiracy and inciting to riot after a massive demonstration in the
streets and parks of Chicago turned violent. Among the bearded, beaded
and wild-haired defendants, he was balding and wore a coat and tie. He
and Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis were
convicted of inciting a riot, but the convictions were overturned on
appeal.

One of his four surviving children, Michele McDonough, said Wednesday
that Dellinger remained actively engaged in issues until just a few
years ago. The "last real trip he made," she said, was three years ago
when he hitched a ride to demonstrations in Quebec City against the
creation of a free trade zone in the Western Hemisphere.

"He felt this is one of the most important times to be active," she
said. "He was working on a wide range of things: prisoners' rights,
supporting a living wage, demonstrating and writing about foreign
policy of this government."

Dellinger had been to court, to jail and to prison long before the
'60s, although that is the era with which he is most identified. He
supported union organizing drives in the 1930s and civil rights in the
1950s. He was jailed so often that he had lost count.

"I went from Yale to jail," he said, "and got a good education in both
places."

He refused to register for the draft during World War II, even though
he could have had a deferment because he was studying for the divinity
at Union Theological Seminary. The courts were not in a mood to hear
his critique of the "strategic disagreement" between the U.S.
imperialists and the Third Reich; he was sent to federal prison in
Danbury, Conn., for a year and a day. When he got out, he still refused
to register, and was sent to the maximum-security prison at Lewisburg,
Pa., where he staged hunger strikes and spent time in solitary
confinement. Three years later, he was released.

Dellinger continued to protest -- against nuclear testing, against the
bomb, against the Korean War, for prisoners' rights and for Puerto
Rican independence. A critic called him "the Kilroy of radical
politics," who appeared at nearly all the big demonstrations. He worked
with the radical Catholic priests, the Berrigan brothers, to write a
"declaration of conscience" to encourage resistance to the draft, and
he was one of the organizers of the National Coordinating Committee to
End the War in Vietnam, which staged the huge antiwar marches in
Washington in 1970.

He made two trips to China and North Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. He
marched on the Pentagon repeatedly. After the Chicago Seven trial,
North Vietnam decided to release a few U.S. prisoners of war, and its
leaders asked Dellinger, among others, to come to Hanoi to escort them
back to the United States, which he did.

At the 1969 trial, just before Judge Julius Hoffman sentenced him, he
was offered a chance to speak. But when the judge tried to cut him off,
Dellinger said: "You want us to be like good Germans, supporting the
evils of our decade, and then when we refused to be good Germans and
came to Chicago and demonstrated, now you want us to be like good Jews,
going quietly and politely to the concentration camps while you and
this court suppress freedom and the truth. And the fact is, I am not
prepared to do that. You want us to stay in our place like black people
were supposed to stay in their place. ... ''

His life took him a long way from his start in Wakefield, Mass., where
he was an outstanding long-distance runner and high school athlete. He
enrolled at Yale in 1933, during the depths of the Depression, and,
embarrassed by the elitism he saw, spent vacations as a hobo, which he
regarded as on-the-job training.

He graduated Yale as a Phi Beta Kappa economics major and won a
scholarship to Oxford University. On his way to England, he slipped
down to Spain, then into the middle of its civil war, and nearly
defected from academia. But he went on to Oxford, then returned to Yale
for graduate study and to the Union Theological Seminary to study for
Congregationalist ministry.

Because protests did not pay the bills, Dellinger was a printer, writer
and editor throughout his life. He was an editor of a series of small
magazines -- Direct Action, Alternative, Individual Action and,
finally, Liberation magazine, from 1956 until it closed in 1975. He
wrote six books, the latest in 1993, "From Yale to Jail: The Life Story
of a Moral Dissenter."

Colman McCarthy, director of the Center for Teaching Peace Inc. in
Washington, called Dellinger "truly a kind and lovable man, both a
natural storyteller about all his decades of jamming the gears of the
world's war machines, and an icon of nonviolence who taught that all of
us are called to be peacemakers. In an era diseased with war, his
arguments for pacifism remain bedrock-sound."

Survivors include his wife of 62 years, Elizabeth Peterson, and four
children.