Former congressman, champion of liberal causes dies

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.

The office of Libby Schaaf, mayor of Oakland, Calif., confirmed the death. Additional details were not immediately available.

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 antiestablishment leftists helped propel Dellums to Congress three years later. A skilled orator — and, at 6 feet, 7 inches, an imposing figure — he was attacked by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew during his first election campaign as an “outand-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 2000 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.

Dellums quickly realized that without a seat on the Armed Services Committee, which had no black members, he could accomplish very little. The newly formed Congressional Black Caucus advocated for Dellums, but House leadership made clear that Dellums’ leftist views were incompatible with the influential oversight body and that he was not the African American they had in mind.

Rep. Louis Stokes, DOhio, chairman of the black caucus, later told The Washington Post: “I dropped my lunch right then and there and went over to where the committee was meeting. I reminded (then-Speaker) Carl Albert that white people don’t tell black people who their leaders are.”

Dellums got the seat. But the hard-line conservative committee chairman, F. Edward Hébert, D-La., forced also to accept Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., opposed having a woman as well as a black man on his panel and made his displeasure known by reportedly forcing them to share one chair.

“Everything in me wanted to rage against this indignity,” Dellums later said. “But I thought, let’s not give these folks the luxury of seeing that . ... We sat cheek to cheek in the chair for the entire meeting.” (A second chair arrived at the next meeting.)

As his seniority and expertise grew, he adapted in manner and dress. He dropped the confrontational approach in favor of courtly persuasion. He became one of the House’s nattiest dressers, with a preference for pinstripe suits and polished shoes. He did not, however, curb his devotion to antiwar and liberal causes, trying to scissor the Pentagon budget and stamp out the MX missile, President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” antimissile program and other military projects.