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Ralph DiGia (December 13, 1914 – February 1, 2008) was a World War II conscientious objector, lifelong pacifist and social justice activist, and staffer for 52 years at the War Resisters League. Born in the Bronx to a family of Italian immigrants (his father was an anarchist barber) in 1914, DiGia grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A 1927 rally for Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti set him on the path he would follow for 80 years. At the College of the City of New York, where he was studying bookkeeping, DiGia signed the “Oxford Pledge,” refusing to participate in the coming war. In 1942, when the Selective Service System ordered him to report for induction, he said he was a conscientious objector. But his objections to war were based on ethics, not religion, and the draft board had no category for secular COs. The U.S. Attorney's office referred him to pacifist lawyer Julian Cornell, at the War Resisters League; Cornell lost his case, and DiGia spent the next three years in federal prisons. At Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut, and later at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, he met other draft resisters, like Dave Dellinger, who some decades later would be a defendant in the Chicago Seven case, and Bill Sutherland, who would move to Africa after the war and eventually become a pan-Africanist advocate for nonviolence. While in prison, DiGia and other COs conducted hunger strikes to compel the prison system to integrate its dining halls. They succeeded. In 1946, along with Dellinger, Igal Roodenko, and others, DeGia helped found the radical pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Revolution. ==Opposition to the Cold War== After his release, he joined a New Jersey commune with Dellinger. In 1951, DiGia, Dellinger, Sutherland, and fellow CO Art Emery bicycled from Paris to Vienna, handing out antiwar leaflets as they went, urging Cold War soldiers everywhere to lay down their arms and refuse to fight. In the early 1950s, he left the commune and moved to the Manhattan area that would later be called Soho, where he lived for the rest of his life, and in 1955 he joined the War Resisters League staff as a bookkeeper. The following year he convinced the organization to help him to refuse his war taxes by not withholding federal taxes from his paycheck. In the early 1960s, he was arrested more than once for not taking shelter during the "civil defense" drills. In 1964 he served four weeks in jail in Albany, Georgia (with, among others, the late peace theorist Barbara Deming) in the Quebec-Washington-Guantánamo Peace Walk organized by the Committee for Non-Violent Action. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ralph DiGia」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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