Dellinger, David (1915–2004)

Active nonviolence and social protest were central to the life of David Dellinger, a student in the 1930s and son of an economically and socially prominent family [Page 441]who became involved in politics as he was studying economics at Yale University. He was arrested at a protest where he was supporting the trade union movement. Dellinger left Yale for a time during the Great Depression. He decided to ride the freight trains, sleep at missions, and eat at the soup lines. He then spent a year working in a factory in Maine, in 1936, after finally graduating from Yale.

Dellinger received a fellowship to Oxford University, and became a supporter of the Popular Front government in Spain. When he returned to the United States, he enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1940, Dellinger refused to register for the military draft. He was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison, and, while in prison, he organized protests against the segregated seating arrangements. His activism led to solitary confinement in the prison. After being released, he was arrested again for refusing to join the armed forces when the United States entered World War II. He was sentenced to another 2 years in prison.

After the war, Dellinger helped create the Direct Action magazine in 1945, and criticized the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A short time later he became the editor of Liberation, a position he maintained for more than 20 years.

Dellinger also was a prominent activist in opposition to the Vietnam War. He helped organize the 1967 protest march on the Pentagon. In 1968, he was one of the activists charged with conspiring to incite riots at the Democratic Party Convention. His codefendants included Tom Hayden (Students for a Democratic Society), Bobby Seale (Black Panther Party), Rennie Davis (National Mobilization Committee), and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (Youth International Party). These activists, part of the famous Chicago Seven, were eventually acquitted. Dellinger was painted as a stern, evangelical Christian Socialist, and as the chief architect of the conspiracy because of his position as the chairperson of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

Dellinger wrote a number of books, including Beyond Survival: New Directions for the Disarmament Movement (1985), Vietnam Revisited: From Covert Action to Invasion to Reconstruction (1986), and From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter (1993).

He continued to be active in politics, and even into his eighties he continued to take part in protest marches. He was a primary figure in the demonstration against the North American Free Trade Agreement in Quebec City in 2001. He also held regular fasts in an effort to change the name of Columbus Day to Native American Day.

The life of Dellinger suggests to activists that we have more power than we know. Traveling across every state, speaking at gatherings large and small, he was fond of pointing out that efforts for peace and justice were larger and more substantive than at the height of the 1970s. He noted that in the past 30 years that efforts were simply more locally based, and covered a wider range of issues.

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