Biography
Oberlin-educated Baltimore poet and secretary of the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission. On October 27, 1967 he entered the Selective Service Board at Baltimore's Customs House with Father Philip Berrigan, Tom Lewis, and James Mengel and poured human and poultry blood on 1-A draft files — the first action of the Catholic Left and prototype for the Catonsville Nine seven months later. Sentenced to two years; reported to Lewisburg federal penitentiary in 1970, serving 21 months. David Eberhardt was part of a strand of Vietnam-era activism that fused religiously inflected conscience with dramatic direct action aimed at confronting the machinery of conscription. He became closely associated with the 1967 “blood on draft files” protest carried out by the Baltimore Four at the federal building in Baltimore, an action designed to force public attention onto the human cost of the war and the role of draft administration in sustaining it.
Eberhardt was prosecuted and convicted for offenses tied to the destruction or defacement of Selective Service records and interference with draft administration, and—after appellate efforts were exhausted—served about 21 months at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. Decades later, he received a presidential pardon from Ronald Reagan, and he remained identified with the broader tradition of antiwar civil disobedience that treated arrest and imprisonment as integral—not incidental—to protest strategy.