RIP

He was best known to most of the country as one of the Chicago 7 (nee 8), tried for a phantom "conspiracy" to incite the violence that occurred during the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, violence that was later labeled "a police riot" by a commission set up to examine it.

But he was much more. He was a life-long pacifist, an author of several books, a union organizer in the 1930s, a civil rights activist in the 1950s and '60s, a leader of the anti-Vietnam movement in the '60s and '70s. In 1939, inspired by the example of Gandhi, he helped found the Newark Ashram in the heart of the Newark, NJ, ghetto, a forerunner of the interest both in community service and organizing and in communal living in the '60s.

During a 3-year prison term (one of many imprisonments over the years) during World War II for being a conscientious objector, he was among those who forced an end to Jim Crow seating in the dining halls of US prisons.

Greg Guma, editor of the political magazine Toward Freedom, called [him] "one of the major figures in terms of peace and social justice of the last half century."

His name was David Dellinger, and he died last week at the age of 88 in Montpelier, Vermont, at the retirement home where he'd been living.

He was at it until the end.

Just three years ago, at age 85, Dellinger got up at 2:45 a.m. at his home in Montpelier and hitched a ride to demonstrations in Quebec City against the creation of a free trade zone in the Western Hemisphere.

During the Chicago 7 trial, there were a number of stormy confrontations between the defendants and their lawyers on the one hand and the judge on the other, often triggered by the judge's patent bias in favor of the prosecution (which led to the convictions being overturned) and featuring shouted accusations. One observer later wrote that while some of the other defendants may have been louder or more dramatic, Dellinger was the one who was totally without fear.

A pretty good summation.