Politician led US moves against apartheid South Africa

FORMER California congressman Ron Dellums first won election to Capitol Hill as an antiVietnam War candidate and later led a 15year effort to enact United States sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid government.

Dellums died aged 82 at home in Washington following a battle with cancer.

A cofounder of the Congressional Black Caucus and one of Capitol Hill’s most unabashed and tenacious liberal voices, Dellums retired from the US House of Representatives in early 1998 after 27 years.

He reentered elective politics a decade later to serve four years as mayor of his native Oakland, California, starting in 2007. Dellums began his political career on the Berkeley City Council in 1967.

A former US Marine, he was recruited by peace activists in 1970 to challenge incumbent US Representative Jeffery Cohelan, a liberal Democrat seen by critics on the left as having failed to take a strong enough stance against the Vietnam War.

Dellums defeated Cohelan in the primary and went on to become the first AfricanAmerican elected from a whitemajority congressional district, California’s seventh, then 71% white. He won 12 more consecutive elections to the Oaklandbased House seat.

Branded ‘‘an out and out radical’’ during his first congressional campaign by Republican US vicepresident Spiro Agnew, Dellums accepted the label as a badge of honour, as recounted by the San Francisco Chronicle.

‘‘If it’s radical to oppose the insanity and cruelty of the Vietnam War, if it’s radical to oppose racism and sexism and all other forms of oppression, if it’s radical to want to alleviate poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness and other forms of human misery, then I’m proud to be called a radical,’’ Dellums told reporters at the time.

One of Dellums’ greatest political triumphs was congressional enactment in 1986, over the veto of Republican president Ronald Reagan, of United States economic sanctions against the apartheid policy of racial separation by South Africa’s white minority government.

Fellow Democrat Barbara Lee, according to the Chronicle, recalled Dellums telling his staffers that ‘‘the only question we should ask when we made decisions about anything is, ‘Is this the right thing to do?’.’’

Despite his reputation for being one of the Pentagon’s harshest critics, Dellums became chairman of the House armed services committee in January 1993 when Les Aspin resigned to become president Bill Clinton’s defence secretary. Dellums was forced to relinquish the post two years later, after Republicans regained control of the House. — Reuters