War Resisters of World War II Tell Their Stories: Peace and Social Justice - David Dellinger (1999)

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War resistance in the United States encompasses activities related to war resistance by American citizens and other who oppose military action on the part of the United States. This includes opposition to, and evasion of, military duty. Such resistance may originate from pacifism or antimilitarism, generally, and may include registration as a conscientious objector to military service, draft dodging, or desertion. Alternatively, it may be directed towards specific military actions, as with opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, opposition to the Iraq War, and the post--September 11 anti-war movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_resistance_in_the_United_States Dellinger was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts to a wealthy family. His father, Raymond Dellinger, a graduate of Yale University, was a lawyer and a prominent Republican and friend of Calvin Coolidge. His maternal grandmother, Alice Bird Fiske, was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution. A Yale University and Oxford University student, David Dellinger also studied theology at Union Theological Seminary. At Yale he had been a classmate and friend of the economist and political theorist Walt Rostow. Rejecting his comfortable background, he walked out of Yale one day to live with hobos during the Depression. While at Oxford University, he visited Nazi Germany and drove an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he was an imprisoned conscientious objector and anti-war agitator. In federal prison, he and fellow conscientious objectors — including Ralph DiGia and Bill Sutherland — protested racial segregation in the dining halls, which were ultimately integrated due to the protests. In February 1946, Dellinger helped to found the radical pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Revolution. Dellinger had contacts and friendships with such diverse individuals as Eleanor Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abbie Hoffman, A.J. Muste, Greg Calvert, 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, and helped bring Dr. King and James Bevel into leadership positions in the 1960s anti-war movement. He sat on the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America and the Young People's Socialist League, its youth section, until he left in 1943; and was also a long-time member of the War Resisters League. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dellinger Ralph DiGia (December 13, 1914 -- February 1, 2008) was a World War II conscientious objector, lifelong pacifist and social justice activist, and staffer for 52 years at the War Resisters League. Born in the Bronx to a family of Italian immigrants in 1914, DiGia grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A 1927 rally for Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti set him on the path he would follow for 80 years. At the College of the City of New York, where he was studying bookkeeping, DiGia signed the "Oxford Pledge," refusing to participate in the coming war. In 1942, when the Selective Service System ordered him to report for induction, he said he was a conscientious objector. But his objections to war were based on ethics, not religion, and the draft board had no category for secular COs. The U.S. Attorney's office referred him to pacifist lawyer Julian Cornell, at the War Resisters League; Cornell lost his case, and DiGia spent the next three years in federal prisons. At Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut, and later at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, he met other draft resisters, like Dave Dellinger, who some decades later would be a defendant in the Chicago Seven case, and Bill Sutherland, who would move to Africa after the war and eventually become a pan-Africanist advocate for nonviolence. While in prison, DiGia and other COs conducted hunger strikes to compel the prison system to integrate its dining halls. They succeeded. In 1946, along with Dellinger, Igal Roodenko, and others, DeGia helped found the radical pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_DiGia