7
Panther members in Chicago went door-to-door in many black communities to find out what peoples’ complaints and priorities were and to get signatures on petitions for community control of the police. These neighborhood activities sometimes put them in conflict with Chicago street gangs, who considered many areas their exclusive territories. The gangs had become home for many ghetto youth. They were armed and organized. Sometimes they exercised their power to benefit the community. The Black P. Stone Nation, successor to the Blackstone Rangers, carried out a “no-vote” campaign on the South Side to take votes away from the Democratic machine in favor of more progressive and community-oriented candidates. In 1969 members of the Black Disciples, Chicago’s second-largest street gang, made up the majority of demonstrators who picketed and actually halted Chicago construction projects in the Loop, Chicago’s business center, until they won positions for African Americans in the building trades unions, which had been a bastion of discrimination.
Unfortunately, gang leaders were often focused on controlling the proceeds from the most thriving business in the ghetto, the drug trade. Gang members were encouraged and sometimes required by their leaders to sell drugs and keep rivals groups out of their territory. Everyone assumed the Chicago police were getting their cut.
In 1969, Fred met and worked out a treaty with David Barksdale, the leader of the Black Disciples. The agreement allowed the Panthers to organize and recruit in areas controlled by the Disciples. Fred had been less successful when he met with the leadership of the Blackstone Rangers. One face-to-face meeting took place at the Rangers headquarters in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Fred and several other armed Panthers went to the meeting but were quickly surrounded by many better-armed Rangers including Jeff Fort, their leader, and other representatives of the Main 21, the Rangers’ governing body.
Fred started rapping, making it clear that the Panthers were not trying to control turf. He wanted the Rangers to join in Panther efforts to stop police brutality, as well as join the Party if they desired. At least he wanted an agreement that Panthers could sell their paper without harassment.
Fort told Fred he could be rich if he and the Panthers joined the Rangers’ drug operation. Fred refused. Fred did not use drugs and he and Panther policy did not allow Panther members to use them. Drugs and alcohol were prohibited in the Panther office. The meeting ended with Fort acknowledging that the Panthers were not a rival gang but still refusing to permit them to operate in Ranger territory. The meeting lessened tensions only slightly.
Nevertheless, Fred’s efforts to work with and organize gang members caused fear throughout the police and FBI. After the meeting at Ranger headquarters, Chicago police, following an FBI tip, arrested a carload of armed Panthers driving away. This resulted in criminal charges against the Panthers and set off speculation that the Rangers had snitched on them. Years later we would learn that an FBI informant in the Panthers had tipped off his FBI control, who then notified the police.
On January 24, 1969, the Chicago police arrested Fred following an FBI tip that he was appearing on a local TV station. In front of the live cameras he was led away on an old traffic warrant. Later, Fred told people that when he got to the police car, he noticed he hadn’t been cuffed. When placed in the back seat he saw there was a gun resting there. “I spotted a set-up,” he said. “I put my wrists outside the car and started screaming, ‘There’s a gun in the car that somebody left.’” His quick thinking worked. That day he avoided police bullets.
Fred and the Panthers sought alliances with other groups in Chicago. One of them was the Young Lords Organization (YLO), which had started as a Puerto Rican street gang. In the late 1960s, under the leadership of Cha-Cha Jimenez, they focused on stopping Chicago’s Department of Urban Renewal and other city agencies from forcing poor and working-class people, many of whom were Puerto Rican, out of the Lincoln Park neighborhood.
In 1969 the YLO took over Reverend Bruce Johnson’s church on Armitage Avenue, and renamed it the People’s Church. With Reverend Johnson’s support, the church became the headquarters for the Lincoln Park Poor People’s Coalition, which included black, white, and Mexican groups who were fighting to keep Lincoln Park from being gentrified. Following the Panther example, the YLO started a Breakfast for Children Program as well as a health clinic in the church. The police were constantly harassing and arresting Cha-Cha for organizing the Puerto Rican community against the city’s gentrification plan. For a period in 1969, Dennis went to court regularly to get him released on bond. The Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots, an organization of white Southern youth from Uptown, formed their own Rainbow Coalition, a precursor to Jesse Jackson’s, to protest police brutality and abuse in Chicago and support the Panther demand for community control of police.
On April 4, 1969, Manuel Ramos, a Puerto Rican teenager and the minister of defense of the YLO, was shot and killed by an off-duty Chicago police officer at a Young Lords party. Another Young Lord was shot and critically wounded. The police officer’s version, that Ramos had attacked him, did not fit with other witness accounts or with the location and direction of the bullets fired into Ramos’s body.
The Rainbow Coalition organized a march on May 3 to protest Ramos’s killing and demand a new and independent investigation. The police had declared Ramos’s death “justifiable homicide,” the standard ruling in police shooting cases. In the thirty-five years I practiced civil rights law in Chicago, I don’t recall the police ever finding any on-duty police killing anything but “justifiable.”
I was growing weary of working at the Legal Assistance Foundation and was drawn more and more to helping organizations such as the Young Lords and the Panthers. And so I was present on that bright and windy spring day in 1969 at People’s Park, marching with the Manuel Ramos family. We intended to present a letter to the police demanding a thorough investigation of Ramos’ death. In addition to the coalition, the marchers included SDS members and other white leftists. Our march was scheduled to go from Lincoln Park south to the Eighteenth District Police Station on Chicago Avenue.
Dennis and I were among the nearly one thousand protesters who assembled around noon at the plot of vacant land at Halsted and Armitage that the Young Lords had named People’s Park. The plot was across the street from where we would open our law collective four months later. We left the park with the Young Lords, in their brown berets with red stars on the front, leading the procession. The march took us through the all-black Cabrini-Green housing project, controlled by the Cobra Stones, part of the Black P. Stone Nation.
As we left the projects heading south, our procession picked up a tail: about one hundred Cobra Stones with red caps turned sideways. Some were holding car radio antennas as weapons and taunting us from behind. When we turned left on Chicago Avenue and arrived at the Eighteenth District Police Station, a hundred cops in formation and full riot gear started marching toward us from the other side. They wore helmets with plastic face guards and carried batons. The Cobra Stones were still approaching us from behind, the gap closing quickly. We were trapped.
I was standing near the Ramos family when I heard, “Join arms together! Protect our march!” I felt paralyzed. My legal training had not taught me how to handle this situation. I considered fleeing but there were no safe havens for legal observers that day. As I deliberated, I saw my friend Ted Stein, another lawyer, unhesitatingly join arms with those on both sides of him. I got a sense of what solidarity means. Well, Jeff, I thought, this is it. There ain’t no ducking today. There’s only one honorable thing to do. I locked arms with the people on my right and left, ready to face whatever came. As we stood our ground waiting for the confrontation, Hilda Ignatin, a community organizer working with the Young Lords, left our line and approached the Cobra Stones. They stopped within a few feet of us.
“We’re marching to protest a police killing,” she said. “Why don’t you join us?” They looked surprised and hesitated. Their leaders conferred.
“The police told us the Young Lords were helping the Panthers take over our Projects,” one of them said.
“That’s not true,” Hilda replied. “Our issue is a police killing right here in the Eighteenth District. The same police who brutalize you.” The Cobra Stones conferred again. I watched intently. It looked like they were arguing. Then one of them stepped out front. “OK, we’ll join you,” he said. I relaxed a bit. They stood with us, even joined our chants for justice for the Ramos family. Their presence temporarily stopped the cops coming from the east. Dennis and the Ramos family presented their letter demanding a new investigation to the district commander, who came out to take it, then quickly vanished inside. It was a rare moment when the left and black street gangs connected.
All of us left together. We started walking, but when we turned north on LaSalle Street, it became a trot, and then a run. The crowd smashed store windows with rocks and bottles. I had never been in a group that was breaking windows. My level of alarm rose with each burst of shattering glass. It was electric. I didn’t break any windows, but I didn’t run away.
The year 1969 was the era of “Street Fightin’ Man.” The Rolling Stones song was often played as a warm-up for militant demonstrations. Excesses became the norm, whether it was the pulse, passion, and drugs of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix or the increased bombing in southeast Asia. Nikki Giovanni wrote a poem in which she asked, “Nigger can you kill?” Many saw it as a legitimate call to arms for black rage. I too became drawn to the exhilaration of street confrontations and was convinced of their political effectiveness. These were what the press reported and what made headlines. Orderly protests were mostly ignored. However, as a lawyer, the activity was a lot safer for me than the people I supported. I was seldom in the streets, only in court with the unlucky arrestees.
In May 1969, shortly after the Ramos march, Fred had another trial. The summer before, an ice cream vendor in Maywood had been pushed down inside his truck and seventy-one bars of ice cream were handed out to Maywood kids. The police later arrested Fred Hampton after they claimed the victim identified Fred’s picture, which they had shown him. Fred always denied he did the robbery. Recently while visiting the Hampton household, I met Thomas Blair, a neighbor of theirs in Maywood since the 1960s. Blair told me he took and passed out the ice cream. His knowledge of the details, as well as his physique, which was similar to Fred’s, convinced me he told the truth.
Jean Williams, a female attorney Fred had met on King’s marches, represented him. The prosecution brought the ice cream vendor back from Vietnam to testify, an unusual expense and effort in a case with no injuries and so little loss, but Cook County state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan wanted Fred in jail. Hanrahan had a broad face and a determined look. He came from Daley’s Bridgeport neighborhood and combined Irish appeal with a Harvard Law School education. Ambitious and serious, with a short temper and little sense of humor, he was widely regarded as heir apparent to Mayor Richard J. Daley. In his public speeches after he was elected Cook County state’s attorney in 1968, Hanrahan referred to the Panthers as a “gang.” This would serve his purpose well when later that year he and Mayor Daley declared a “war on gangs.” Hanrahan presented himself as the guardian of law and order, defending society against black chaos and violence.
After he took office in January 1969, Hanrahan created a nine-man Special Prosecutions Unit (SPU) to deal with gangs, even though a similar Gang Intelligence Unit (GIU) already existed in the police department. Hanrahan’s SPU was given primarily police functions. Hanrahan had served as the U.S. attorney for Chicago and its suburbs, and he appointed his former assistant, Richard Jalovec, to be in charge of the SPU. In June an additional team of police officers, led by Sergeant Daniel Groth, was added. It included Officer James “Gloves” Davis, a black cop notorious for brutally beating black youth after he put on black leather gloves.
Mayor Daley made the police chief, superintendent of schools, fire commissioner, and head of human resources a top-level committee to direct the city’s actions against gangs. Hanrahan, the spokesman for the campaign, promised to increase prosecution of gang members. At one point, speaking to a group of African American mothers, he referred to gang members as “animals unfit for society.” He was booed. After that his antigang campaign lost favor among blacks.
Even though Hanrahan vilified Fred and the Panthers publicly, particularly their antipolice rhetoric, many Maywood board members and community activists, black and white, attended Fred’s ice cream trial to support him. Some testified as character witnesses. The village board agreed to let Fred do a mock trial using their assembly room as the courtroom. In the mock trial Fred represented himself before a people’s tribunal consisting of prominent Maywood citizens and some board members. Exercising the lawyer skills he was never able to utilize in a real courtroom, Fred obtained a “not guilty” from the citizen’s jury.
Many of those who acted as jurors and spectators later told me how impressed they had been with the sharpness of his cross-examination and the power of his argument.
At the time of Fred’s real trial, I worked with Skip Andrew and Donald Stang, two young lawyers just out of law school in the main Legal Assistance office in downtown Chicago. Skip had spent two years in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. There he witnessed the democratic election of the leftist Juan Bosch, who was quickly overthrown by a U.S.-supported coup. Some of the people Skip worked with were killed in the U.S. invasion. He and other Peace Corps volunteers were so outraged that only a special emissary from the White House talked them out of holding a press conference denouncing the United States.
Skip, the son of a Protestant minister in Iowa, was intense and meticulous, bordering on the compulsive, and took practicing law very seriously. He usually wore a suit and tie, sported a trimmed mustache and goatee, and looked older and more conservative than the rest of us, which added to his credibility in court. Skip and his wife Nancy lived on Burling Street, a few doors from Mary and me in Lincoln Park.
Donald Stang was a Harvard Law School graduate and came from a liberal, Jewish, upper-middle-class family in New York. He was intellectual, cautious, and quiet. He picked his words carefully. Don also had a wry sense of humor and a baby face. His hair was shorter than mine, but we both sported the shorter version of the Afro, a “Jew-fro.”
Skip and Don attended Fred’s ice cream truck robbery trial. In the small courtroom, they made eye contact with Fred, who later approached them in the hall. Fred pointed a finger at Skip’s suit and tie and asked who he was.
“I’m a lawyer at Legal Assistance … and so is he,” Skip replied, pointing to Don.
“Which side are you on?” Fred asked.
“Yours,” Skip responded, assuming Fred was asking whether he was for the prosecution or the defense.
“No, I mean what are you two doing for the revolution? Are you for us or against us?”
More than a bit taken aback, Skip and Don sputtered, “For you.”
“Then come to the Panther office at nine tonight and knock on the steel door.”
No one but Fred could pull off his “in your face” directness without incurring resentment. That evening Skip and Don went to Panther headquarters and knocked. A voice came over a speaker, “Who’s there?” They gave their names and were buzzed into a dark vestibule. A speaker from the top of the stairs above them bellowed, “By whose authority are you here?”
“Chairman Fred sent for us” Skip replied.
“Come up one step at a time,” the faceless speaker responded. Skip made out a shotgun pointed at them. As they approached the upper part of the stairs, the door at the top opened, and a bright light shined in their eyes. They walked in and Fred greeted them with a grin and a big hug.
That night Fred recruited Skip and Don to be Panther lawyers. Fred’s magnetism was irresistible. He laid out the Panther program, told Skip and Don that “the police are trying to destroy the Panthers any way they can. We need your help.”
When Don explained that Legal Assistance lawyers couldn’t take criminal cases, it didn’t satisfy Fred—or Don. After talking with each other, Skip and Don met with Dennis the next week to discuss the formation of an independent law office, one that would be free to represent not only the Panthers but the movement as a whole.
Two days after Fred confronted Skip and Don, he was convicted. Sidney Jones, a black trial judge who was well connected to the Democratic machine, indicated he intended to grant Fred probation, the expected sentence for an offense where no weapon was used, no one was injured, and the defendant had no criminal record. But during the three weeks between the conviction and the sentencing hearing, State’s Attorney Hanrahan held a press conference. He blasted the Panthers and Fred Hampton and criticized the trial judge for considering probation. Hanrahan carried a lot of clout in the Democratic Party, and any sitting judge wanted his endorsement for reelection.
On May 27, Fred was sentenced. The prosecutor questioned Fred. His lawyer, Jean Williams, let him answer. “Are your principles consistent and compatible with those of Mao Tse-Tung of Red China?” the prosecutor asked.
“We take things from Mao Tse-Tung and Martin Luther King or anybody else applicable to what we are after,” Fred said.
“Do you feel that a legitimate means of obtaining what you are after is armed violence or armed revolution?”
“I believe if we tried anything else we would end up like Dr. Martin Luther King.”
Judge Jones had taken his cue from Hanrahan and sentenced Fred to two to five years in the state penitentiary. Fred’s bond was revoked and he was taken into custody. He was soon transferred to Menard Prison in southern Illinois, 350 miles from Chicago, to begin his sentence.
On June 4, 1969, a week after Fred went to prison, FBI agents, led by Chicago’s Special Agent in Charge (SAC), Marlin Johnson, raided Panther headquarters. They had obtained a search warrant by swearing before a judge that George Sams, a fugitive, was present in the office. Sams had been there but left forty-eight hours earlier. Looking for George Sams was the official reason for FBI raids on Panther offices in at least two other cities. In each instance, Sams left shortly before the raid. It was later revealed that Sams was an FBI informant. He went to these offices to provide the FBI the pretext for a raid.
FBI agents called and told the Chicago Panthers that the office was surrounded, that they had a search warrant, and that no one would be hurt if the Panthers did not resist. Agents then came to the entrance, broke down the front door, and went upstairs, where they pointed their guns at the eight people inside. No one resisted. The FBI seized three thousand dollars in cash and took property and records, including lists of contributors. Food for the breakfast program was dumped on the floor, and legally purchased weapons were confiscated. Nothing was ever returned.
The eight Panthers on the premises were arrested and charged with harboring a fugitive. Skip and Don defended them and procured their release on bond. There were banner headlines that proclaimed the Panthers’ arrests for “Multiple Weapons” and “Harboring a Fugitive.” These were much more prominently displayed than the back-page news stories several weeks later noting all charges were dropped.
Some Panther members became frightened and left after Fred’s incarceration and the FBI raid. Bradley Greene had come to the office to join the Panthers in early May and was told that because there were so many new Panther members, he could only become a “friend of the Panthers” until the section chiefs had integrated the new members. When he returned in June, he was immediately accepted and soon made a section chief himself.
Skip and Dennis started working on Fred’s appeal. They recruited Flint Taylor and Seva Dubuar, two law students, to go to Maywood to get affidavits from community leaders to be used in support of releasing Fred on an appeal bond. Before a trial there is the presumption of innocence and a right to bail except where the defendant is likely to flee or presents a danger to the community. After a conviction, the granting of bail is discretionary. Support and endorsements by community leaders are crucial. Interviewing people in Maywood about Fred was Flint’s first experience working closely with black people.
Flint came from an old Boston family that came over on the Mayflower. He attended Brown University and was finishing his first year at Northwestern Law School. His hippy exterior, including long, reddish-blond hair, disguised a tireless work ethic. He was competitive in sports and didn’t like to lose at anything. Flint is a person you want on your side whether it’s in a lawsuit or a basketball game. His thoroughness and tenacity have made him an indefatigable advocate for civil rights for over forty years and earned him the reputation of being one of the most dogged and successful civil rights litigators in the country. He dates his commitment to civil rights to learning about Fred from his family and friends in Maywood.
In July, Dennis and ACLU attorney Kermit Coleman appeared before chief justice Walter V. Schaefer of the Illinois Supreme Court with the affidavits Flint and Seva had obtained supporting Hampton’s release. State’s Attorney Hanrahan’s representative spoke out vigorously against granting bond, arguing that they “could not keep track of Fred if he was released and he was a risk of flight.”
“Are you telling me you don’t know where Fred Hampton is every minute of the day?” the chief justice responded incredulously. The state’s attorney had no response.
On July 31, while Justice Schaefer was considering granting bail, the Chicago police and the Panthers exchanged gunfire at the Panther headquarters. The police said the incident started with sniper fire, but several witnesses said the police opened fire on the Panther office without provocation. Five police officers were wounded and three Panthers— Larry White, Dwight Corbett, and Alfred Jeffries—were arrested. Again the office was ransacked and Panther property was seized and never returned. The police formed a gauntlet at the bottom of the stairs. They beat and kicked the three as they walked outside.
Skip showed up in court to represent the Panthers at their preliminary hearing. His cross-examination of the police witnesses exposed so many contradictions in their testimony that charges against all the defendants were dropped.
A few days later Justice Schaefer granted Fred Hampton’s petition for an appeal bond, allowing him to be released from Menard Prison. He also set an expedited appeal schedule. On August 13, Fred returned to Chicago, and the next day the Panthers had him speak at the Church of the Epiphany, known as the People’s Church, located at Ashland and Adams. It was still warm outside when Flint and I entered to hear Fred. The large stone edifice was in the heart of Chicago’s black West Side community, less than a mile from the Panther office. The vestibule was full when we entered. Mike Gray and Howard Alk had set up their filming equipment at the front of the center aisle. Major parts of his speech that evening have been preserved in the Film Group’s The Murder of Fred Hampton, released in 1971. I have repeated some of them in the opening scenes of this book. Near the end Fred told us we should all say “I am a revolutionary” before we went to sleep in case there was a “revolutionary happy hunting ground” and we might not wake up. Some truth hidden in a joke.
After Fred finished and the church shook with its final reverberation of “Power to the people” and we had all declared “I am a revolutionary,” we stood up to leave. Mike Gray turned off his camera. Fred’s prophetic words that night, “I’m not gonna die slipping on ice … I’m gonna die in the proletarian revolution,” became the ending to his film. On the twentieth anniversary of Fred’s murder, Mike wrote:
A few months after he died, I began to understand exactly what it was about him that separated him from the rest of us. Watching that footage hour after hour in the editing room with Howard Alk, I finally saw that Fred Hampton was fearless. Literally, without fear. And as we listened to the speeches again and again, it became apparent he had accommodated death. He knew he was going to die. It was OK And so he had set aside the ultimate fear, the one that stopped all of us in our tracks, no matter how courageous, the net fear upon which we base all our other fears, the one that keeps us all in line. Hampton had simply set that fear to rest. He was free. Thus he was able to speak clean simple truths that hit you like a thunderbolt.
If I had not been a lawyer that night I might have gone into the streets or underground. Fred’s fearlessness challenged my own fears. Instead, I joined the People’s Law Office (PLO). I had been part of the discussions with Dennis, Skip, and Don and was intrigued by the new venture but fearful and hesitant as well. Even with its limitations, Legal Assistance had stability and a paycheck. Income from the new office would be uncertain at best. But the hardest thing was casting my lot outside the mainstream; becoming a lawyer for the movement that challenged the very institutions that most lawyers used their skill to support. Law collectives had formed in New York and L.A., but the concept was still new and no one had enough experience to know how they would fare.
I had to see and hear Fred to overcome my reluctance and my own fear. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a part of Fred’s legacy is the People’s Law Office, which formed a few months after Skip and Don encountered Fred and his “up against the wall” recruitment tactics and when Flint and I heard him speak.
I went home from Fred’s speech, grabbed a cold beer, and told Mary we needed to talk. “I want to be part of the new office to represent Fred and the Panthers,” I said, as we sat on our living room couch, across from the handmade bookshelves filling up with political literature.
To my surprise, she replied, “Go for it. I can support us for a while on my salary from the Film Group.” “What about film school?” I asked. “It can wait; I like what I’m doing now.” She smiled. When we opened our new office in the summer of 1969, our clients included the Panthers, the Young Lords, antiwar protesters, and SDS. Chicago’s political and social movements were a microcosm of those throughout the United States, if not the entire world. I once was told every generation has its chance to make a revolution. The last had been in the 1930s. This was ours. If we doubted our success, we saw the people in Vietnam, Cuba, and China winning liberation struggles led by
revolutionary forces. Many other countries of Africa and South America were also engaged in anticolonial struggles, seeking radical change and separation from the United States. Here we were in the “belly of the beast,” where it was most vulnerable.
From today’s perspective, what I felt had to be done in 1969 may seem shortsighted and impulsive. This is partly true. I certainly did not appreciate the strength, staying power, and violence the U.S. government would use to suppress our movement. It didn’t turn out to be a “paper tiger,” as Mao had predicted.
But we did not accept the bourgeois society, imperialism, and patriarchy we encountered. We held the government responsible for the Vietnam War, for buttressing reactionary governments throughout the world, including the apartheid regime in South Africa, and for the continuous oppression and exploitation of blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans as well as women. Like much of the rest of the world, we had come to believe radical, indeed revolutionary change, was necessary.
We divided the world much as Eldridge Cleaver did: “You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.” The solution seemed to be revolution “by any means necessary.” We felt empowered; we could make history. Only a lack of will or courage could stop us.
As for the personal implications of being a “revolutionary,” I, like other “mother country radicals,” as we whites called ourselves, had to figure it out. Tennis? OK, but who had time? Tasty food? A hard one to give up and maybe OK if not overindulged, not too expensive, and everyone got to share—potlucks preferable. Maintaining relationships with your parents? The radical movement line was maybe, but my gut said try. My parents were more accepting of me than I was of them. There was a distance, but I didn’t burn my bridges. The Weathermen, who had taken over SDS and with whom we had the closest personal relationships, pushed the line. “Smash monogamy!” they cried, arguing it was the source of patriarchy and women’s oppression. Yet the alternatives of many partners or serial monogamy had their own problems. I can’t say how much we were guided by our theory and how much by our hormones. Sex? No limit. It was free, but of course there could be an emotional toll. Type? Heterosexual not preferred, but allowed, and most of us indulged heartily. Living in nuclear families? The line said no—kids and parents benefit from a communal setting. I had no kids. For a while we helped with Dennis’s kids, and I did eventually live in a collective. I had many good and a few bad experiences living in a group scene but found it difficult to maintain over a long period. Mind-expanding drugs like LSD? No prohibition if used to gain better understanding and awareness. Taken infrequently, which I did, they helped me see things I had never seen before and some of these things contained truths even after the trip was over. Like seeing Dennis and his wife Mona as the gurus, those with special insights, at PLO. Money? The line was give it to the movement; share it. I did give up most of mine but held out a little, hedging my bet. Dealing with personal issues? The line said, “the personal is political,” which has some truth, but the line didn’t take into account the heart, and often neither did I. I left my feelings out of the equation of what should be done.
My cubicle at the newly opened People’s Law Office was in the middle of the five other hexagons that made up the interior offices. It was difficult to find enough straight wall to align a desk. A local architect had designed the space to “make us different and to save money,” although I never figured out how it did the latter. He also glued egg cartons to the ceiling as noise baffles because the hexagonal walls of each office didn’t reach the ceiling. The soundproofing didn’t work, but it was a conversation starter with clients.
My first week at the office, we erected a four-foot-high, hollow wooden barricade in front of the glass windows that looked out on busy Halsted Street in Lincoln Park. We filled it with concrete for protection against anyone shooting in from the street. We considered the local police, or their friends, the most likely candidates.
“I wonder how many law offices in Chicago do this,” I said to Flint.
We also installed a three-foot-high steel gate between the inner office and entrance door. The gate could only be opened by the buzzer on the receptionist’s desk. We took the possibility of a police attack on our office seriously. We had a built-in gun cabinet stocked with a legally purchased and registered shotgun and a nine-millimeter handgun. Some of my partners had taken target practice a few times before I joined PLO, and I went to a private pistol range with the nine millimeter. Firing the gun itself wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as being on the range with a lot of off-duty cops. As it turned out we never had occasion to use or even pull out our weapons. When we moved downtown six years and a political era later, I was surprised to find them still there in the cabinet in the wall. They had become period pieces.
We didn’t need a lot of money to live on and the structure of sharing fees, with Dennis getting a little more because he had a family, suited us. We began operating on the Marxist principle “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need,” but the complexities of defining need quickly caught up with us.
Should we take into account money from a working spouse or parents in determining what each lawyer needed or received? Karl Marx said yes, but we found this impractical and difficult to calculate. Why should a spouse take on onerous work to get more money, if it only resulted in her partner’s salary being decreased? I still had some money from my family. Should I work for free until it was gone? These issues became so complicated that after a year we opted for a standard salary, with an increase if you had children. At first legal workers and secretaries earned the same money as the lawyers, but this too changed over time. They continued to earn salaries and the lawyers divided up what was left. In the early years the nonlawyers did better.
Getting paid depended on whether money was coming in. When we started in 1969, we hoped to make two hundred dollars per month each. For me, that was enough for basic living expenses. With money from my family, Mary and I bought a house in Lincoln Park, discounted because it backed on the El, or elevated train. We lived collectively with other PLOers including Flint, Susan Waysdorf and Courtney Esposito, legal workers who did everything from answering phones to investigation, and, later, attorneys Michael Deutsch and Susan Jordan, when they joined the office.
PLO’s decision making was democratic. Everyone who worked at PLO had an equal vote at office meetings—even Jim Sorflaten, who swept the office once a week. However, Jim had not been selected because of his activism, and the issues we voted on both confused and bored him. We soon decided that only full-time PLOers got to vote.
Dennis proposed the name People’s Law Office because it fit with the times and our mission. Later we realized we had the same initials as the Palestine Liberation Organization. This never proved much of a handicap with our clients, who generally opposed Israel’s expansion and sympathized with the other PLO. In Chicago the two organizations were never confused with each other.
Our office was bustling from day one. Defending the Panthers, the Young Lords, and two white groups, Rising Up Angry and the Young Patriots, was a lot of work for four lawyers requiring frequent court appearances. I was quickly drawn into the criminal cases, which sustained the office financially. I became the rainmaker in the office, although for my first twenty years, I would call it a drizzle. We had no shortage of criminal cases, most of which were referred by the Panthers and Young Lords. It was not unusual to have five cases a morning in different courtrooms spread throughout Cook County. Every criminal courtroom was crowded. The only way to cover all your cases, which most often involved continuances, was to get in and out quickly. This required handing the clerk a five-dollar bill under your appearance form to get your case called rapidly.
Another strategy we learned for misdemeanor cases with hostile trial judges was to demand a jury trial. This resulted in the case being sent to Branch 46, a courtroom in the traffic court building. The cops frequently did not follow the cases to the new court and, if they did, often gave up after a few continuances.
I recall the regular Branch 46 judge chiding Dennis as his client’s case was dismissed, “Well, Mr. Cunningham, you’ve outlasted another one.”
“Twenty-sixth Street” (2600 South California) was where the majority of the city’s felony criminal cases were sent. Cases were often decided at preliminary hearings or at short bench trials. In both situations the judges were in a hurry. If you didn’t speak up loudly and quickly, you were overlooked. The hearings and trials frequently turned into shouting matches between the prosecutors and defense counsel, with each using every objection as an opportunity to argue their entire case.
My first political case was defending the twelve SDS Weathermen arrested on September 24, 1969, for demonstrating outside the Conspiracy Eight trial. The Weathermen, who took their name from Bob Dylan’s lyrics “You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” were advocating confrontations with the police.
The Conspiracy Eight defendants included Panther chairman Bobby Seale, whose case would be severed on November 5, to be tried later. Those left on trial would become the Conspiracy Seven: Youth International Party leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; SDS founder Tom Hayden; longtime antiwar organizer David Dellinger; and Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner of the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. These seven were among the leaders who organized the thousands of antiwar protesters who came to Chicago and were attacked while protesting outside the 1968 Democratic Convention. Bobby Seale had done nothing but attend the convention and talk with some of the others.
Although the Walker Report, the Illinois governor’s investigation of the events outside the convention, concluded it was a “police riot,” eight defendants were charged with conspiring to cross state lines with the intent of inciting violence. This was a violation of the new Rap Brown Act, which was passed earlier in 1968 to prosecute protesters for activity otherwise protected by the First Amendment. It forbade crossing state lines with the intent to cause a riot and was an attempt to deter people from or punish them for making radical speeches. The Act was eventually ruled unconstitutional.
On the day the Conspiracy Eight trial started, many protesters, including a small group of the Weathermen, gathered outside the federal courthouse to protest the government’s prosecution of the eight for exercising their right to free speech and assembly. When the police pushed the demonstrators up on the sidewalks, some pushed back. One protester was taken into custody and later escaped from the paddy wagon. Twelve other SDS Weathermen were arrested. Video footage showed only minor shoulder shoving between the protesters and the police. Although no one was injured on either side, the arrestees were all charged with at least two felony counts of aggravated battery, a felony count of mob action, and several misdemeanors. One eighty-five-pound demonstrator was charged with offenses carrying up to thirty years for what the videotape disclosed was a light touching of a police officer’s shoulder in response to him pushing her. State’s Attorney Hanrahan wanted to demonstrate he was tough on demonstrators as well as street gangs.
A few days after the twelve SDS Weathermen were released on bail, we stood in front of Chief Judge Power for the arraignment. The charges against the defendants were read out loud. Judge Power, a small man with a complex to match his name, asked, “How do you plead?”
I gave the standard reply. “The defendants plead not guilty and waive formal reading of the indictment.”
Power’s next question caught me by surprise. “Who is the leader of this SDS group?”
Before I could respond, Howie Machtinger, one of my clients, replied “Ho Chi Minh.” The defendants broke out in laughter.
Judge Power was not amused. “Since you think this is so funny, I find you in contempt. You can spend the day locked up. Sheriff, put them up in the bullpen.” The defendants were herded into the lock-up behind the courtroom while I argued on their behalf.
“Your Honor, this was a harmless attempt at humor. There was no disrespect intended,” I argued, trying to put the best face on the situation while trying not to laugh myself.
“You can join your friends in the lock-up if you continue arguing, Mr. Haas,” was the judge’s response.