He founded the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), served as the executive director of the Lawyer's Constitutional Defense Committee from 1964 to 1970,[1] and headed the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project from 1974[2] to 1990.
After serving in the army in the war as a member of the Counterintelligence Corps from 1944 to 1946, he went to the City College of New York, where he received a bachelor's degree and then did graduate work in political theory at Columbia University[1] After serving in the army, it is said that he had the "appearance of a durable veteran from ancient wars, penetrating eyes intolerant of bombast and passivity, facial lines that mobilize easily to express by turns infectious good humor, remembered pain, resignation, impatience.
[5] Once he was released, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote on his imprisonment forms, "your courageous willingness to go to jail for freedom has brought us closer to our nation's bright tomorrow.
He also worked to create the National Coalition for Universal and Unconditional Amnesty to pressure Gerald Ford to pardon those who had left the United States to avoid conscription.
[8] In 1976, while he was still working with the Capital Punishment Project, he led the creation of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) in response to the Supreme Court decision Gregg v. Georgia, which permitted executions to resume in the United States.
I now renounce the State of Israel, disavow any political connection or emotional obligation to it, and declare myself its enemy.In 2003, the letter was included in Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon.
[10] In 1988, Schwarzschild testified before the Congressional Black Caucus as a member of the executive board of the Jewish Committee on the Middle East, saying, in part: I and an increasing number of other American Jews are appalled at the spectacle of the State of Israel, which thinks of itself today as the contemporary incarnation of the Jewish people, having made another people into a dispersed nation; denying them national identity and self-determination; depriving them of their lands and water; suppressing their national, social, and cultural institutions; beating their children; killing unarmed civilians; exiling their leaders; imprisoning their spokespeople; destroying their homes; opening and closing the Occupied Territories as though they were the Jewish ghettos of the European Middle Ages ...In these and other statements, Schwarzschild characterized the treatment of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel as inconsistent with, and at times directly in opposition to, Jewish tradition and values.
"[4] After retiring from the ACLU in 1990, he continued to work on Middle Eastern issues,[4] and he remained the head of the New York office of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
[12] The annual Henry Schwarzschild Memorial Lecture began in 1999,[13] sponsored by the NYCLU and the Hogarth Center for Social Action at Manhattan College.