Ronald V. Dellums was born in 1935 and raised in Oakland, California.

Professional background:

* President, Healthcare International Management Company * Member, U.S. House of Representatives (1970-97) * Chairman, House Armed Services Committee

Member of the following boards of directors:

* Constituency for Africa * AIDS Action

Partial list of awards:

* Medal of Distinguished Public Service, U.S. Department of Defense * Lifetime Achievement Award, Peace Action

Publications:

* Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life form the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power * Defense Sense: The Search for a Rational Military Policy (1983)

Quotations:

"I come to Congress with this incredible mantle, this tremendous burden -'Afro-topped, bell-bottomed, radical black dude from Berkeley wins election.' So that's what I had to carry. I said, 'If I allow this process to marginalize me as a gadfly, five hundred thousand people who are counting on me to make significant and important, often life-and-death decisions that affect them, their children, and their children's children into the future, will be diminished. So I cannot allow myself to be marginalized, otherwise I'm allowing half a million people to be marginalized. I'm allowing movement and beauty and nobility and principle to be marginalized, to be trivialized. So if I'm carrying this burden, if I'm carrying this responsibility, the weight of controversial ideas, I've got to figure out how to not be a controversial person. Because a controversial person carrying controversial ideas is a double strain. So let me get myself out from under this. If people begin to see my personhood, that I'm a multidimensional human being, that I'm prepared to deal with them substantively, then we take Ron Dellums off the table, because Ron Dellums is irrelevant. It's the power of ideas. Now let's you and I talk about these ideas.' ... And so I got in bed with the [briefing] books, with the missiles and the bombs and the force structure and the national security, so I'd learn, so I could walk on the floor of Congress and say, 'Would the gentleman yield?' And the people would say, 'Wow, you don't want to debate this guy, because he's ready.' Again, having nothing to do with me, having nothing to do with my ego, but having to do with the fact that I realized somewhere along the way that I became in that institution the personification of these movements and these struggles from the sixties that were emanating from this community, and that I had a solemn responsibility to carry that forward to the maximum extent that I could."

Nominating Speech:

Nominated by: ProgressiveGovernment Institute

Recognize that as the most powerful country, the US must lead in international cooperation;

Instill and preserve a high level of compliance with all treaties such as the Geneva conventions;

Remember that the USA is a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

Will not manage Defense as either a jobs or a corporate welfare program;

Work to restrain the international arms trade and reduce arms and nuclear proliferation;

In keeping with our desire for a world of law, will work to make sure that our armed forces get no preferential treatment such as immunity from the International Criminal Court or the land mines ban;

Strictly limit privatization and outsourcing of military duties.