David Burgess lives in Benicia and has written his autobiography, “Fighting for Social Justice,” with a foreword by Bill Moyers.

In 1964, the year I entered college, David Burgess was the Indonesian Peace Corps Director. He met Robert Kennedy and his wife that year when they visited Jakarta, a year after President Kennedy was assassinated. Burgess remembers that “[Robert’s] face was drawn, his eyes distant. He appeared…to be in a continuing state of mourning.” Four years later, two months and two days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Robert Kennedy would meet the same fate as his brother.

Two years later, in 1966, David Burgess sailed across the Atlantic with his family to take a position in Thailand as a senior member of UNICEF. He was dedicated to serving others, but at 49 he was undergoing a “rather unusual spiritual revival” and was beginning to understand what a close friend had recently told him: “You still regard yourself, Dave, as a young man in a hurry as you approach your fiftieth year. You are anxious to get things done. You are more concerned about plans for tomorrow than about the wonderful reality of each swiftly passing moment today. You are so preoccupied with doing that you neglect being.”

That same year, I was attending a small engineering school in southern Indiana and was president of the only fraternity that had Jewish brothers. A black had enrolled in the school, one of the first to be admitted, and many of us had rushed him. But ours was a single blackball system. We voted for new pledges by depositing white and black marbles in a hat that was passed around in the dark, secret basement in our fraternity house. Many of us had argued strongly for the black student, but two had sneered that they would never allow a n----r into the fraternity. The hat made its way slowly from one hand to the next, from one row to the next, and back up to me, standing in the front, where I saw, among a sea of white, two black marbles.

If I had been as committed to integration as David Burgess was during that same period, I’m sure I would have resigned from the fraternity. I regret that I didn’t.

In the spring of ‘66, the president of the student body, who was a fraternity brother, excitedly told me that he thought he was going to be able to get Robert Kennedy to talk at the graduation ceremony. Later my elation turned to dread and disbelief—and we exchanged angry words—when he told me, with equal excitement, that while Kennedy had turned him down, George Wallace would speak instead.

Wallace came. He spoke. I sat on my hands, refusing to rise and applaud the Governor of Alabama who just three years earlier had stood in the University of Alabama doorway trying to stop integration. Surely, had I known him, David Burgess would have counseled me to do much more.

Born in China on June 15, 1917 to a father working for the YMCA and a feminist mother, David Burgess was a liberal, Christian activist first at Oberlin College and then at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Employed by the Farm Security Administration, he and his wife Alice helped migrant workers in Southern Florida, laboring beside black and white farm hands, where it wasn’t uncommon, if a black man was accused of insulting a white, “for his corpse to be found in the fields or floating in a drainage canal the next day.”

David and Alice Burgess worked in Bridgeton, New Jersey, where racism was rampant even among the clergy, and where David gradually became a labor union representative for migrant workers. After they worked together to save government housing for migrant farmers in Missouri, David was offered a position as chief organizer for the Textile Workers Union of America. He would have to work long hours and travel extensively, and he and Alice would no longer be working together as ministers.

So when David Burgess, at age 49, sailed to Thailand, he could already look back on a life of active service to others that frequently required that he take conscientious and sometimes controversial stands, earning him many ardent supporters as well as a few vocal detractors. In 1955, when CIO President Reuther asked him to become the labor attaché at the American Embassy in Burma, the FBI investigated him, claiming that he had socialist leanings and that he believed in government control of industry. Had Walter Reuther and Georgia Senator Walter George not intervened on his behalf, it’s doubtful he would have secured the position. (By 1966, his FBI file following his UNICEF appointment would number more than 400 pages.)

David Burgess, who is now 83, would not retire for another 23 years after his spiritual renewal. He would go on to be chief spokesman for UNICEF in North America. And he would be a minister at two Newark, New Jersey churches while also being executive director of the multi-denominational metropolitan Ecumenical Ministry.

But he experienced a sea change at age 49, which must have been a wonderful gift, especially to one whose life, to quote Bill Moyers, “…has been a testimony to idealism in action.”

As David Burgess wrote in Thailand two months before his fiftieth birthday: “Suddenly and unexpectedly I have felt a new awareness, a new sensitivity, a new opening, a melting of the walls which have sometimes prevented me from seeing beyond the four walls of my own cramped self. I am now more calm and refreshed, ready to enjoy petty events and big events in the company of my fellow human beings. For the gift of this new and more joyful life, I am deeply grateful to God.”