On Nov. 1, shortly after 2 a.m., Meredith Dallas, surrounded by family, died peacefully at the Friends Care Center, where he had been living for the past year.
The third child and second son of a factory foreman, Meredith Eugene Dallas, or Dal, as his friends and colleagues affectionately called him, was born on Dec. 3, 1916, in Detroit, Mich., to William and Ethel Dallas who would go on to have six children. When his older brother died at the age nine, the 6-year-old Meredith became the vessel of his father’s ambition — that his oldest son grow up to be a Methodist minister. This ambition dovetailed nicely with the influence Detroit’s Central Methodist Church had on the young Meredith. Of particular influence were people of social conscience and national renown, like educator and civil rights leader Mary Bethune, who would on occasion speak to the congregation. Through the church, Meredith was active in the Young People’s League, an organization that examined issues of race and labor in America (an organization that would later be labeled by Joe McCarthy as a Communist front). Politically and philosophically influenced by these activities, Meredith became a pacifist by the time he completed high school.