On this day in 1969, the "Chicago Eight", protesters associated with the 1968 DNC riots, including Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and civil rights activist Abbie Hoffman, were indicted for conspiracy, crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot, and various other crimes associated with the counter-cultural protests in Chicago.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, activists from around the United States came to Chicago to protest the Vietnam War and other U.S. policies.

The protests were attended by a variety of organizations, including the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the Youth International Party ("Yippies"), and the Poor People's Campaign, led by Ralph Abernathy. The protests devolved into a melee with a militarized police presence, later described by a federal commission as a "police riot", outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, an incident that was broadcast internationally.

Following federal investigations into the incident, 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 protesters.

On March 20th, 1969, this grand jury indicted eight organizers associated with the protests: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Youth International Party; pacifist organizer David Dellinger; Tom Hayden, Lee Weiner, and Rennie Davis of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; chemist John Froines; Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party.

Despite being charged with conspiracy, these individuals were only tenuously linked through their participation in the 1968 protests. Author Bruce Ragsdale noted in 2008: "The eight were linked less by common action or common political goals than by a shared radical critique of U.S. government and society."

The trial itself was fraught with outbursts from the defendants and celebrity testimony: Seale called the presiding judge a "rotten racist pig, fascist liar" and later appeared before the jury bound, gagged, and chained to his chair; Hoffman attempted to bring in a Vietnamese flag to the courtroom and fought for possession of it with a court marshal; witnesses included Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary.

Seale's case was declared a mistrial, while the remaining seven were convicted of a total of 159 counts of criminal contempt. On February 18th, 1970, the jury acquitted all seven defendants of conspiracy, and Froines and Weiner of all charges. At his sentencing, Dellinger stated:

"Whatever happens to us, however unjustified, will be slight compared to what has happened already to the Vietnamese people, to the black people in this country, to the criminals with whom we are now spending our days in the Cook County jail. I must have already lived longer than the normal life expectancy of a black person born when I was born, or born now. I must have already lived longer, 20 years longer, than the normal life expectancy in the underdeveloped countries which this country is trying to profiteer from and keep under its domain and control."

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    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I've never really fucked around with party politics, I guess. When my brain isn't totally broken I try to help out with street level stuff, I listen to Trueanon, and sometimes I read some theory. I guess it just never came up.