Biography
Thomas Charles Cornell was an American pacifist organizer, ordained Catholic deacon, longtime member of the Catholic Worker Movement, and a co-founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. As a young Catholic Worker in the early 1960s, he played a central role in initiating the first organized U.S. opposition to the Vietnam War. On July 29, 1965, just weeks after Congress passed the new federal law making destruction of a draft card a crime punishable by five years in prison, Cornell publicly burned his draft card at a New York City rally — an act of civil disobedience explicitly designed to test the constitutionality of the new statute.
On November 6, 1965 he again publicly burned his draft card, this time alongside David Miller, A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day, and three others, at an even larger New York rally. He was prosecuted federally and was convicted in 1968. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the draft-card-burning statute the same year (United States v. O'Brien, 1968). Cornell served six months in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut.
After his release he spent the remainder of his life as a Catholic Worker organizer, a co-editor of the Catholic Worker newspaper, and a columnist on labor and Christian-pacifist politics. He was ordained a permanent deacon of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988. He died on August 1, 2022 at age 88.
