Some six thousand conscientious objectors went to federal prison during the Second World War — most of them Jehovah's Witnesses denied ministerial exemptions, alongside secular pacifists, radical Christians, and men who refused even the alternative-service camps as conscription by another name. At the peak, one in six federal prisoners was a draft resister. Among them were Bayard Rustin, who served over two years in Ashland and organized against its Jim Crow seating from inside, and David Dellinger and the Union Theological Seminary students who had refused to register at all.
The CO prisoners turned the penitentiaries into laboratories of nonviolent resistance: hunger strikes at Lewisburg and Danbury against mail censorship and racial segregation — the 135-day Danbury strike of 1943 forced the first desegregation of a federal prison dining hall — and work strikes that prefigured the tactics of the civil-rights movement. The generation that emerged from these cellblocks — Rustin, Dellinger, Jim Peck, George Houser — went on to organize the first freedom rides and the antiwar movements of the following thirty years.