In 1948, he co-founded the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. In February 1946, Dellinger helped to found the radical pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Revolution. 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. 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 because of the protests. Steel, or the Chase Manhattan Bank, even if Hitler was running the other side.' Political careerĭuring World War II, he was an imprisoned conscientious objector and anti-war agitator. I wasn't even tempted to pick up a gun to fight for General Motors, U.S. Dellinger, who opposed the war's victorious Nationalist faction, led by Francisco Franco, later recalled, 'After Spain, World War II was simple. While at Oxford University, he visited Nazi Germany and drove an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. Rejecting his comfortable background, he walked out of Yale one day to live with hobos during the Depression. At Yale he had been a classmate and friend of the economist and political theorist Walt Rostow. Dellinger graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in economics, began a doctorate for a year at New College, Oxford, and studied theology at Union Theological Seminary of Columbia University with the intention of becoming a Congregationalist minister.

From Yale to Jail by David T. Dellinger