David T. Dellinger (August 22, 1915 – May 25, 2004) was an American pacifist and an activist for nonviolent social change. He achieved peak prominence as one of the Chicago Seven, who were put on trial in 1969.
Dellinger was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts to a wealthy family. He was the son of Maria Fiske and Raymond Pennington Dellinger; his father was an alumnus of Yale University, a lawyer, and a prominent Republican and friend of Calvin Coolidge. His maternal grandmother, Alice Bird Fiske, was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Dellinger graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in economics, began a doctorate for a year at New College, Oxford, and studied theology at Union Theological Seminary of Columbia University with the intention of becoming a Congregationalist minister. At Yale he had been a classmate and friend of the economist and political theorist Walt Rostow. Rejecting his comfortable background, he walked out of Yale one day to live with hobos during the Depression. While at Oxford University, he visited Nazi Germany and drove an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. Dellinger, who opposed the war's victorious Nationalist faction, led by Francisco Franco, later recalled, "After Spain, World War II was simple. I wasn't even tempted to pick up a gun to fight for General Motors, U.S. Steel, or the Chase Manhattan Bank, even if Hitler was running the other side."
During World War II, he was an imprisoned conscientious objector and anti-war agitator. In federal prison, he and fellow conscientious objectors, including Ralph DiGia and Bill Sutherland, protested racial segregation in the dining halls, which were ultimately integrated because of the protests. He sat on the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America and the Young People's Socialist League, its youth section, until he left in 1943. In February 1946, Dellinger helped to found the radical pacifist Committee for Nonviolent Revolution. In 1948, he co-founded the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.