Posted on 05/26/2004 4:14:52 PM PDT by calcowgirl
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP)--Peace activist David Dellinger, one of the Chicago Seven arrested and tried for their part in the violent anti-war protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, has died at 88.
Dellinger died Tuesday, said Peggy Rocque, administrator of Heaton Woods, the Montpelier retirement home where the activist had been living.
Dellinger was a pacifist who devoted much of his life to protesting. A member of the Old Left whose first arrest came in the 1930s during a union-organizing protest at Yale, he was a generation older than his Yippie co-defendants in the Chicago Seven case.
``Mainly I think he'll be remembered as a pacifist who meant business,'' said Tom Hayden, a fellow '60s radical and member of the Chicago Seven who went on to become a California legislator. ``His pacifism was very forceful. He didn't mind interjecting himself between armed federal marshals and someone they were pushing around.''
At the Chicago Seven trial in 1969 and 1970, Dellinger and four co-defendants--Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis _ 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.
When Hoffman invited Dellinger to address the court during sentencing, he continued to speak after the judge ordered him 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.''
Greg Guma, editor of the political magazine Toward Freedom, called Dellinger ``one of the major figures in terms of peace and social justice of the last half century.''
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,'' published in 1993.
Dellinger fought for unions in the 1930s despite being called a communist, and walked with civil right leaders in the South in the 1950s and '60s, despite the risk of violence.
As a soldier in World War II he spoke out against the practice of putting blacks in the back of the train ahead of defeated Germans. During a three-year prison term--one of several stints behind bars--Dellinger refused to sit in the all-white dining area.
Just three years ago, at age 85, Dellinger got up at 2:45 a.m. at his home in Montpelier and hitched a ride to demonstrations in Quebec City against the creation of a free trade zone in the Western Hemisphere.
``Three percent of the richest people in the world control more wealth than 49 undeveloped countries,'' he said. The trade agreement ``is going to extend that kind of system.''
Dellinger contended capitalism 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.''
ping
I am sure his vote will still be counted.
Good Riddance !!
one down, six to go....
As an avowed communist, he willfully condoned the execution of more than 50 million people. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Imagine being in that retirement home with him. Always bitching, trying to form an uprising against the rice pudding, forming activists cells to call C-Span and trying to unionize the Heaton Woods Mall busses. Once a hell-raiser, always a hell-raiser.
Not even that. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin have already checked out. Tom Hayden is still around, as is Bobby Seale (I think). That accounts for five. Anyone know about the rest?
Oh, yeah, defense attorney William Kunstler went off to play poker with Old Scratch a while ago. AFAIK, Len Weinglass is still alive.
You know, if you think about it, that will probably describe a lot of FReepers in retirement homes. I'm planning on being a real pain in the rear in my golden years. : )
And his death is news, how?
OD'd on bong water.
Kerry's guilty of that too.
Hey, both of these guys are guilty of leading Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge to get the idea they could kill 2,000,000 Cambodian people and get away with it.
So, Dellinger, right up there with some of the big time genocide guys at 2,500,000 (minimum estimate), is never going to get off the great mandala. He is doomed to keep coming back in one role or another, usually bad ones, until the heat death of the current universe, and maybe beyond.
Outer Darkness is not a sufficient judgment for creatures such as Dellinger.
Well put.
Thanks for reminding us. Why doesn't the author know this? Jerry Rubin BTW, I am convinced, was on his way to becoming a Conservative.
Hoffman, Dellinger...Two down, five to go!
Hoffman, Rubin, Dellinger...make that THREE down, four to go!
Breaks my effing heart that the commie worshipping pos is dead. I hope it was a long and painful death. Will J Kerry be attending the funeral?
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