Biography
Larry Gara was later a distinguished pacifist historian. He refused to register for the draft in the Second World War and served a federal prison term as a young resister. In 1949 he was prosecuted again — this time for counseling a Bluffton College student to refuse to register — and convicted under the Selective Service Act, one of the most prominent draft-counseling cases of the postwar years. He spent decades afterward teaching history and writing on nonviolence at Wilmington College.
In his 2017 first-person account, Gara recalled spending a year in partial isolation after joining Bayard Rustin’s effort to desegregate the prison dining hall during his first federal term. He described the separate draft-counseling sentence as eighteen months and recalled obtaining early parole, remaining on parole when he began graduate study in Wisconsin. These recollections do not give complete custody endpoints or equate the imposed term with time served.
Larry Gara, “Surviving Attacks on Academic Freedom,” Academe, September–October 2017.
