Chicago Seven

Associated with the trial some historians portray as uniquely symbolic of the conflict of values characteristic of U.S. society in the late 1960s, the Chicago Seven were seven men indicted during the spring of 1969 for conspiracy to incite a riot. Originally made up of eight defendants, including Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale, the charge made reference to the widespread unrest that occurred at the time of the Chicago-based August 1968 Democratic National Convention. The group—including Youth International Party (YIPPIE) founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, pacifists Dave Dellinger and Rennie Davis, Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden, and locally active academics Lee Weiner and John Froines—had a diverse and sometimes conflicting sense of appropriate courtroom strategy and tactics. With all convictions overturned late in 1972 by a Circuit Court of Appeals, the ultimate judicial decision affirmed a comment made by Abbie Hoffman about eight men who had never (before the trial) met as a single group: They could hardly agree to a conspiracy when they couldn't even agree on lunch! The legacy of the trial suggests that courtroom dramatics can play a powerful role in challenging legal and political authority.

Most observers, including an independent commission and Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General Ramsey Clark, concluded that the violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was caused by an out-of-control police force, under the direction of militaristic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Daley's insistence on getting a federal judge to convene a grand jury on the matter resulted in the eight indictments. Defense attorneys William Kuntsler and Leonard Weinglass submitted questions intended to reveal cultural bias among potential jurors to trial judge Julius Hoffman (including whether they knew who Jimi Hendrix was or whether they let their daughters dress without bras), who refused to allow that line of inquiry. There is little doubt that Judge Hoffman's strict and narrow interpretation of the law, combined with his open distaste for the defense, helped set up a dynamic that encouraged outrageous defense theatrics.

After one month of struggling to get a postponement so that Black Panther lawyer Charles Garry could be added to the defense team, Bobby Seale, angered at being forced to represent himself, intensified his challenges to the judge. Hoffman, in turn, ordered Seale bound and gagged, an incident not missed by the national media. Seale's case was quickly severed from the remaining seven. Later in the [Page 311]trial, during defense testimony, witnesses appeared to vouch for the defendant's peaceful intentions. These witnesses included folk singers Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Phil Ochs; beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who led the courtroom in chanting OM; and LSD guru Timothy Leary. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin entered the courtroom on occasion wearing mock judicial robes. Dellinger, the oldest of the group and a World War II conscientious objector, admonished the judge for wanting people to behave like “good Germans” and go along with the Vietnam War, then like “good Jews,” going along quietly during a prosecution made up largely of testimony by police officers and paid informants.

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