Biography
Thomas Whitney Rodd was a pacifist who refused draft registration and protested the Vietnam War. After an initial imprisonment and probation, he returned to prison when an antiwar demonstration violated restrictions on his public protest.
The Militant individually identifies this participant in the integrated Quebec–Washington–Guantanamo peace walk among those arrested and taken to jail in Griffin, Georgia on November 9, 1963. Its account alleges police use of electric cattle prods against walkers and reports the group’s release after negotiations over permission to continue. It does not establish a complete individual custody duration. The separate November 19 Macon arrests are a collective report and are not assigned to every Griffin participant. The Militant, November 25, 1963, vol.27 no.42, original PDF page 3. Source: https://www.themilitant.com/1963/2742/MIL2742.pdf#page=3
First-person draft-refusal statement and custody limits
The April 29, 1964 Carnegie Tartan prints Thomas Whitney Rodd’s own statement, identifying him as an eighteen-year-old Pittsburgh draft-registration resister and Taylor Allderdice graduate. Rodd says that at 10 a.m. on March 26, 1964, six days after his eighteenth birthday, he presented himself at the federal attorney’s offices and requested arrest. That explicit relationship corroborates the already stored March 20, 1946 birthdate; it does not establish an actual jail admission at the time of the request. The editors announce trial for May 6, and Rodd describes five years as a possible maximum and his federal imprisonment as still forthcoming. Neither a scheduled trial nor an anticipated sentence is substituted for actual sentencing or intake. He also states that he had previously been jailed and tortured while working for racial equality in the South; that is a first-person historical account without the personal location, dates or duration needed to create a precise additional custody interval. Existing later draft-case terms, probation revocation and release estimates remain dependent on their separate sources, not this earlier statement.
Carnegie Tartan, volume64 no.27, April29,1964, original page5.
