Ralph DiGia | |
---|---|
Born | December 13, 1914 |
Died | February 1, 2008 (aged 93) |
Education | City College of New York |
Known for | pacifism |
Spouse | Karin |
Ralph DiGia (December 13, 1914 – February 1, 2008) was a World War II conscientious objector, lifelong pacifist and social justice activist, and staffer for 52 years at the War Resisters League.
Born in the Bronx to a family of Italian immigrants (his father was an anarchist barber) in 1914, DiGia grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A 1927 rally for Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti set him on the path he would follow for 80 years.
At the College of the City of New York, where he was studying bookkeeping, DiGia signed the "Oxford Pledge," refusing to participate in the coming war. In 1942, when the Selective Service System ordered him to report for induction, he said he was a conscientious objector. But his objections to war were based on ethics, not religion, and the draft board had no category for secular COs. The U.S. Attorney's office referred him to pacifist lawyer Julian Cornell, at the War Resisters League; Cornell lost his case, and DiGia spent the next three years in federal prisons.
At Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut, and later at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, he met other draft resisters, like Dave Dellinger, who some decades later would be a defendant in the Chicago Seven case, and Bill Sutherland, who would move to Africa after the war and eventually become a pan-Africanist advocate for nonviolence. While in prison, DiGia and other COs conducted hunger strikes to compel the prison system to integrate its dining halls. They succeeded. In 1946, along with Dellinger, Igal Roodenko, and others, DeGia helped found the radical pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Revolution.[1]
© MMXXIII Rich X Search. We shall prevail. All rights reserved. Rich X Search