Ron Dellums, U.S. lawmaker who led push
for sanctions against South Africa, dead at 82
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[July 31, 2018]
By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) - Former California congressman
Ron Dellums, who first won election to Capitol Hill as an anti-Vietnam
War candidate and later led a 15-year effort to enact U.S. sanctions
against South Africa's apartheid government, died on Monday at age 82.
Dellums' death, at his home in Washington following a battle with
cancer, was confirmed in statements from his family and his successor in
the U.S. House of Representatives, fellow Democrat Barbara Lee, who got
her start in Congress as an intern in his office.
Dellums, a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus and one of
Capitol Hill's most unabashed and tenacious liberal voices, retired from
the U.S. House of Representatives in early 1998 after 27 years.
He re-entered elective politics a decade later to serve four years as
mayor of his native Oakland, California, starting in 2007. Dellums began
his political career on the Berkeley City Council in 1967.
A former U.S. Marine, he was recruited by peace activists in 1970 to
challenge incumbent U.S. Representative Jeffery Cohelan, a liberal
Democrat seen by critics on the left as having failed to take a strong
enough stance against the Vietnam War.
Dellums defeated Cohelan in the primary and went on to become the first
African-American elected from a white-majority congressional district,
California's 7th, then 71 percent white. He won 12 more consecutive
elections to the Oakland-based House seat.
'OUT AND OUT RADICAL'
Branded "an out and out radical" during his first congressional campaign
by Republican U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew, Dellums accepted the
label as a badge of honor, as recounted by the San Francisco Chronicle.
"If it's radical to oppose the insanity and cruelty of the Vietnam War,
if it's radical to oppose racism and sexism and all other forms of
oppression, if it's radical to want to alleviate poverty, hunger,
disease, homelessness and other forms of human misery, then I'm proud to
be called a radical," Dellums told reporters at the time.
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Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums listens during a news conference in
Oakland, California May 11, 2010. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
One of Dellums' greatest political triumphs was congressional
enactment in 1986, over the veto of Republican President Ronald
Reagan, of U.S. economic sanctions against the apartheid policy of
racial separation by South Africa's white minority government.
Lee, according to the Chronicle, recalled Dellums telling his
staffers that "the only question we should ask when we made
decisions about anything is, 'Is this the right thing to do?'"
Despite his reputation for being one of the Pentagon's harshest
critics, Dellums became chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee in January 1993 when Les Aspin resigned to become
President Bill Clinton's defense secretary. Dellums was forced to
relinquish the post two years later, after Republicans
regained control of the House.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Bill Tarrant
and Peter Cooney)
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