<Begin Segment 12>

AI: Had you thought consciously about the potential consequences of losing opportunity, the problems of having a jail record, arrest record and so forth?

PI: No, it never did. I always felt that whatever I wound up doing, and at that time my career plans had, I had shifted from medicine to sort of social activism. And for a full-time social activist, this is just part of the job. So I never felt I had any danger. I didn't have any long-range plans of going to, of even of finishing college or going to graduate school or even ultimately going to law school. This was something I didn't even think about at the time. I was basically a full-time activist. And after I got back to Antioch after this experience -- well, to, going back from Atlanta to Washington, we were at the Clinical Center in Bethesda. This was before they had closed down or I had gone back a second time as a matter of fact, was living there. I decided to, that the most visible symbol of my connection to the system, to the government, was my draft card. Now, when I was eighteen I registered for the draft in Cincinnati. In fact, I think I came back down from Antioch to my hometown, Wyoming, Ohio, gone into the local draft board, which was in the police station, the county -- the city building, and registered. And it didn't even strike me as anything to think about. You had to register when you were eighteen. And I was a college student and I'd get a deferment. And I went back to school.

And it wasn't until two years later that I thought about this. And it's interesting because the motivation for sending my draft card back with a letter saying I was no longer going to cooperate with the Selective Service System had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. This was before the war had started. It came out of my feeling that I did not want to or was unwilling to serve in an army defending a country that was still practicing racial segregation. And this was also -- there was a very important event. Most people don't remember the influence it had on the American Civil Rights movement. Shortly after the sit-ins began in February of 1960 -- and I think this happened in April or May of that year -- there was a massacre called the Sharpville Massacre in South Africa. And students, young people who had been demonstrating against the apartheid system in South Africa were massacred by the police. And I think sixty of them were killed. And this event had a profound impact on the students in this country, the sit-in students, because it, it symbolized for us that even though we were not being massacred, even though people were in fact being murdered in this country, that we shared the same thing with the people in South Africa, the blacks in South Africa, which was segregation. Theirs was more vicious than ours but they were exactly from the same motives: to preserve white supremacy. And I think, and I remember being very much affected by the Sharpville Massacre. And I think this had something to do with all the thoughts that finally expressed themselves in sending back my draft card.

AI: Did you, was this act of sending back your draft card, was this singular, just you yourself? Did you talk to others who were contemplating the same thing? Did you know of anyone else who also cut their ties by sending that, their cards back?

PI: At this time, in the fall of 1960, I don't recall anybody else doing this. I don't recall talking to anybody about it. It was just an act I did by myself. And I had some connections with pacifist groups, Quaker groups, people who had been conscientious objectors in World War II, but there was no organization. Now, I later became active in Students for a Democratic Society and helped organize anti-draft activities. But the very beginning in 1960 was just by myself. I didn't even try to talk anybody else into doing this. Later on, I did. But it was just something I felt I had to do.

AI: And did you have any thought about what the consequence might be of sending your card back?

PI: Well, I knew that eventually if I was drafted that I'd have to decide, am I going to go into the army? What am I going to do? I knew the consequences could be a criminal conviction and going to jail or prison. But at that time, it didn't really concern me. And in fact, after I sent my draft card back and carried on this very odd correspondence with my draft board for several years, because they kept trying to persuade me to apply for exemption as a conscientious objector, and I refused to do that. And that was because -- and I think this was my first experience with legal training because I remember looking it up and going to the law libraries in Washington. To become a conscientious objector at that time and to be exempted from military service, you had to fill out a form. And one of the questions, I think it was Section 6J, was -- and you had to check this box -- it says, "I object to participating in war because of my belief in a supreme being." And then it, it defined that. It said, a relation -- "...involving relationship superior to those arising out of any human relationship." And I remember that distinctly from the form. And I could not sign that, first because I did not believe in a supreme being in the sense that I'm sure they did, some omnipotent god, and secondly that there was any relationship, any obligation superior to that of human relationships. I thought of myself as a humanist. That all of life is human relationships. And so I refused to sign that, and I told them so. In fact, I wrote very long, sort of pedantic letters explaining this to them. And for about four years, nothing happened. And in fact I had gone back to school. I had dropped out of school. I had come back to Washington to work. All during a time when the draft board wasn't actually doing anything.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.