Biography
Bill Sutherland refused to cooperate with Second World War conscription — objecting both to war and to serving in a segregated army — and was imprisoned at the Lewisburg penitentiary in Pennsylvania alongside other pacifist resisters. After the war he moved to Africa and became a lifelong bridge between African liberation movements and the American peace and civil-rights movements, working in Ghana and Tanzania and hosting a generation of activists.
Sutherland was sentenced in July 1942 after refusing to report to a Civilian Public Service camp, and served 38 months of a four-year federal sentence at the United States Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, before his release in 1945. The surviving summaries disagree about the years — an American Friends Service Committee biography gives 1942-45, its own internal chronology 1943-45, and another AFSC brochure 1943-46 — and no prison register has been found to fix an admission or discharge day; the 38 months is the figure they all share. Born December 24, 1918; died January 2, 2010.
