When he was 26 years old in 1948, Garry Davis did something that would make the rest of his life really complicated.
Over the next six decades, he’d be detained and imprisoned 34 times in 9 countries, dragged off the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, and gain millions of followers, all while confronting countless bureaucrats who had absolutely no idea what to do with him.
What set this chain of events into motion was his decision to stand before a guy in a gray suit at the US Embassy in Paris, put his hand on a bible, and read a couple of lines off a sheet of paper renouncing his American citizenship. And he'd never become a citizen of any other country, instead navigating the world as a stateless person without any sort of road map or instruction manual.
Garry’s life journey that led him up to that point was pretty unexpected. He was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family, the son of a famous bandleader, and himself a rising Broadway star. But his experience flying bombing raids during World War II and losing his older brother Bud to a German torpedo caused him to reevaluate not just his participation in the war, but his identity as an American citizen. Eventually he concluded that the only way to prevent future wars was for people to completely remove themselves from the system that creates the “us versus them” mentality.
Garry would go on to found the World Government of World Citizens and issue birth certificates, passports, and other identity documents, all in his quest for unity and peace.
On the latest episode of Far From Home, I revisit a lengthy interview I conducted with Garry at his home in Vermont back in 2009 when he was 88 years old.
If you're interested in learning more about Garry Davis, check out this documentary that was made about him a number of years ago.