The Year Was 1969

William Kunstler

The trial of The Chicago 7 was taking place with their main attorney William Kunstler and the reason why I remember this is the fact that William Kunstler gave at talk at Elon College regarding the rights of students.  The school administration was searching our dorm rooms indiscriminately and without warning and we complained that the school administration did not have the right to do this because they were a Church of Christ College and could do as they pleased.  

At Kunstler's LECTURE, he informed those students present that Elon College actually received more funds from the Federal Government than they did from the Church of Christ and therefore needed to have a SEARCH WARRANT in order to search our rooms since we were paying a rental fee for those rooms.  Elon College stopped the practice after Kunstler's LECTURE.

This type of experience is not easily forgotten.

I just watched the movie THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 and it vividly brought back memories that had all but been forgotten by me and the reason why these memories were more or less forgotten by me was the fact that I did not return to Elon College the second semester was that I had enlisted in the US Navy Reserves and did not have to report to active duty for another year as long as I attended Reserve meetings.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

The trial of the Chicago Seven begins before Judge Julius Hoffman. Initially there were eight defendants (and the group was known as the Chicago Eight), but one, Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, denounced Hoffman as a racist and demanded a separate trial. The seven other defendants, including David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE); Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden of MOBE and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); and Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Youth International Party (Yippies), were accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

At the height of the antiwar and civil rights movements, these young leftists had organized protest marches and rock concerts at the Democratic National Convention. During the event, clashes broke out between the protesters and the police and eventually turned into full-scale rioting, complete with tear gas and police beatings. The press, already there to cover the Democratic convention, denounced the overreaction by police and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s handling of the situation.

The Chicago Seven were indicted for violating the Rap Brown law, which had been tagged onto the Civil Rights Bill earlier that year by conservative senators. The law made it illegal to cross state lines in order to riot or to conspire to use interstate commerce to incite rioting. President Johnson’s attorney general, Ramsey Clark, refused to prosecute the case.  SOURCE:  History.com