David Harris, Leader of the Vietnam Draft Resistance Movement, Dies at 76

But when he heard that some of the students were planning to go back to Mississippi for another round of organizing, he signed up immediately. Within three days he was on the ground in Lambert, a Delta town about 75 miles south of Memphis.

The experience electrified him. He returned to school later that fall and immersed himself in Stanford’s nascent movement against the Vietnam War. He spent long nights in his room with his dorm mates, listening to music (including Joan Baez records, long before he had met her) and debating the morality of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia.

He attended his first protest in March 1965. The experience, he wrote in his book “Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us” (1996), “felt like an emergence, from dark into light, from forest into clearing.”

He centered his activism on draft resistance, because, he said, it was a way for him to make a personal, concrete difference — and, possibly, a sacrifice. In 1966 he mailed his draft card back to the U.S. Selective Service, writing that he would refuse to carry it and would decline to serve if he were drafted.

“I sealed the envelope, walked down the block to the mailbox and put the envelope in,” he wrote. “I remember that summer afternoon, the dirt of the road nearby, and I remember feeling like I could have flapped my arms and flown back to my house if I had wanted. I felt like I was my own man for the first time in my life.”

A gifted orator, Mr. Harris was soon in demand as a speaker at antiwar rallies across California. Along the way he encountered Ms. Baez, who had founded an organization called the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, in Carmel, Calif. One day Mr. Harris drove down there looking for grant money.

“He was just this lovely cowboy,” Ms. Baez said. “And that was my introduction to what the resistance was all about. I mean, I knew a little, but he was certainly the best representative to have.”