WWII Conscientious Objector Ralph Di Gia Dies At 93
by John M Miller
http://newsblaze.com/...
Ralph DiGia, World War II conscientious objector, lifelong pacifist and social justice activist, died February 1 in New York City. He was 93.
[...]
DiGia's activism took him through countless arrests and a stretch in federal prison, thousands of meetings and hundreds of demonstrations, hunger strikes, a bicycle ride across Europe, relief work in Bosnia, and not a few New York Mets baseball games.
80 Years of Activism
Born in the Bronx to a family of Italian immigrants in 1914, DiGia grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
[...]
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. [...]
DiGia spent the next three years in federal prisons.
It was at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut, and later at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, that he met other draft resisters, like Dave Dellinger, who four 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. And it was in prison that he and other COs would use the only force available to them - a hunger strike - to compel the prison system to integrate its dining halls. ...
[...] In 1951, DiGia, Dellinger, Sutherland, and fellow CO Art Emery bicycled from Paris to Vienna, handing out antiwar leaflets as they went...
[...] In the early 1960s, he was arrested more than once for not taking shelter during "civil defense" drills. In 1964 he served four weeks in jail in Albany, Georgia (with, among others, the late peace theorist Barbara Deming)...
Vietnam and After
[...] In 1971 - when he was among 13,500 arrested in the May Day antiwar actions in Washington - he married Karin, becoming stepfather to her children. Their son was born in 1973.
[...] In 1977, when thousands protested nuclear power at Seabrook in New Hampshire, he was there. A year later, he was arrested on the White House lawn, demanding nuclear disarmament. He was in Central Park in June 1982 when a million people said "No Nukes!"...
In the early 1990s, as the tensions in former Yugoslavia turned deadlier, his wife Karin transformed, a nonprofit she had founded into a Bosnian relief agency. [...] DiGia often accompanied her, becoming as beloved a figure in Bosnia as he was in New York.
(now)Into his 80s, DiGia kept accumulating a record: He was arrested in Washington at WRL's "A Day Without the Pentagon" in 1998 and-possibly for the last time-at the mass protests against the acquittal of the NYPD officers who shot Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999...
Imagine all the people
living life in Peace
In 1996, the Peace Abbey, the multi-faith retreat center in Sherburne, MA, gave Ralph its Courage of Conscience award (previously given to civil rights activist Rosa Parks, poet Maya Angelou, and the Dalai Lama), "for his example as a conscientious objector and for over forty years of dedicated service at the War Resisters League." In 2005, WRL gave its 40th annual Peace Award to DiGia and his longtime colleague, former photographer Karl Bissinger.
You might say I'm a dreamer
but I'm not the only one
I hope someday you join us
and the world will live as one
This winter, after a fall and hip fracture, he developed pneumonia and died Friday in St. Vincent's Hospital. Karin and their children were with him when he died.
"when asked what he wished for more
world peace or the METS to win the world series it is said he replied...
(sung to the tune of take me out to the ballgame)
I know that WORLD PEACE is the right thing to choose
but I hate it SO MUCH every time the METS lose sooo
its root root root for home team
if they don't win its a shame
LETS ALL TOAST TO WORLD PEACE
at the old ball game....