Rev. Donald Benedict, 90, civic activist spent career pouncing on injustice; Inequity 'profoundly upset' clergyman
ZapRatz
Activist spent career pouncing on injustice
Inequity 'profoundly upset' clergyman
By Trevor Jensen | Chicago Tribune reporter
September 7, 2008
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituaries/chi-hed_benedict_07sep07,0,4443007.story
Rev. Donald Benedict spent 366 days in prison for resisting the draft
during World War II, the first chapter in a long career as a civic
activist who saw injustice on many fronts and took action.
Rev. Benedict, 90, died Thursday, Sept. 4, in Pittsford, Vt., five
days after suffering a stroke, said his daughter Kennette. He and his
wife had lived part of the year in Vermont since the late 1960s while
maintaining a home in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood.
After starting urban ministries in the Harlem neighborhood of New York
City and Cleveland, Rev. Benedict was recruited in 1960 as executive
director of the Chicago City Missionary Society, which under his
leadership took its present name, the Community Renewal Society. His
focus was promoting social change and fostering leadership through a
network of inner-city churches, which he urged well-heeled suburban
congregations to support, his daughter said.
He helped create such groups as the Kenwood-Oakland Community
Organization, the Urban Training Center and the West Side
Organization. The Chicago Reporter, a newspaper that covers urban
issues, started publishing through the Community Renewal Society under
his watch.
His work made him the target of surveillance by the Chicago Police
Department's notorious Red Squad in the 1960s. A transcript of one
day's report from the spies uncovered nothing more than Rev. Benedict
leaving his Hyde Park home with a briefcase in the morning and
returning with the same briefcase in the evening, according to a
Tribune article.
Rev. Benedict left the Community Renewal Society at the end of 1982,
the year his autobiography, "Born Again Radical," was published.
In the 1980s, he was chairman of the New Chicago Ethics Committee,
which promoted ethics in city politics. In 1987, he ran unsuccessfully
for 33rd Ward alderman against Richard Mell.
He continued to find causes to champion. He became a habitué of
criminal courtrooms and took up the causes of those he thought had
been wronged, leading to the formation of the Justice Coalition for
Greater Chicago. He helped start Protestants for the Common Good in
1995 to counter conservative groups he thought had hijacked public
discourse on Christianity.
"I've never met anyone who was more profoundly upset by basic
unfairness," said Rev. Alexander Sharp, executive director of
Protestants for the Common Good. "Once you got him angry, you were in
for a long fight."
Rev. Benedict told his daughter that he was motivated by the biblical
story of the good Samaritan.
As a student at Union Theological Seminary, he joined fellow
seminarians—including David Dellinger, who later became one of the
Chicago Seven—in resisting what they thought was the class-based
nature of the draft. He spent a year and a day in prison.
His pacifist leanings softened with the news of atrocities in Europe
during World War II. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps,
serving in the South Pacific.
Ordained in 1948, he and two people started the East Harlem Protestant
Parish in storefronts in one of New York City's most blighted
neighborhoods. He was executive director of Inner City Protestant
Parish in Cleveland for six years before coming to Chicago.
Other survivors include his wife, Ann; three daughters, Sandra, Susan
and Ruth; and three grandchildren.
Services are set for Monday in Vermont.
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