Biography
Bradford Lyttle is an American pacifist organizer whose arrests span more than half a century, from draft refusal in the early 1950s to a nuclear weapons plant in 2010. He first went to prison in 1954, serving nine months at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri for refusing to cooperate with Selective Service. In 1959 he organized Omaha Action, the nonviolent campaign against the intercontinental ballistic missile base at Mead, Nebraska; arrested on July 8 and bailed, he was sentenced on July 13 to six months and a $500 fine for trespassing and disregarding a court order. He coordinated the Quebec-to-Guantanamo peace walk of 1963 and 1964, which carried the pacifist movement into the segregated South and was jailed repeatedly along the way — at Macon, Georgia in November 1963, and twice at Albany, Georgia, where the walkers insisted on marching integrated through the downtown business district and spent the turn of 1964 in jail. He was arrested at the Times Square antiwar sit-down in February 1966, and that April he and five other American pacifists were seized in Saigon while trying to demonstrate near the United States Embassy and deported to Hong Kong within hours. Arrests followed at the Pentagon in 1967 and in the Mayday actions of 1971. He remained active for decades afterwards, arrested with David Dellinger at the 1996 Democratic National Convention protest in Chicago, acquitted by directed verdict after a 2005 Chicago demonstration against the Iraq war when the court found police had not allowed adequate time to disperse, and arrested again at the Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in July 2010, at the age of eighty-two. He was born on November 20, 1927.
