David Dellinger

David Dellinger after his arrest for failing to report for his World War II draft physical

David Dellinger (August 22, 1915 â€" May 25, 2004) was a renowned pacifist and activist for nonviolent social change, and one of the most influential American radicals in the 20th century. He was most famous for being one of the Chicago Seven, a group of protesters whose disruption of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago led to charges of conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting a riot. The ensuing court case was turned by Dellinger and his co-defendants into a nationally-publicized platform for putting the Vietnam War on trial. On February 18, 1970, they were found guilty of conspiring to incite riots but the charges were eventually dismissed by an appeals court due to errors by US District Judge Julius Hoffman.

Dellinger was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts to a well-to-do family (his father was a lawyer and a prominent Republican). A Yale University and Oxford University student, he also studied theology at Union Theological Seminary. Rejecting his comfortable background, he walked out of Yale one day to live with hobos during the Depression. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector and anti-war agitator.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Dellinger joined freedom marches in the South and led many hunger strikes in jail. As US involvement in Vietnam grew, Dellinger applied Gandhi's principles of non-violence to his activism within the growing anti-war movement, of which one of the high points was the Chicago Eight trial.

Dellinger had contacts and friendships with such diverse individuals as Eleanor Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abbie Hoffman, A.J. Muste, David McReynolds and numerous Black Panthers, including Fred Hampton, whom he greatly admired. As chairman of the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee he worked with many different anti-war organizations.

In 2001, Dellinger led a group of young activists from Montpelier, Vermont, to Quebec City, to protest the creation of a free trade zone. He died in Montpelier in 2004.

Quote

:"Before reading [his autobiography], I knew and greatly admired Dave Dellinger. Or so I thought. After reading his remarkable story, my admiration changed to something more like awe. There can be few people in the world who have crafted their lives into something truly inspiring. This autobiography introduces us to one of them." — Noam Chomsky, from the dustjacket of From Yale to Jail

See further

* From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter (1993), Dellinger's autobiography; ISBN 0-679-40591-7
* Revolutionary Nonviolence: Essays by Dave Dellinger (1970)
* "Why I Refused to Register in the October 1940 Draft and a Little of What It Led To" (1999), from Gara, Larry and Lenna Mae Gara, eds., A Few Small Candles: War Resistors of World War II Tell Their Sories. Kent, OH. Kent State University Press. ISBN 0-87338-621-3.
* David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary (2006), by Andrew E. Hunt ISBN 0814736386 [1]

External links

* "David Dellinger: Pacifist elder statesman of the anti-Vietnam Chicago Eight" (The Guardian)
* "Goodbye, David Dellinger" (CounterPunch)
* Revolutionary Non-Violence: Remembering Dave Dellinger, 1915-2004 - Tribute by Democracy Now!