Ronald V. Dellums, who entered the U.S. House of Representatives in 1971 as a fiery anti-war activist from Berkeley and grew over 14 terms into a deft and respected legislator, becoming the first African-American to chair the Armed Services Committee and helping win the fight to impose economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa, died July 30. He was 82.
Dellums was raised in blue-collar Oakland where his early political ideas were shaped by an uncle, who was a prominent trade unionist and intimate of the civil rights eminence A. Philip Randolph.
A Marine Corps veteran, Dellums was a psychiatric social worker before joining the Berkeley City Council in 1967.
Amid the Vietnam War and counterculture movement, a community of anti-establishment leftists helped propel Dellums to Congress three years later. A skilled orator — and, at 6-foot-7, an imposing figure — he was attacked by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew during his first election campaign as an “out-and-out radical” who could not be trusted to hold power over admirals and generals.
“If it is radical to be against war and poverty,” Dellums responded, “then Ron Dellums is a radical.”
He arrived in Washington trailed by the image popularized by Agnew and other right-wing opponents: an “Afro-topped, bell-bottomed radical” from the “commie-pinko left-wing community of ‘Berzerkeley,’ ” as Dellums noted in his memoir.
Vowing to take on the military-industrial complex, he introduced a resolution in his freshman term calling for an investigation into possible U.S. war crimes in Indochina. When he was rebuffed, he helped conduct unofficial hearings on the controversial subject, a move that garnered national attention as well as scorn from many House colleagues.