Ron Dellums

Ronald Vernie Dellums was born on the twenty-fourth of November 1935 at the West Oakland district of Oakland, California, the son of Verney Dellums — a Pullman porter and union organiser — and Willa Terry Dellums, a clerk in the United States Civil Service. His uncle C. L. Dellums was the West Coast vice-president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters under A. Philip Randolph (placed in this archive). The household was the political-organising centre of West Oakland Black labour. He completed the Oakland Technical High School in 1953.

He served the United States Marine Corps from 1954 to 1956. He completed the bachelor's at the San Francisco State College in 1960 and the master's in social work at the University of California Berkeley in 1962. He worked across the 1960s as a senior counsellor at the Bayview-Hunter's Point Mental Health Service in San Francisco and as a programme director at the Concentrated Employment Program of Berkeley.

He was elected to the Berkeley City Council in 1967 on the new Berkeley Community for New Politics ticket — among the principal early local-government victories of the post-1965 New Left. He served three years and stood for the United States House of Representatives in November 1970 from the new California Seventh Congressional District. He defeated the incumbent Jeffery Cohelan in the Democratic primary by ten thousand votes — the principal anti-war Democratic primary victory of the 1970 cycle.

He served thirteen consecutive terms across twenty-seven years from 1971 to 1998. He served as chair of the House District of Columbia Committee from 1979 to 1993 and as chair of the House Armed Services Committee from 1993 to 1995 — the first African American to chair the principal military-policy committee of the United States Congress.

His decisive legislative achievement was the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 — the federal sanctions regime against the Republic of South Africa that he had first introduced in 1972 and that finally passed in October 1986 by veto override over President Ronald Reagan.

He resigned from the House in February 1998. He stood for mayor of Oakland in 2006 and served one four-year term from 2007 to 2011.

He died of complications of cancer at Washington on the thirtieth of July 2018, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the congressional architect of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act.