David Dellinger Dies

[Michael Hoover <hooverm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

David Dellinger Dies
By DAVID GRAM
Associated Press Writer

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) David Dellinger, whose advocacy for peace stretched
from draft resistance in World War II to the Chicago Seven trial in the
late 1960s to his strong opposition to the Iraq war, has died at 88.

Dellinger died Tuesday, said Peggy Rocque, administrator of Heaton
Woods, the Montpelier retirement home where he had been living. He had
suffered for years from Alzheimers disease.

He'll be remembered so long as there's a peace and justice movement
because he contributed to so many people's lives and so many causes,
said Tom Hayden, a fellow 1960s radical who joined Dellinger and others
in leading protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, said
from his home in California.

Mainly I think he'll be remembered as a pacifist who meant business,
Hayden said. His pacifism was very forceful. He didn't mind interjecting
himself between armed federal marshals and someone they were pushing
around. He didn't mind standing up and talking back to a judge even if
it meant a contempt citation.

Greg Guma, editor of the politically progressive magazine Toward
Freedom, who had known Dellinger for 20 years, called him one of the
major figures in terms of peace and social justice of the last half
century. I think he was to the peace movement what Martin Luther King
(Jr.) was to the civil rights movement.

Dellinger's first arrest as an activist came during a union-organizing
protest at Yale, where he was a student in the 1930s. He served two
prison terms as a draft resister after declaring himself a conscientious
objector during World War II.

As recently as 2001, at age 85, Dellinger got up at 2:45 a.m. and
squeezed into a van with a half dozen activists one-quarter his age to
travel more than four hours from Montpelier to Quebec City. They were
going to protest talks on establishing the Free Trade Area of the
Americas.

Three percent of the richest people in the world control more wealth
than 49 undeveloped countries, he said. I think the FTAA is going to
extend that kind of system.

Dellinger's protests against war were bound up in his critique of
capitalism, which he said led to imperialism and violence.

The evils in the society today are greater than they were in 1968, he
said in a 1996 interview with The Associated Press I enjoy life this
way, I enjoy life being in solidarity with the people who are fighting
for a better world.

At the Chicago Seven trial in 1969 and 1970, he and four co-defendants
Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis and Hayden were convicted of
conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 convention. Those convictions
were overturned by a federal appeals court, which cited errors by U.S.
District Judge Julius Hoffman.

Dellinger was defiant toward what he saw as oppressive authority
throughout his life. When Judge Hoffman invited him to address the court
at his sentencing, he continued speaking over several admonitions from
the judge to stop.

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, Dellinger told the judge. And the fact is I am
not prepared to do that.

Dellinger's anti-war stance drew notice internationally. When the North
Vietnamese decided to release a few U.S. prisoners of war in 1969, they
invited a delegation including Dellinger to receive them. The group flew
to Hanoi to do so.
Dellinger wove several strands of activism together. He was a strong
defender of organized labor and critic of the nuclear arms race. He
marched with civil rights leaders in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.

Guma called Dellinger a key figure in forging an alliance in the mid-60s
between the civil rights and anti-war movements. He was a guy who could
bring people together across boundaries, Guma said.

Born in Wakefield, Mass., in 1915, Dellinger studied economics at Yale,
spent a year at Oxford University in England and studied for the
ministry at Union Theological Seminary. He wrote several books, the most
recent, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter, coming
in 1993.

When peace activists gathered for a conference earlier this month at
tiny Goddard College outside of Montpelier, they joined in writing a
letter to their mentor, Dellinger, whose ill health kept him from
attending.

Now, as we face another war and another convention and election, we look
and remember your steadfast leadership during the protests at the
Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, as well as your many less
publicized direct actions, against weapons manufacturing and the CIA,
and in support of civil rights, and prisoners of conscience, they wrote.

Your example continues to inspire us, and motivates us to work for a
better world.