They pledged to raise money to fund the Chicago Eight’s legal defense and encouraged readers to make donations. Because the Chicago Eight had begun referring to themselves as “The Conspiracy,” the 19 signers dubbed themselves the Committee to Defend the Conspiracy. The letter was signed by 19 people, including Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Judy Collins and Norman Mailer (Collins and Mailer would also testify at the trial). “Potentially, this law is the foundation for a police state in America.” “The effect of this ‘anti-riot’ act is to subvert the first Amendment guarantee of free assembly by equating organized political protest with organized violence,” it read. Three months before the Chicago Eight trial began, a group of prominent writers and thinkers published a letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books arguing that the anti-riot law set a dangerous precedent. The Chicago Eight: (top L-R) Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman,Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Bobby Seale, Lee Weiner, John Froines and David Dellinger, circa 1968. Prominent voices challenged the legitimacy of the anti-riot law. Mitchell-who was later convicted for his role in the Watergate conspiracy-was much more receptive to Daley, and decided to prosecute the Chicago Eight under the new federal anti-riot law. The next year, Richard Nixon took office and appointed John Mitchell as the new attorney general. “He thought that there was more evidence against the police, who had violated the civil rights of the protesters in Chicago.” “I interviewed and he said he saw there was no evidence to try the defendants,” says Nick Sharman, a researcher at the University of Melbourne and author of The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the Press. Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark didn’t think there was a case. After violence erupted at the Chicago DNC, Mayor Daley wanted the government to prosecute some of the demonstrators under the new act. The Chicago Eight were the first people tried under the first federal anti-riot law.Īnti-riot laws were all at the local or state level until the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which included a provision making it illegal to cross state lines to incite a riot. Fifty years later, here’s why the Chicago Eight trial that opened on Septemwas such a big deal. None were convicted of conspiracy, and although five of them were convicted of inciting a riot, an appellate court dismissed the charges because it found that the judge had been biased against them. The evidence against the Chicago Eight, as they became known, was always slim. The others were Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party David Dellinger, a longtime anti-war activist Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (whose members were called “yippies”) and Lee Weiner, who had volunteered as a marshal for the DNC demonstrations to help with crowd control. government accused him, Davis and six other men of conspiring to incite a riot at the DNC. “Rennie Davis and I were hit on the head with night sticks.”įroines, who is now a professor emeritus of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, wasn’t arrested that day. “One day in Grant Park somebody took down a flag and the police used that as an excuse to go through the crowd beating people with nightsticks,” recalls John Froines, who helped organize the DNC anti-war demonstrations with Rennie Davis of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. These police and military forces violently clashed with Vietnam War protesters, resulting in hundreds of injuries and 668 arrests during the four-day convention. Daley refused protest permits to most anti-war demonstrators and deployed 12,000 police officers, 5,600 members of the Illinois National Guard and 5,000 Army soldiers on the streets to meet any who showed up. Before the convention began on August 26, Chicago Mayor Richard J. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago is most-remembered for what happened on the streets outside of it.
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