DC Dave
July 12, 2021

Guest article by Larry Kessler, Professor of Chinese history, UNC-Chapel Hill, written in July 2012

Biographical summary

Sidney Rittenberg was born in 1921 into a prominent Jewish family of Charleston, South Carolina. His father was president of the city council, and there is a boulevard in Charleston named after his grandfather, Sam Rittenberg, a local businessman and long-serving state legislator who was a driving force behind enactment of state laws to improve public school education and human rights. Sidney had received scholarships from Princeton and Virginia, but he decided to attend UNC because of its liberal reputation under Frank Porter Graham, who knew his family and took Sidney under his wing. Sidney later called the university, which he attended from 1937 to 1940 majoring in philosophy, his “spiritual birthplace.” He dropped out of school before completing the requirements for a Bachelor of Arts degree. Sidney once stated that ironically it was also because of Dr. Frank that he left after his junior year. Rittenberg had become heavily involved in the peace movement and labor organizing, and had joined the campus affiliate of the American Communist Party. As he began to neglect his academic work, Dr. Frank Porter Graham (president of UNC at the time) called Sidney into his office and suggested that he drop out of school and pursue his radical activities, which he did. But after Pearl Harbor and the American entrance into World War II, Sidney was drafted into the U.S. military in 1942, after first being rejected for poor eyesight when he tried to volunteer right after Pearl Harbor. Before joining the army, he gave up his Communist Party membership so as not to jeopardize his position. He was sent to study at the army’s Chinese language training school in Monterey, and also took courses at Stanford University.