David McReynolds, longtime peace activist and agitator, dead at 88
By Ellen Moynihan
Aug 17, 2018 | 5:30 PM
David McReynolds, field secretary of the War Resistance League. (Ed Molinari / New York Daily News)
Longtime peace activist, writer and photographer David McReynolds died Friday after a fall in his New York home. He was 88.
McReynolds, who was also the first openly gay candidate for president, moved to New York in the mid-1950s. A few years later, he began working with the War Resisters League. His career spanned four decades; he retired in 1999.
Born in Los Angeles in 1929, he came to the city after graduating from UCLA and dived head-first into politics and activism, his friends said.
"I hardly know what to say. He was such an important figure in my mind and in my life,” said Bob Fass, host of WBAI's “Radio Unnamable,” a pioneer of the free-form style. "He was a good friend. … I’m still a little shocked."
The two met in the 1960s while organizing a protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which turned ugly when the Chicago Police Department declared open season on the activists. The violence was broadcast live on TV.
"We went to confront the Democrats," Fass said. "There were a lot of personalities."
McReynolds became involved in politics as a teenager, first with the youth group of the Prohibition Party, then as a Socialist. He ran for Congress in 1958 and 1968, and president in both 1980 and 2000 as a member of the Socialist Party.
A 2004 bid for senator as a Green Party candidate was also unsuccessful. Despite never holding public office, McReynolds stayed close to politics and never stopped organizing, writing and opining.
Fass said his friend should be remembered most for his peace-loving beliefs.
"He was against violence and against war," Fass said. "He was very important in organizing against it."
Last summer, McReynolds posted a lengthy reflection on the process of aging on Facebook.
"It is about realizing we — those of us in our 80s — will be here for a while, and need to treat ourselves with a bit of discipline. We are needed, not to complain but to resist, to use the wisdom we have gained, often at a steep price, to stand for sanity in our world, and for a sense of compassion in our relationships,” he wrote.
Source from New York Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-news-david-mcreynolds-dead-88-story.html
David McReynolds: Peace Movement Titan Is Gone
Another Eminent Pacifist leader Is Gone: David McReynolds
I only sort of knew David McReynolds, but he hovered significantly in the background of peace work during my apprenticeship in the Vietnam years.
David McReynolds, pacifist organizer stalwart, October 25, 1929 - August 17, 2018.
My most vivid memory of David was not a personal encounter, but in the pages of WIN Magazine, a “radical pacifist” journal published by the War Resisters League. In 1969 he joined several other elder eminences in coming out there. These were the first confrontations I had had with homosexuals as sympathetic figures and colleagues.
His article was more personal than political, often embarrassed about how much his struggles in and out of the closet had cut into his driving impulse to organize nonviolent action against war and imperialism. Its candor and humility cut right through my unthinking, reflexive homophobia, pointing a way forward from it which I have worked ever since to follow.
Otherwise, his principal habitat was New York City’s intense but esoteric subculture of leftist sectarianism, which I followed for a bit but never really got drawn into. It gave him a base, in the Socialist Party (which was not communist, but look it up if you want to know more), from which he carried on his long organizing career in the War Resisters League, which made a big but mostly unheralded impact during the long, bleak Vietnam years.
One of his most visible protests came on December 6, 1965, when he joined a small group for draft-age men in the public burning of their daft cards. It made the front page of the New York Times.
A local paper reported a reunion of some of the group two years ago:
“McReynolds, [raised in Los Angeles, as a serious Baptist, but now] an atheist who lives in the East Village, described his decision to burn his draft card as “an act of penance” for supporting President Johnson the year before.
“I thought he would stop the slide to war,” he recalled. “I felt so betrayed by the horror of Vietnam.”
McReynolds (the tallest one) burns his draft card, December 6, 1965.
All of the five draft-card burners were eventually arrested and most served short prison sentences, except for McReynolds, who by then was too old to be inducted. Jim Wilson, now about 70 and active back then in the Catholic Movement “by way of Selma,” received the harshest penalty — two years of hard time behind bars from a three-year sentence for failing to report for induction. He was 20 or 21.”
I smiled to read in the New York Daily News online obituary to discover that Dave’s first foray into politics as a teenager was with the Prohibition Party. Later, it says, he was the first openly gay candidate for president, running on the Socialist Party ticket in 1980 (when he got 6898 votes) and 2000 (when his tally dropped to 5602).
From a 2011 speech he gave at a book party for a dual biography of him and his feminist contemporary, Barbara Deming:
McReynolds, awaiting arrest, again.
It has been a good life in which, looking back, I am moved by the thought that at one time or another I walked in the company of giants such as Alvin Ailey, Norma Becker, Karl Bissinger, Maris Cakars, Sam Coleman, Dave Dellinger, Barbara Deming, Ralph DiGia, William Douthard, Peggy Duff, Allen Ginsberg, Gil Green, Arthur Kinoy, A.J. Muste, Grace Paley, Igal Roodenko, Bayard Rustin, Myrtle Solomon, and Norman Thomas. And was arrested with more than half of them.
I am deeply moved by those who organized this event and by WRL, which put up with me for nearly four decades, and the Socialist Party, which twice honored me with their nomination for President. . . .
First, do not be dismayed that we are in such troubled time. Large numbers of Americans seem impressed by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, or Donald Trump. Would you rather have found yourselves in a comfortable time when your voice wasn’t needed?
Think back to the other times we have lived through. The great war for Four Freedoms when we put Japanese in concentration camps on the West Coast. McCarthyism, when people were jailed for their political beliefs.
I remember, at UCLA, a group of us young radicals met at the beach shack in Ocean Park, 132 ½ Ashland Ave., for a serious discussion of whether we should not all leave for Costa Rica. One of us was taking flying lessons, and one of us was arranging for renting or buying a plane.
We voted not to go — though we were convinced we would all end in prison, as indeed some of my close friends at the time, Vern Davidson and others, did, for refusing the draft. Think of the fact that south of the Mason-Dixon line whites and blacks were separated on buses and trains, and blacks in the South had no vote.
Dave’s NY Daily News obit. Full text here: https://tinyurl.com/yafywg7q
Even in defeat we are victorious, for we have given our lives a meaning others should envy. In struggling for something greater than ourselves, we will be transformed.
Thank you, Dave.
Source from Friendly Letter: https://afriendlyletter.com/david-mcreynolds-peace-movement-titan-is-gone/
