Ron Dellums

• Born: November 24, 1935
• Birthplace: Oakland, California
• Died: July 30, 2018
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Politician

As a member of Congress, Dellums brought a number of controversial but significant issues, ethnic and ideological, to the floor of the US House of Representatives.

Area of achievement: Government and politics

Early Life

The father of Ronald Vernie Dellums, Verney Dellums, was a longshoreman who worked in the San Francisco Bay area and was an activist in the organized-labor movement alongside his brother, C. L. Dellums, who was a leader in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. After graduating from high school, Ron Dellums served in the Marine Corps and returned to school, earning an AA degree from Oakland City College and in 1960 a BA from San Francisco State College. In 1962, he received an MA in social work from the University of California at Berkeley, where he became a member of the first primarily African American fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha.

While Dellums was a student in Berkeley he married his second wife, Leola “Roscoe” Higgs, who also graduated from San Francisco State (in 1966, after the birth of their children). During the years of their marriage, which ended in divorce in 1998, Leola first made her mark as a teacher and curriculum specialist in the East Bay Skills Center. After she and Dellums moved to Washington, DC, in 1971, she received her JD degree in 1982 from Georgetown University. Later she worked with the American Civil Liberties Union and served in the District of Columbia judicial system and as a special assistant to Texas congressman Mickey Leland.

Life’s Work

From 1963 to 1967, Dellums served in several social service programs, ranging from the California Department of Mental Hygiene to the Bay Area Social Planning Council. He was first elected to public office in 1967, when he gained a seat on the city council of Berkeley. He would hold this post during the height of the politically volatile period between 1967 and 1970. When he decided to become a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives in 1970, he may have been aided by the fact that a reapportionment process made Oakland the core of a majority African American congressional district.

Another factor in the Democratic primary race may have been the fact that the white incumbent, Jeffery Cohelan, mainly emphasized ties with organized labor and failed to acknowledge the rising tide of antiwar sentiment and race-related issues in the Berkeley-Oakland area. In fact, in the first year of his service in the House, Dellums clearly stated his opposition to the Vietnam War. Attention to his antiwar stance was not limited to the House floor. In a highly publicized case of “mistaken identity,” a Capitol Hill police officer apologized for having clubbed Dellums (whom he mistook for “just another” black protester) during an antiwar rally near the Capitol.

Opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa was also one of Dellums’s priorities beginning in 1972. His leadership in this area took fourteen years to pay dividends, with the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. In 1971, Dellums joined twelve other African American congressmen to form the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Over the next few years he stood out as one of the most outspoken members of the CBC.

After reelection in 1972, Dellums received his first important congressional committee assignment, to the House Armed Services Committee. It seemed inevitable that conservative congressmen would object, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to his nomination, not on grounds of race but on his publicly stated commitment to pacifism.

Despite recurring skepticism, Dellums went on to be reelected without difficulty. By 1993, he was also a member of the Military Acquisitions Subcommittee. A record of clearly responsible actions did not prevent him from opposing spending for military projects he criticized as potentially interventionist. An example came when he opposed a White House plan to spend several million dollars to build an ammunition storage complex in Honduras, one of several potentially volatile Central American settings. He also opposed spending for new strategic weapons, including the Pershing and MX missiles and the highly publicized B-2 “Stealth” bombers. Dellums held several other key committee posts during his long tenure in the House, including chairmanship of the Committee on the District of Columbia, the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Dellums’s repeated electoral success did not always compare favorably with the larger percentage of voters who supported African American candidates in other congressional races. While voter support of African American candidates usually surpassed seventy-five percent, in six of his reelection races, Dellums received around sixty percent of the vote. Some campaign observers have noted that (probably because of Dellums’s radical ideology) he consistently received less funding from political action committees than other African American candidates.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Dellums urged US policy makers to avoid emphasis on military intervention as a viable option in world trouble spots. By this time, however, with the troubled nature of global politics and the US involvement in the Middle East, Dellums decided to retire from Congress at midterm in 1997. His successor, Barbara Lee, attained his House seat with an almost record level of voter support.

After leaving Congress and before running for mayor of Oakland, Dellums was active in a number of areas. In collaboration with H. Lee Haltermann, he published the autobiography Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power in 2000, the same year in which he married Cynthia Lewis. He served as a lobbyist for different Bay Area interest groups, particularly those connected with education and mass transit. He also worked as a consultant to Healthcare Management International, a private concern involved in the establishment of health insurance systems abroad. When the incumbent mayor of Oakland (former and future California governor Jerry Brown) was scheduled to leave office after completing his term limit, Dellums became a candidate and was elected to the post.

Within a short time, he set up numerous special task forces to look into Oakland’s desperate needs for increased public safety, lower cost housing, and educational improvements. Nevertheless, Dellums’s tenure as mayor became increasingly controversial, involving a move in 2007 (ultimately unsuccessful) for a recall vote and charges of tax evasion in 2009. In August 2010, Dellums announced that he would not seek reelection. Although he stated that he hoped he would be remembered for making Oakland “more engaged . . . enlightened and . . . empowered to continue the important work that lies ahead,” an editorial in the city’s Oakland Local was highly critical of his mayoral record.

In 2016, Dellums began serving as the president of the newly founded Dellums Institute for Social Justice. After a battle with prostate cancer, he died at his home in Washington, DC, on July 30, 2018, at the age of eighty-two.

Significance

Dellums’s election to Congress occurred at an important time of transition in US history. There was a rising tide of support for African American political candidates to represent mainly African American constituencies, as the crack in the door widened enough in the late 1960s to support some politically radical candidates for public office. Coming from a liberal background in a unique congressional district, Dellums did not hesitate to use his image to draw attention to what many considered to be revolutionary social and political issues.

Bibliography

Dellums, Ronald V., and H. Lee Halterman. Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power. Beacon Press, 2000. Dellums’s account of his political career.

Goldman, T. R. "Ronald Dellums, Who Entered Congress a Firebrand and Left a Statesman, Dies at 82." The Washington Post, 30 July 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ronald-dellums-who-entered-congress-a-firebrand-and-left-a-statesman-dies-at-82/2018/07/30/cbc41d76-941c-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54‗story.html. Accessed 16 Nov. 2018.

McFadden, Robert D. "Ron Dellums, 82, Dies; Unrelenting in Congress, He Upheld Left’s Ideals." The New York Times, 30 July 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/obituaries/ron-dellums-forceful-liberal-in-congress-for-27-years-dies-at-82.html. Accessed 16 Nov. 2018.

Singh, Robert. The Congressional Black Caucus. Sage, 1998. A study of the origins and actions of the CBC written about eight years after Dellums served as its chair.

Tate, Katherine. Black Faces in the Mirror. Princeton UP, 2003. A survey of the electoral processes and election records affecting African American bids for seats in the US Congress.