David Harris (protestor)
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David Harris was a prominent anti-Vietnam War protestor, president of the Associated Students of Stanford University, and later, the leader of many anti-draft groups, including the Resistance, which organized resistance to the Selective Service System's efforts to draft soldiers to fight in the Vietnam War. He was also (previously)involved in SNCC's voter registration efforts in Mississippi. He was eventually imprisoned for draft resistance.
He was born in 1946 in Fresno, California. In 1963, he went to Stanford University as an undergraduate. He became involved in the Civil-Rights movement, traveling through the Deep South trying to register African-Americans to vote, In 1966-67, he served as President of the Associated Students of Stanford University]]. The following year, he founded an organization called the Resistance, which persuaded young men of draft age to refuse to be drafted and to work together against the Vietnam War. Within a few years, the Selective Service System discovered, to its dismay, that only about half of the men sent draft notices actually showed up for their draft physicals. In due course, Harris received his draft notice and didn't show up. Unlike most such malefactors, he was arrested and convicted of a federal felony, often misnamed draft evasion, but more accurately draft refusal. He was sentenced to a term in Federal Prison: he served about 18 months in various minimum--to-medium-security prisons; he was released on parole in 1971. After his release, he gave talks about the experience: he said "In prison, I lost my ideals, but not my principles."
From 1968 through 1973, Harris was married to folk singer Joan Baez. Baez related the amusing story of his arrest to the audience during her performance at the Woodstock Festival in which, while Harris was being arrested, anti-Vietnam-War protestors were pasting a "resist the draft" bumper sticker on the police car. Imprisonment didn't improve the marriage; after Harris returned, they decided that both had changed in ways that made them incompatible and filed for divorce. Harris and Baez had one son together, Gabriel Harris. Gabriel attended the private Peninsula School, which his mother had attended.
In 1975, Harris ran as a Democrat for a seat in the U.S House of Representatives, from a district that included the northern part of Silicon Valley. He was not elected.
Harris was married to author and New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh from 1975 until her death in 1993. Harris and Fosburgh had one daughter together, Sophie Harris.
At Stanford, Harris was a protegé of Allard K. Lowenstein, a political organizer and later one-term Democratic congressman from New York. In the early 1980s, Lowenstein was shot to death by Harris's onetime friend Dennis Sweeney, another Lowenstein protegé.. Two years later, Harris wrote the book Dreams Die Hard about his experiences throughout the 1960s and 1970s with Lowenstein and Sweeney and about the events leading up to the shooting. He has written several other books, as well as many articles for Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, and other periodicals.
