John Theodore Glick

John Theodore “Ted” Glick, born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, is an American antiwar, progressive and climate-justice activist. After leaving Grinnell College in 1969 he publicly refused induction into the United States military and became active in the Catholic Left campaign of nonviolent resistance to the Vietnam War. On September 6, 1970 he and seven others entered the federal building in Rochester, New York and ransacked federal offices and government records, Selective Service material among them, intending to disrupt the draft. Representing himself at trial, he was convicted with all seven co-defendants on December 1, 1970 and sentenced on December 3 to concurrent terms of up to eighteen months. He served roughly eleven months in federal custody, at the federal youth institution at Ashland, Kentucky, at FCI Danbury in Connecticut and at the federal facility at Springfield, Missouri; at Danbury he joined a prison hunger strike in August 1971 and was put in solitary confinement. He was released on appeal bond on October 28, 1971. While he was still imprisoned he was added, on April 30, 1971, to the superseding indictment in the Harrisburg Eight case, which alleged a conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger, damage federal heating tunnels, possess explosives and destroy government records; because he insisted on representing himself his case was severed from the others, and the government never brought the severed prosecution to trial. On June 29, 1972 the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the Rochester conviction, holding that the trial judge had prejudicially communicated with the jury outside Glick’s presence during its deliberations. He has continued since as a progressive organizer, writer, antiwar activist and climate-justice campaigner.