REPRESENTATIVE RON DELLUMS: Black, Radical, and Hopeful
Knoll, Erwin
REPRESENTATIVE RON DELLUMS: Black, Radical, and Hopeful by ERWIN KNOLL By this time, if the Pentagon is on its toes, it has alerted the commander of every military installation in the continental...
...Black people's humanity and dignity may be the only thing that can save this country...
...They just get ground up by the system...
...A mess hall that serves 200 men has cutlery for thirty-five...
...Maybe we can be the people that can turn this country around...
...I tell my colleagues in the Congress, "Hey, man, you want to know something about all them young white radicals...
...Since April, Dellums has been coming together with human beings in the military...
...Fort Meade, Maryland...
...The people who are talking about violence are elitists, and they are as much my enemies as the racists...
...When you travel around this country you see that the majority of people are moderate to conservative to reactionary...
...These are the young men we ask to kill or be killed...
...Black people have a right to stand up and oppose the absurdity of sending our eighteen and nineteen-year-olds over there to be killed...
...So had another prisoner, Private William H. Sellers, who had advised Dellums: "I have been redrafted after serving in the Army for 2 years four months and 11 days and was given General discharge for not being able to adjust to the Army way of life...
...One such topic is what he calls "the extremely incestuous dialogue on the left," where "liberals talk only to liberals, radicals talk only to radicals, revolutionaries talk only to revolutionaries, and anybody to^the left of that talks only to the CIA...
...Maybe it's because the world they live in is so horrible that they have to create a new one...
...Now they are confronted with young people who challenge that ethic and tradition, who have different value systems, who have a tremendous sense of human values...
...His recent visits to military installations have given Dellums occasion to reflect on his own service as a Marine...
...Black Panthers...
...Second, I must bring these conditions to the attention of my colleagues in Congress who are charged with legislating on these matters...
...Twenty-five per cent of the deaths are black deaths...
...It took Congressman Dellums to get you to meet with us...
...His first job—as a psychiatric social worker for the state —ended abruptly when one of his "clients," a black man who had been diagnosed as psychotic, said he didn't want to talk about his emotions...
...the rest eat with their fingers...
...On a train platform in Trenton after his visit to Fort Dix, a young man, white, long-haired, approaches and says, "Pardon me, but aren't you Ron Dellums...
...Last fall, after he defeated a Cold War liberal, five-term Representative Jeffery Cohelan, in a hard-fought Democratic primary, Vice President Agnew denounced Dellums as "a radical extremist," a man whose purpose in running for office was "bringing the walls down...
...It wants to dismiss the people who are raising the questions as undesirable human beings...
...And if we do that we're going to see some changes in this country...
...Activists...
...He stands six feet four inches tall, and his graceful 200-pound frame is usually draped in mod apparel...
...Dellums had a sterner rebuke for a soldier who raised the question of violence as a last recourse for the American left: If you're talking about peace in the world, picking up a gun is insane...
...His hair, worn "natural," makes him seem even taller, and the gray in his temples and mustache conveys mature dignity...
...On those days," said Dellums, "I fake it...
...It's not just a question of voting on the floor of Congress—most of the Congressmen there are concerned about whether they get re-elected, not about solving the problems of this country...
...He is recognizable and recognized...
...He wants to be the Congressional voice of the military— not of the Joint Chiefs and the brass, who suffer no lack of Congressional voices, but of the men in the ranks who are, Dellums believes, one of America's neglected minorities, victims of repression, discrimination, and poverty...
...he just wanted a job...
...Dellums plays his appearance for what it's worth...
...Like many large men, Dellums speaks softly, gently...
...Black people are human beings in this country, and black people have a right to be for peace in Indochina just as any other human beings...
...Louis, wrote: "You have rallied the dwindling hopes of students and citizens who had given up on Congress, politicians, and the vote...
...Stepping out of a car at Fort Bragg to meet a covey of colonels hastily assembled for escort duty, he stands tall, puts his right hand in the small of his back, takes a deep breath, and whispers to an accompanying reporter, "Pardon me while I assume my Congressional pose...
...They weren't parachuted into America from some foreign country...
...My efforts have barely scratched the surface...
...We've got to start turning that cat around, man, so that the majority of the American people get their heads screwed on right, so that they understand that they're overworked, underpaid, overtaxed, and being exploited every single day...
...But when the system felt it would rather create a nigger than put the military high command and the civilian leadership on trial, they turned on k Lieutenant Calley...
...After that experience, his studies started to slide...
...We operate," a colonel told me while Dellums visited the stockade, "on the Army principle of CYA—cover your ass...
...There were regulations that had to be followed...
...The military establishment has been a sacred cow for far too many years...
...When Dellums talks about peace, he means peace—not just American withdrawal from Indochina, but withdrawal from the mentality that relies on death and the threat of death as a national way of life...
...As for wanting to bring the walls down, Dellums confessed to that charge, too...
...Dellums left social work to become a street worker in a ghetto antipoverty program, and entered community politics...
...He is that rarest of phenomena, a radical in the Congress of the United States...
...I believe you do have problems," he said...
...So I've got to fight my way and take my struggle to the people...
...Give us a chance...
...You can't do that as a purist...
...Treatment for addicts, he said, "is a big joke around here...
...You're just running on because the Congressman is here," a black WAC shouted, and a soldier said: "This is the first time we've ever met our CO...
...The military is steeped in its own ethic and traditions...
...Dellums set out on the road toward changing the nature of this country shortly after his discharge from the Marine Corps...
...I wasn't crazy, so I asked them why, and all they talked about was the emptiness, the hypocrisy, the contradictions of Middle Class life in America...
...In 1954, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Marine Corps...
...The one remaining constituency that needs to be mobilized if we are serious about peace is the military, Dellums says...
...Their feelings ought to be expressed, and if they are expressed loud enough and strong enough, maybe somebody will get the message...
...Both had been drafted after serving in the Army, both were "very complicated cases," and it would take much processing, much paperwork, to free them from the stockade and return them to civilian life...
...The son of a Pullman porter, he was born thirty-five years ago in the black ghetto of West Oakland, California...
...He is that rarest of phenomena, a radical in the Congress of the United States/1 Of the conditions he has seen so far, nothing is in more desperate need of correction than the Personnel Control Facility (PCF) at Fort Dix—one of twenty-one such centers established by the Army at bases around the country to deal with the thousands of men who are apprehended as AWOL or return voluntarily to duty...
...They tell you, 'That's your problem.'" Why do people shoot heroin into their arms...
...Dellums asks officers...
...He wore the uniform, he had the bars, he carried the flag, and he went out to do the job they told him to do—killing, even killing innocent men, worn-en, and children...
...He sees evidence of this in the rapidly rising AWOL and desertion rates, in the widespread and growing use of drugs, in the open hostility displayed by enlisted men toward their officers and senior non-coms, in the disaffection even of many young officers...
...Truly, Aaron Carson Private Carson had, indeed, written truly, Fort Bragg officers acknowledged when Dellums visited him in the stockade in April...
...Four years ago he was elected to the Berkeley City Council, but he soon began wondering "whether I could function in the framework of the electoral process—whether the Council could really help the elderly, the young, and the racial minorities deal with the basic problems confronting human beings...
...Their discussions rarely deal with the problems of the individuals who are caught up in the realities of war and militarism...
...I asked, when he was angered and saddened by what he had seen in the Personnel Facility at Fort Dix, what he did on those days when he had no faith, when he didn't think he could do any good, when it didn't seem as if anything he did would make a difference...
...I am not going to back away from being called a radical," Dellums said...
...Men sleep without blankets, sheets, or pillows...
...I say that violence is totally nonproductive — totally dysfunctional — even in revolutionary terms...
...The suggestion came recently from a black officer, and Dellums said he took "extraordinary objection" to it...
...He was for bringing down the walls between the races, between the classes, between the generations in America...
...What angers Dellums most is the idea, occasionally advanced by his own black constituents, that the war is not —should not be—a top-priority issue for a black Congressman...
...This is 1971...
...I'm going to write a report, put it in the Congressional Record, ask for action by the Armed Services Committee...
...In Fayetteville, North Carolina, a local reporter commented after hearing him speak to a black civic group, "I'd heard he was pretty radical, but he sounded right on to me...
...Having them stand up for peace can be a very powerful thing...
...You should have seen it in January —it was ice," one soldier said...
...A very different kind of letter came from Private Aaron Carson, 278 36 2876, who wrote from the Fort Bragg stockade: Dear Mr...
...Ron Dellums still has hope...
...They're inside...
...They were born to you...
...The men in the PCF are free to come and go, and though a majority have voluntarily returned to duty from AWOL, many take off again...
...There are a few topics, however, that set his teeth on edge, that cause his voice to rise and move into a rapid-fire rebuttal...
...I'm thirty-five years old, and I don't want my kids to go kill or be killed in anybody's war...
...His style comes as a surprise to those prepared for table-thumping oratory...
...I am but one man against the Army...
...That's why I'm out here...
...The Vice President was right on target...
...The post commander, Colonel A. W. Alexander, promised to investigate all complaints and assure "a fair shake" for every member of his command...
...If you don't want to stay, they tell you to go," one soldier on KP duty in the mess hall told Dellums...
...So you've got to define the war issue as it relates to domestic questions...
...You don't build a movement out of pessimism and negativism...
...I was a squared-away Marine, but it was an unreal world, totally unreal, and I couldn't survive in that kind of world for the rest of my life...
...As long as we spend billions of dollars to kill and maim, and spend crumbs for expedient liberal poverty programs that pit people against themselves all over this country, we're in trouble...
...He's likely to drop in unannounced, inspect your facilities, talk to your troops, ask embarrassing questions...
...You build a movement out of hope...
...Come on in and see me about them...
...What I'm talking about is freedom and peace and the ability of human beings to come together...
...Ron Dellums, freshman Representative from Berkeley, is carving out a new constituency...
...We've got to join this world...
...Or at least it has failed to change—has failed to keep pace with the drastic changes among the young men entering the armed services...
...I think we can solve them...
...We have to raise serious questions in America...
...He has visited the wounded at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, and met with sailors aboard the aircraft carrier Constellation off San Diego...
...You've got to come down to the ground where life is funky and real for people...
...Its leaders have successfully negotiated the system...
...When he asked for questions and comments, the GIs told of poor medical care, of discrimination in assignments and promotions, of being punished for taking their complaints to the Inspector General, of being harassed by the military police for "organizing a black power movement" when they met to discuss their problems in the barracks...
...Angela Davis...
...He made the race, reluctantly, as a Democrat "because the people I wanted to help were essentially in the Democratic Party and you can't accomplish anything unless you start where people are, not where you think they ought to be...
...I cut my classes and sat in the bleachers and cried for two or three hours...
...REPRESENTATIVE RON DELLUMS: Black, Radical, and Hopeful by ERWIN KNOLL By this time, if the Pentagon is on its toes, it has alerted the commander of every military installation in the continental United States: Be on the lookout for Representative Ronald V. Dellums, Democrat of California...
...Strangers far from Berkeley (or Washington) stop him on the street...
...Tm only one individual...
...Later he told a reporter that while some of the complaints were "probably justified," the men who had voiced them were "the dregs of the Army...
...The political leadership in America needs to know how the young people feel about it...
...If all were present, there would be no beds to accommodate them...
...At Fort Meade, some 300 soldiers, most of them black, turned out at a post theater to hear and cheer Dellums while the post commander and his deputy sat sternly, arms folded, on the stage behind the Congressman...
...You've got to talk about the war as it relates to poor people when you talk to poor people, working class people when you talk to working class people, chicanos when you talk to chicanos...
...Men speak of having boots taken off their feet while they sleep, of having their wallet pockets cut away with razors...
...The Dix PCF is a jungle where men are "processed" in a huge cage—sometimes for forty-eight hours or more— and then assigned to filthy, ramshackle barracks built during World War II to last five years...
...It's the war that's at the basis of this economy, man...
...For every young man who refuses to step forward and be inducted into the Army, there are thousands more within the military who feel exactly as he does...
...On the day of Dellums' visit, 344 were present for duty in the PCF and 461 were AWOL...
...But he's hardly a Party man...
...Below his rolled up sleeves, needle track marks were clearly visible on his arm...
...Maybe some day we can create a world where we don't need a military, but in the meantime we have to do something to make it humane...
...After an hour or so of occasionally vituperative dialogue between the commander and his troops, Colonel Alexander announced that he had been "enlightened...
...not just ending the war, but ending all war...
...A black professor at Washington University, St...
...Break it down for the people so that they understand that there's welfare for the rich in this country, that the real welfare programs are farm subsidies, oil depletion allowances, tax loopholes, cost-plus war contracts...
...We have to get our heads out of that patronizing approach that the only kind of issues are black issues...
...These aren't guys who want to make waves...
...If being an advocate of peace, justice, and humanity toward all human beings is radical, then I'm glad to be called a radical...
...A few weeks ago, when House Democrats voted in caucus to call for an end of the Vietnam war by December 31, 1972...
...It's not true...
...Campus Unrest...
...And that means ending the insanity of war, that means ending the absurdity of repression and racism and discrimination and poverty and hunger and disease...
...I think I have a responsibility to do two things: First, I have to bring these matters to the attention of the American public...
...We've understood that right along, because when this system cannot deal with its problems, it says, "Look...
...He has heard harrowing tales of military injustice, and seen evidence that the tales are true...
...We've gotten so esoteric and so pure that we only talk about the war as an immoral thing, but how can a person with a first-grade education relate to its immorality when the country is wiping him out with poverty and hunger...
...It's unable to understand...
...Our first order of business has to be to create a climate in this country that allows people to start re-evaluating what's being said to them, what's being fed to them, in the newspapers, in the magazines, in political speeches...
...They say ecology is not a black issue—but we live in the dirtiest, filthiest communities in America...
...And so the silent majority gets diverted from the problems of this country to look at scapegoats...
...He's black, he's some kind of radical, and he's bad news...
...On the floor of the House of Representatives, as on his tour of military bases, Dellums is a hard man to lose in a crowd...
...And if that's true, then maybe we have to change the nature of the world they live in, and if that world is the military, we have to make that world h umane...
...At one point, when I got to the outer limits of the Middle Class and I opened the door to walk in, I saw ten million young whites running like hell to get out...
...I come from Berkeley, and if you live in Berkeley for six months you go on a trip...
...They wake up oriented to hope...
...To say that is not a copout for the movement, it's a sophisticated, intelligent approach toward building a strategy for change...
...So what are you and I going to do about changing the nature of the system...
...I just want to thank you for being in Congress...
...What we've got to do is find a strategy and a rhetoric that allows the majority of people to understand that our immoral and illegal involvement in Indochina hurts them, and talk about the reasons...
...Can you understand that that has nothing to do with Vietnam...
...People who live in Berkeley suddenly see the world consisting of a majority of radicals and revolutionaries...
...They say war is not a black issue —but we're dying there...
...And if it is radical to oppose the use of seventy per cent of Federal monies for destruction and war, .then I am a radical...
...fifty-five per cent of the casualties are black casualties...
...Then I gave away my spikes and glove...
...The silent majority is the most manipulated, programmed, duped group in this country...
...The military system, it seems to him, has changed^-has become more brutal, more dehumanized...
...Delums Im writting this letter because I heard that youre coming here on the 13th of April, and I would like very much to talk with you, this is my problem, Im 35 years old and Im in the army and only been in for 10 months, I have been undesirable discharged from the army before, in 1968 an army recruiter came to my house and took me to Jacksonville Fla for test and examination, and I told him I didn't want to join the army, in 1970 I was picked up and carried to Ft Jackson SC for basic training and I have been trying to prove that I was discharged with a bad discharge before, my wife dont have any means of support, because she havent got but two checks from the army that was June and July of 70, I went AWOL 24 Sept 70, not for that reason but because my company wouldnt let me sign in 4 days early off leave and I couldnt sleep in the barracks and couldnt eat in the mess hall, so I really didnt have any choice but to go back home at Eastman Ga, where they came and got me, I feel that I am much to old to be of any use to the army, my wife was in an auto accident, and I would like to go home with a discharge so I can take care of her because the army isnt even paying me...
...And the military leadership is unable to cope with that...
...Despite his doubts he agreed last year to run for Congress...
...How are we going to deal with the problems of education, housing, health care, guaranteed annual income, all the other issues that need to be addressed in this country so long as we spend fifty and sixty and seventy and 100 billion dollars a year for killing other human beings—most of them black or brown or poor people...
...ERWIN KNOLL is the Washington Editor of The Progressive...
...People in this country don't wake up to the bullet or the bomb, man...
...His idol was Jackie Robinson and he wanted to play professional baseball, but he was dropped from the high school team, Dellums recalls, because "the coach didn't like blacks...
...But to enlisted men he says, // you get hung up with the damn needle, man, you're not dealing with the problem of changing the nature of this country so it speaks to your family and you as human beings...
...The political rhetoric in this country doesn't do anything about educating people...
...And, always, he has talked about war crimes and the crime of war...
...The elitist stands up on Cloud Nine saying out of one corner of his mouth, "I relate to the masses of people," but out of the other corner of his mouth he's saying, "The masses of people are so stupid that I have to free them...
...Dellums made no effort to conceal his contempt...
...What it means is that racism in the educational institutions in this country shackles black soldiers and sends them to Vietnam to fight and die...
...He wants to speak to their needs and he wants to enlist their energies in the cause he puts above all others: peace...
...Both the Democratic and Republican Parties are busy telling people what they want to hear instead of telling them what they have to know in order to make intelligent decisions...
...Calley's a scapegoat, and they hope that you'll look at Calley so that you won't look at the people who established the policy in Indochina that allows us to kill, kill, kill...
...Lieutenant Calley bought the whole program...
...Fort Bragg, North Carolina...
...I tried...
...He earned an associate degree in social sciences at Oakland City College, a bachelor's degree at San Francisco State, and a master's in psychiatric social work at the University of California...
...I've come all the way to Washington to join 434 other people most of whom are way behind their own people, most of whom are preoccupied with their own self-aggrandizement...
...There are no First Amendment rights, no Fourteenth Amendment rights...
...The reason is that they pass the tests low, so they end up in the infantry, and they end up in the front lines...
...On the day Dellums visited, uninvited and unannounced, latrines were clogged and filthy water stood six inches deep in the shower stalls...
...The black high school he attended did not offer college preparatory courses, so he shifted to another, predominantly white, school by giving an uncle's address as his own...
...If they choose at some point to say, ((Man, I'm not going," then my only position is to back them up...
...these, the commanding officer explained, are stolen to obtain money for heroin...
...I wish Congress would roll over and play dead for some black cat with a natural from Berkeley, but they're not about to do that...
...There's no such thing as due process in the military...
...To a radical soldier at Fort Bragg who asked him how to deal with the question of American "economic imperialism," Dellums replied: Talk about economic imperialism doesn't mean anything except to a cat who went to college...
...Fort Leavenworth, Kansas...
...Nobody talks to the substantial majority of the American people who still believe that we are beating back some weird monster that is stalking the earth...
...Dellums has a lifetime of experience as a nigger in America...
...The only way the people can rethink their emphasis on militarism is to let them know how their sons are being treated in the military...
...A strange, old-fashioned kind of radical—one who believes in building bridges, in persuading people, in working together, in making the system move...
...My head's in a different place now...
...Dellums gets letters, hundreds of them every week, from all parts of the country...
...I think Lieutenant Calley is probably one of the wisest young white men in America: He now understands that you don't have to be black to be a nigger in this society...
...You've got to deal with the fact that if there is to be change in this country, the majority of people have to give their tacit or overt approval for that change...
...they know the situation...
...And if the committee doesn't act, I'll go on doing what I can do to focus attention on conditions that desperately need correcting...
...We have a generation of young Americans—black, white, brown, red, and yellow—who are hellbent not to destroy the good in society but to change the institutions so that the good in society is able to reflect itself...
...He has talked to soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey...
...You know, many of our folks said the way to make it in America was to get into the Middle Class...
Vol. 35 • June 1971 • No. 6
