Dellums, Ron

DELLUMS, RON (1935-2018). California representative to the US Congress, later a mayor of Oakland, Ronald Vernie Dellums was a forceful figure in the Black Left for more than a quarter century, a key figure in the Rainbow Coalition, and an honorary co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Dellums, son of a longhoreman and nephew of an organizer in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, came into Congress from Oakland and Berkeley in 1971 as a ferocious opponent of the Vietnam War. He set a precedent by being the first Black candidate ever elected from a district in which people of color were a minority of the voters. Serving until 1997, Dellums moved quickly into demands for investigations of US war crimes. He forcefully opposed not only every US invasion thereafter, but insisted that the so-called defense budget could be redirected toward solutions to the social problems and especially race-based poverty. His alternative budget proposals, never passed, offered a possible way forward for the Left to create a successful coalition with liberals, who mostly remained skeptical of his ideas when not downright opposed to them.

A key figure in the campaign against South African apartheid, Dellums supplied legislation to embargo trade and demand divestment, sanctions that finally passed over the veto of Ronald Reagan. Notwithstanding his militant opposition to military budgets, he became Chair of the Armed Services Committee in 1993 and played a key role in demanding, if unsuccessfully, Congressional oversight on future US military adventures. His view of CIA meddling in global affairs was notoriously severe: “We should dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, nail by nail, brick by brick,” as he put it in 1996.

During the 1980s, Dellums urged the creation of the Rainbow Coalition, led by Jesse Jackson, having declined an offer to run as an independent candidate for president on a civil rights ticket in 1980. Careful of his ties to progressive Democrats, he embraced the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee during the 1970s. Its successor, DSA, widely regarded him as the most prestigious Congressional figure committed to versions of socialism.

Dellums also took part in, or sponsored, various activities related to particular Communist Party projects, including international youth congresses, and wrote for Freedomways, widely considered the most prestigious publication in the Popular Front milieu. He was a vigorous supporter of Father Aristide, Haitian president forced out of office by the US state department and of the short-lived government of the Grenadian revolution. As representative from the Bay Area, Dellums served as a major supporter of an almost endless series of radical coalitions, antiwar to environmental, racial justice to public art.
Announcing his intention to leave Congress before the 1998 election (he was succeeded by Barbara Lee), Dellums lobbied for various causes in Washington, DC for a decade and then ran for the mayor of Oakland. Armed with his prestige and a well-oiled political machine, Dellums swept into office in 2007, succeeding former governor Jerry Brown. Dellums’s mayoral tenure, marked with a wide range of social problems in the city, ended less than happily, and he did not run for election again in 2011.

Dellums, Ron and H. Lee Halterman. Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.