Forceful liberal in Congress for 27 years
The New York Times
Ron Dellums, who became one of the United States’ best-known black congressmen, a California Democrat with a left-wing agenda that put civil rights and programs for people ahead of weapons systems and warfare, died early Monday at his home in Washington. He was 82.
His death was confirmed by Dan Lindheim, who was an aide to Mr. Dellums on Capitol Hill and was city manager of Oakland when Mr. Dellums was a one-term mayor there a decade ago. Mr. Dellums had cancer, he said.
A former social worker representing Oakland and Berkeley, perhaps the nation’s most liberal congressional district, Mr. Dellums went to Washington in 1971 as a fiercely liberal — some said radical — firebrand protesting the Vietnam War.
He demanded a House investigation into U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. When his pleas were ignored, he held his own informal hearings, which drew national attention. As anti-war protests raged outside the Capitol, a former Army sergeant told in unsworn testimony how he and his platoon had massacred 30 men, women and children in a Vietnamese village. It was a shocking beginning.
But over the next 27 years, Mr. Dellums became a calmer voice, still defending principles as he saw them, but as a mellower graybeard spearheading the Congressional Black Caucus and conferring with the White House, the Pentagon and leaders of Congress as a member and finally chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee.
By then, a lawmaker who had cut a striking figure on joining the House of Representatives — 6 feet 4, with a modified Afro and a drooping mustache, mod ties, Edwardian jackets and bellbottom trousers — was wearing three-piece suits.
Mr. Dellums introduced hundreds of bills and resolutions that went nowhere, and was rarely on the winning side of fights. But he was an outspoken critic of presidents, Republican and Democrat, and for many Americans beyond his tiny congressional district, he championed a progressive mantra: Stop war. Cut military spending. Help people. Address the nation’s social problems.
He won a dozen re-election campaigns and the sometimes grudging respect of colleagues on both sides of the aisle. His voting record also won virtually straight A’s from labor, consumer, women’s and environmental groups. Human rights organizations hailed his fights to restrict aid to African nations, like Zaire, Burundi, Liberia and Sudan, whose regimes were openly repressive.
After a 14-year campaign against apartheid in South Africa, he wrote the 1986 legislation that mandated trade embargoes and divestment by U.S. companies and citizens of holdings in South Africa. President Ronald Reagan’s veto was overridden by Congress, a 20th-century first in foreign policy. The sanctions were lifted in 1991, when South Africa repealed its apartheid laws.
Mr. Dellums opposed every major U.S. military intervention of his tenure, except for emergency relief in Somalia in 1992, and he sued President George H.W. Bush unsuccessfully to stop the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, saying the invasion did not have congressional authorization.