David McReynolds (1929-2018) was well known in peace and social justice circles for his 40-year career on the War Resisters League (WRL) staff, his years of leadership and as a Presidential candidate in the Socialist Party (SPUSA), and for his polit…

David McReynolds (1929-2018) was well known in peace and social justice circles for his 40-year career on the War Resisters League (WRL) staff, his years of leadership and as a Presidential candidate in the Socialist Party (SPUSA), and for his political writings and commentary. Over seven decades he took his camera everywhere he went, from his early activism in Los Angeles to the streets of Manhattan’s East Village, and on worldwide travels. As a pacifist activist he participated in and documented draft resistance, Ban the Bomb demonstrations, Civil Rights actions, the first U.S. demonstration against Vietnam War through the War Is Over celebration, No Nukes events, gay rights, and international travels on peace delegations. He photographed many well-known and politically active figures including A.J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., Grace Paley, Jeannette Rankin, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, and Ella Baker. And he never passed up a chance to get a shot of his beloved cats, his own, office cats, store cats, or strays wandering the streets of the countries he visited.

Please note: Photos on this site are being transferred to the Swarthmore College Peace Collection archive, where David’s papers are held. As of March 2026, most of the black and white photos on this site are now held under the Peace Collection copyright and may be requested from the Peace Collection (there could be some delay as the SCPC staff organizes the photos to their standards).

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Thank you for your interest!

Self-portrait. Manhattan, 1980. Photo by David McReynolds, ©War Resisters League

Here are some quotes from David about the photo collection:

January 2017: I am grateful beyond words for the chance to put up on a web page those who shaped my life — Bayard Rustin, A.J. Muste, Igal Roodenko, Allen Ginsberg, Norma Becker, Ralph DiGia (the real saint of WRL) and on through boxes of prints and negatives. And the people of Vietnam, Libya, and Iraq. 

April 2018: In some ways this is a personal collection, since pretty much all the photos are mine. We realized, as I advanced in years, that with my camera I have taken pictures of the movement (and friends, cats, dogs, etc.) since the 1950’s. The early ones were black and white, then color prints, then color slides, and now (but we have not sorted those yet) hundreds of digital photos from the past twenty years.
Some of the photos are good, some not so good. But they are a chronicle not so much of my own life as of the work in which the pacifist and socialist movements were involved, such as the demonstration in support of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, or shots from Prague in 1968.
One of the early photos of a large civil rights rally in Madison Square Garden, with Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and others, shows the beginning of the vast movement. Other photos take us to Vietnam during the war years, or to Cambodia. Or to the Soviet Union before its collapse.
There is also the large collection of non-political photos from the East Village of NYC before it was gentrified.