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The Trial of the Chicago 7: History, Legacy and Trial Transcript. Bruce A. Ragsdale
Читать онлайн.Название The Trial of the Chicago 7: History, Legacy and Trial Transcript
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isbn 4064066383282
Автор произведения Bruce A. Ragsdale
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
Confrontations in Chicago
On the eve of the convention, Mayor Daley, citing intelligence reports of potential violence, put the 12,000 members of the Chicago Police Department on twelve-hour shifts and called for the governor to activate the National Guard. The U.S. Army placed 6,000 troops in position to protect the city during the convention. Both the police and the demonstrators organized workshops for training in the event of violence. The estimated number of demonstrators who came to Chicago during convention week was about 10,000, dramatically less than earlier predictions, but the police were determined to present a show of force and to enforce the 11:00 p.m. curfew in the parks.
Beginning on Sunday, August 25, the police and demonstrators clashed in city parks where many of the protests were staged and where visiting demonstrators hoped to sleep. For three nights, the aggressive police sweep through Lincoln Park was met with the demonstrators’ taunting and occasional rocks. With tear gas and clubbings, the police forced demonstrators out of the park and into commercial areas, where demonstrators smashed windows. Police repeatedly targeted journalists and destroyed their cameras.
Violence escalated on the afternoon of August 28, when police at the week’s largest rally charged through the crowd in Grant Park to prevent a man from lowering a U.S. flag. Many in the crowd met the police charge with a volley of rocks and improvised missiles. After some measure of peace returned, David Dellinger attempted to negotiate a permit to march to the convention hall. When the city denied the permit and demonstrators attempted to regroup in front of one of the convention delegates’ hotels, police lost control of the crowd and violently attempted to clear a street intersection. Television cameras recorded indiscriminate police brutality while demonstrators chanted “The whole world is watching.” Inside the convention hall that night, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut condemned the “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” while Mayor Daley, in full view of television cameras, shouted obscenities and anti-Semitic slurs at the senator. Hubert Humphrey won the presidential nomination that night, but the nationally broadcast images of police violence and of Daley’s tirade became the lasting memories of the convention.
Investigating the violence
The violence surrounding one of the essential rites of American democracy deepened the widespread perception that the nation faced a political and cultural crisis in 1968. The city of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Justice, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the presidentially appointed National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence all responded with investigations of the violence. Within days, the Daley administration issued the first report, blaming the violence on “outside agitators,” described as “revolutionaries” who came to Chicago “for the avowed purpose of a hostile confrontation with law enforcement.” The chair of the House Un-American Activities subcommittee, Richard Ichord, suspected communist involvement in the demonstrations, but his hearings devolved into a bizarre preview of the conspiracy trial when a shirtless, barefooted Jerry Rubin burst into the hearing room with a bandolier of bullets and a toy gun. In December 1968, the report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence labeled the disturbances in Chicago a “police riot” and presented evidence of “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions.” The commission’s Walker Report, named after its chair Daniel Walker, acknowledged that demonstrators had provoked the police and responded with violence of their own, but it found that the “vast majority of the demonstrators were intent on expressing by peaceful means their dissent.”
On September 9, 1968, three days after release of the Daley report, Chief Judge William J. Campbell of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois convened a grand jury to investigate whether the organizers of the demonstrations had violated federal law and whether any police officers had interfered with the civil rights of the protestors. The Department of Justice report, however, found no grounds for prosecution of demonstrators, and Attorney General Ramsey Clark asked the U.S. attorney in Chicago to investigate possible civil rights violations by Chicago police.
Indictment
John Mitchell, the new U.S. Attorney General appointed by President Nixon following his inauguration in January 1969, worked with the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago to strengthen draft indictments of demonstrators, and Department of Justice officials asked U.S. Attorney Thomas Foran, a political ally of Mayor Daley, to remain in office and direct the prosecution. On March 20, 1969, the grand jury indicted eight demonstrators and eight policemen. Seven policemen were charged with assaulting demonstrators and the eighth policeman was charged with perjury.
The indicted demonstrators, soon known as the “Chicago Eight,” were charged with conspiring to use interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot. Six of the defendants—David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party—were also charged with crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. The other two defendants, academics John Froines and Lee Weiner, were charged with teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices that would be used in civil disturbances. If convicted of all charges, each of the defendants faced up to ten years in prison. The case entered the court record as United States v. Dellinger et al. These were the first prosecutions under the anti-riot provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
It was an unlikely group to engage in conspiracy. Dellinger, at 54, had been active in pacifi st movements for years before the rise of the student protests of the 1960s. Hayden and Davis were skilled organizers with focused political goals, and they had never been interested in the street theater and cultural radicalism of Hoffman and Rubin. John Froines and Lee Weiner were only marginally involved in the planning for the demonstrations, and their participation during the convention differed little from that of hundreds of others. The unlikeliest conspirator was Bobby Seale, who had never met some of the defendants until they were together in the courtroom and who had appeared in Chicago briefl y for a couple of speeches during the convention. Seale was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, which federal and state prosecutors had recently targeted in numerous prosecutions around the country.
The eight were linked less by common action or common political goals than by a shared radical critique of U.S. government and society. Rennie Davis thought the government “lumped together all the strands of dissent in the sixties,” and Tom Hayden concluded that the government had “decided to put radicalism on trial.” On the witness stand, Abbie Hoffman dismissed the idea of any conspiracy among the eight defendants, adding, “we couldn’t even agree on lunch.”
Judge and jury
The randomly assigned judge, Julius Jennings Hoffman, became as much of a symbol as any of the defendants. Judge Hoffman’s imperious manner and apparent bias against the defendants inflamed tensions