June 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

the Editor's Desk

Editor's Note: Instead of introducing each of the worthy articles in this issue, I'm devoting this column this month to the memory of Dave Dellinger, who died on May 25, 2004 after a long struggle against Alzheimers. Please also see the obituary by his friend Jay Craven on page 18.

I had the privilege of meeting Dave Dellinger just a few times.

As a 19-year-old who was just beginning to immerse myself in activism, I knew next to nothing about peace movement history. I was interested in the War Resisters League, and so decided to attend its triennial conference in 1983 in Easton, PA.

I met Dave in the lunch line of the conference's first day, as he was talking about Gandhi with a small group of activists. The little I knew about Gandhi had been gleaned from Louis Fischer's invaluable book, The Essential Gandhi, but Dave wistfully said he wished he had known more about Gandhi when he was my age. He was clearly an experienced activist, and it was apparent that he had been organizing for decades, and yet he was genuinely curious about each of us, our ideas, and our lives. Over the course of the conference, I became increasingly impressed by his insights, and listened wide-eyed as he discussed debates with A. J. Muste and Martin Luther King, Jr.

On the last night of the conference, a group of about seven of us were sitting around on the grass, and someone asked Dave, "Do you stay in touch with the other members of the Chicago Seven?" I was astonished. I didn't know what the Chicago Seven had been accused of, but I knew they were famous. Dave and I had hung out together at meals and between workshops for a few days, and never had he pulled rank or thought it necessary to impress me by making reference to his celebrity.

What I didn't know about Dave Dellinger already fills volumes, and as the history of peace and social justice activism in the United States is written, it will surely fill many more. After the conference, I went to the library and started researching. He was best known as one of the eight activists (reduced to seven after Bobby Seale's case was severed from the rest) indicted after the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 for conspiracy to cross state lines in order to start a riot (see www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/chicago7.html).

Researching further, I was amazed and thrilled to learn that Dave Dellinger had refused even to register for the draft - in 1940, as one of another grouping of eight radicals, the Union Theological Seminary 8 (UTS8). Living in an anti-racist collective house in Harlem dedicated to experiments in nonviolent living, the UTS8 publicly refused to register for the draft despite being potentially doubly safe from the draft as pacifist seminarians. In doing so, they not only faced long jail sentences, but criticism from A. J. Muste and other pacifist leaders for endangering the newly-won recognition of conscientious objector status for religious objectors, and they were expelled from the Seminary.

Decrying conscription and the war system as the epitome of totalitarianism, they refused to fight Hitler using Hitler's means. Instead, as they stated in their court statement in 1941, by "opposing the Selective Service law, we will be striking at the heart of totalitarianism as well as war." They continued, "[It is] urgent to build in this country and throughout the world a group trained in the techniques of nonviolent opposition to the encroachments of militarism and fascism. Until we build such a movement, it will be impossible to stall the war machine at home. When we do build such a movement, we will have forged the only weapon which can ever give effective answer to foreign invasion. Thus in learning to fight American Hitlerism we will show an increasing group of war-disillusioned Americans how to resist foreign Hitlers as well. For these reasons we hereby register our refusal to comply in any way with the Selective Training and Service Act. We do not expect to stem the war forces today; but we are helping to build the movement that will conquer in the future."

Dave, we have not yet conquered war, militarism, or totalitarianism. But your life is a shining example of unceasing efforts to "build the movement" necessary to achieve those goals across racist, ageist, and later in your life, sexist and heterosexist, lines. We owe you a debt of gratitude for speaking up - and for listening.

Quotations from in America: A Documentary History, revised edition, by Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd, Orbis Books, 1995.

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