Chicago Seven

Testimony from the1968 Democratic ConventionConspiracy Trial

Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida

Red and Black Publishers, PO Box 7542, St Petersburg, Florida, 33734

Printed and manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction: Stage and Cast: A Short History of the 60’s 5

Testimony of Abbie Hoffman 23

Testimony of Rennie Davis 55

Testimony of Bobby Seale 103

Testimony of Phil Ochs 117

Testimony of Allen Ginsberg 131

Testimony of Timothy Leary 159

Testimony of Norman Mailer 169

Testimony of Judy Collins 177

Closing Statement by William Kuntzler 185

Defendant Statements and Sentencing 195

Introduction

Stage and Cast: A Short History of the 60’s

The 1960’s were a unique period in American history. For a period of ten years, to a degree never seen before or since, the entire structure of American society was examined critically by a new generation, and was found to be wanting in nearly every aspect. Protest, dissent and civil disobedience were everywhere; talk of revolution was not only commonplace, but was seriously listened to, advocated and debated. No area of authority or social convention was left unchallenged—the movement against the Vietnam War questioned the post-World War II American role in the world and its ideological justifications; the flowering of Asian religious traditions challenged the authority of the mainstream American churches; the hippie culture of drugs, free love, “flower power” and individualism challenged conventional morality; the civil rights, gay rights and women’s rights movements unraveled and re-wrote existing race relations, gender roles and sexual relationships; the environmental movement attacked industrialization and its effects; the “New Left” challenged the very basis of the “free market” economy and faceless bureaucratic authority; and a series of demonstrations, protest rallies, sit-ins, teach-ins, and other actions, legal and illegal, challenged conventional “law and order” and undermined all of the traditional authority structures. Political figures from both the Democratic and Republican Parties became the targets of wrath, as activists for social justice came to reject both traditional parties in favor of “direct action” and “democracy in the streets”. The “generation gap” grew into a yawning chasm, as young people across the US smoked dope, listened to “acid rock”, read Marcuse and Sartre, and tried to change the entire world that their parents had lived in. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”, they declared.

The “Establishment”, in turn, looked on, stupefied and mystified. It had never faced anything like this before, and did not know how to deal with the onslaught, and in the end it turned to the only effective weapon it had – pure repression. Under both the Democratic administration of Lyndon B Johnson and, after Johnson was driven from the White House, the Republican administration of Richard M Nixon, “counterculture” activists became the target of repressive illegal programs, known as “Counter-Intelligence Programs”, or “COINTELPRO”, by the FBI, CIA, NSA and IRS to disrupt, harass, spy on and “neutralize” dissidents and political opponents. Phones were illegally tapped, mail was illegally intercepted, and provocateurs were used to drum up bogus criminal charges that were used to attempt to remove activists, like Martin Luther King Jr, Cesar Chavez, John Lennon, and others, from political action.

The iconic episode of the “generation gap” took place in Chicago in 1969. An assortment of eight (later reduced to seven) political activists were charged in Federal Court with criminal conspiracy to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. On one side, stood The Establishment – Introduction 7 the judge, the prosecuting attorneys, the police, the political officials, all declaring that they were acting to defend “law and order”, to “preserve the peace” and to “protect the authority of the US Government”. On the other side, stood The Movement – civil rights militants, New Left radicals, hippie music-and-drug gurus, and anti-war protestors, all declaring that they were acting to promote “grassroots democracy”, to give “power to the people”, and to “change America”. Facing each other in court, the two sides re-enacted, in microcosm, the social and political battle that had already been raging for years in the streets. And, just as the national political and social conflicts that produced it, the courtroom trial became part sermon, part theater, part comic relief, part law and order, part repression, and part media event.

The Civil Rights Movement

In terms of its impact on American society, perhaps the most important social movement of the 60’s was the African-American movement for civil rights. Theoretically, the American Civil War resulted in the end of slavery and the establishment of Black Americans as full citizens with all the rights of citizenship. In reality, though, this didn’t happen. When Reconstruction ended, the South came under the control of a virtual single-party political machine, in which Southern Democrats (known as “Dixiecrats”), dominated the Federal and state offices, and within a few decades had implemented a maze of laws and restrictions that turned the South into an apartheid system of racial segregation, known as “Jim Crow”, which left African-Americans voteless, powerless and rightless. By law, Black Americans could not go to the same schools, drink from the same water fountains, eat at the same restaurants, or swim in the same pools as whites. They could not even sit in the front seats of city buses. “Poll taxes” and other “voting requirements”, meanwhile, insured that African-Americans could not vote, and not a single Black was elected to any political office. The Jim Crow system lasted from the 1890’s to the 1950’s, virtually unchanged and unchallenged.

The first crack in Jim Crow came in 1954. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), formed in 1909 to win equal rights for African-Americans through litigation and political lobbying, filed suit in Arkansas against segregated schools. In the landmark Brown v Board of Education case, the Supreme Court agreed that segregated schools were a violation of the Constitution, and ordered that all public schools be made racially integrated. Southern racist political authorities, however, openly defied the Court decision. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils used terrorism and fear to oppose integration, and on several occasions, the Federal government had to order US Army troops in to maintain order and enforce the law.

To counter this resistance, African-American activists decided on a course of “civil disobedience” and “nonviolent resistance”, in which boycotts, sit-ins, mass rallies and other actions would be used to force an end to segregation much more quickly and certainly than legal lawsuits and lobbying could. One of the earliest successes of the civil rights movement was a boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person, a boycott of the city bus system was organized by local preacher Martin Luther King Jr. After a year, a Federal Court ordered Montgomery to desegregate its mass transit system. With this success, King joined with other civil rights activists to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which practiced Gandhian nonviolence as a strategy to force social change.

In 1960, four African-American students sat down at a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave until they were served. The sit-in sparked worldwide attention, and soon “sit-ins” were being organized at segregated facilities across the country. By the end of the year, student activists formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC – pronounced “snick”) to continue and expand the fight. In 1961, SNCC began organizing “Freedom Rides”, in which African-American and white civil rights workers piled into buses to desegregate Southern bus terminals, water fountains, and other public facilities. White supremacists responded by beating the activists, often with the cooperation of local law enforcement officials. “Freedom” buses were sometimes firebombed or shot at, and several “freedom riders” were killed. SCLC, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, and SNCC soon began to cooperate on larger campaigns. During a desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, police commissioner “Bull” Connor unleashed fire hoses and attack dogs on the marchers. King was arrested and, in his cell, wrote “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”, spelling out the goals of the civil rights movement. In 1963, King, SCLC and SNCC organized the March on Washington, and King’s address to the 250,000 marchers, “I Have a Dream”, became one of the most famous speeches in American history.

In the wake of the March on Washington, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress. In the South, however, local Dixiecrat politicians still refused to follow the law, and in response, the civil rights movement organized Freedom Summer, a massive effort to register Black voters and challenge racist institutions across the South. Three civil rights workers, two of them white students from the North, were murdered by the Klan. Despite the 1964 civil rights law, the elections in Southern states were still heavily rigged by the racist Dixiecrats. When the Mississippi Democratic Party “elected” an all-white slate of delegates to the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, civil rights groups organized a “counter-election” and chose a “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” slate instead. The Democratic Party had expected the Convention to be a celebration of Lyndon Johnson’s bold actions on behalf of 10 Chicago Seven civil rights; instead, the Convention got a firsthand look at the racism in its own ranks. The Mississippi Freedom slate went directly to the Credentials Committee in an effort to be seated at the Convention instead of the all-white official delegation. In response, other Southern states threatened to withdraw their own (all-white) delegations from the Convention if any of the African-Americans were seated. The Freedom slate was denied credentials, but after most of the official Mississippi delegates walked out in protest of the Party’s civil rights actions, the Freedom delegates were given passes by sympathetic delegates and sat in the vacant seats, singing civil rights anthems. The next day, when the empty seats disappeared, they stood in the aisles and continued singing.

The Freedom Summer campaign (and the embarrassment caused to the Democratic Party by the Mississippi Freedom delegates) led to the 1965 Voting Right Act, which repealed all of the Jim Crow-era impediments to Black voters, and used the resources of the Federal Government to enforce voting rights. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. Even before his death, however, a faction had appeared in the civil rights movement that rejected King’s reliance on nonviolence, and, impatient with the slow progress being made through legal actions and political maneuvering, advocated that “Black Power” be brought to bear on white racism.