4
In 1964, as sixteen-year-old Fred was speaking out in Maywood, I began at the University of Chicago Law School. On the South Side of Chicago I was surrounded by a poor black community, one being partially displaced by the university I was attending. With black militancy permeating the political atmosphere, amplified by the recent murder of Malcolm X, I could not ignore the blatant inequality between their lives and mine.
At law school I met my classmate Bernardine Dohrn. Intense and persuasive and very attractive, she would become the leader of the Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society. She wore short skirts and high boots and looked you in the eye. Bernardine was passionate and adept at expressing her left politics. She also had a lively sense of humor and an endearing laugh that drew you in and made you laugh, too.
Bernardine chaired the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council (LSCRRC), which provided funds for law students to take summer jobs with civil rights lawyers in the South. In 1965 she matched me with the black law firm of Hollowell and Moore in Atlanta. I had to go to Chicago to take my first steps to confront segregation where I grew up.
My parents knew both Donald Hollowell, a respected older lawyer in Atlanta, and Howard Moore, his younger, more fiery partner. Moore had defended many sit-in protesters and had represented civil rights leader Reverend C. B. King and his followers in Albany, Georgia, when they were beaten for marching and organizing sit-ins to integrate Albany’s restaurants and stores. Most of the work I did was on Howard’s paying civil cases to free him up so he could do his civil rights work.
But one day Howard Moore called me into his office. “Jeff, I want you to bust Bonners Supper Club,” he said. “It’s a small restaurant in Crawfordsville that claims to be a private club. Why don’t you take a friend and see if they’ll wait on you?”
If we could establish that Bonners served white nonmembers like us, we could prove that their “private club” designation was merely a charade and a way to avoid serving blacks.
I asked my friend Henry Bauer—who had gone to the Atlanta Cracker ballgames with Walter and me—to come along. The restaurant was in a white frame building a block from the central square. Below the words on the painted sign, BONNERS SUPPER CLUB, etched on a separate board, were the words PRIVATE CLUB, MEMBERS ONLY.
We entered the small, plain restaurant, little more than a diner. Its ten round wooden tables were half occupied, as were the bar stools along the side bar.
“Howdy, come on in,” the manager said and led us to a table. “How’re y’all tonight?” We sat down, ordered chicken something, and waited nervously for the food to arrive.
An eternity seemed to pass. We felt everyone was staring at us. Meanwhile, the town’s uniformed sheriff, a middle-aged, husky man with a tin star on his tan shirt and a holstered gun on his hip, entered. He pulled up a chair at the table next to us and began shelling peas with a couple patrons already sitting there. Henry and I were silent after he sat down.
“How y’all boys doin’?” he leaned over and asked us.
I responded in my best and deepest Southern accent. “We’re faan.”
“Where y’all coming from?” he inquired.
“Atlanta.”
I was waiting for the next question, Why’d you come all the way out here to eat? It wasn’t long coming.
“We got some friends we’re going to see in Savannah,” I said. That was about as far as I had worked our excuse for being there. Fortunately, I never had to explain why we weren’t on the most direct route to Savannah. The sheriff went back to shelling peas.
Finally our food arrived. I pushed it around the plate, eating enough to be polite, and asked the waitress for the check. “Can I have a receipt also?” She looked puzzled.
“Won’t that do?” she said pointing at the torn slip from one of those anonymous green pads.
“It will if you sign your name, the name of the restaurant, and the date,” I responded.
Again, she gave me a questioning look. After an awkward pause she wrote down the information and gave the receipt back to me. We were out of there before another pea could be shelled.
The next morning I reported what happened to Howard Moore and gave him the receipt. He had me fill out an affidavit about getting served at the restaurant. Three months later, Howard wrote me that Bonners Supper Club “was no longer segregated.”
At the University of Chicago, even in our nonradical law school, Vietnam was on everyone’s mind. Through 1966 and 1967, the United States steadily increased its troop level and expanded the war. As casualties rose on both sides, students at campuses across the country increased the militancy of their protests. A few University of Chicago students were arrested for seeking to enter the back porch of provost Edward Levi’s home. A right-wing law professor threw his radio and struck an antiwar protester at another demonstration. Although I was sympathetic to the protesters’ objectives, I wasn’t ready to join in and accept the consequence—likely expulsion from school.
At the law school, you were either against the war or you kept quiet. I don’t recall any student, not even my classmate John Ashcroft, who would become President George W. Bush’s attorney general, vocally supporting the war. Like many of his reactionary brethren, he laid low in the 1960s. His time had not yet come.
I was horrified and found no justification for the napalm and phosphorous bombs being dropped, or for the U.S. presence in Vietnam at all. I read about Ho Chi Minh and the decades of Vietnamese resistance to colonialism—against the French, then the Japanese, the French again, and finally the United States. As I followed the war more closely, I went from ignorance to skepticism to strong opposition. I eventually supported the National Liberation Front, the Vietcong. The Vietnamese wanted not just peace, but liberation.
Our opposition to the war appeared to have little effect on Lyndon Johnson. By 1967 he had a half million American troops in Vietnam and was seeking more. He promised to call up reserve units, and I feared mine would be included. I had joined a military intelligence unit in Chicago in 1966 because unassigned reservists were the first to be called to active duty. I could not see myself fighting, killing, or being killed in Vietnam.
In March 1967, Dr. King came to Chicago. Together with Dr. Benjamin Spock, he led a five-thousand-person march through downtown to the Coliseum. Bernardine had urged me to come along on King’s integration marches the year before, but I wasn’t willing to be pelted by rocks in the white ethnic neighborhoods where the marches went. This time I was in the Coliseum, when Dr. King spoke about Vietnam:
Poverty, urban problems and social progress are generally ignored when the guns of war become a national obsession…. America is a great nation, but honesty impels me to admit that our power has often made us arrogant. We feel that our money can do anything. We arrogantly feel that we have some divine, messianic mission to police the whole world…. We arm Negro soldiers to kill on foreign battlefields, but offer little protection for their relatives from beatings and killings in our own South. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.
Dr. King went on:
Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the propaganda of war, we must spread the propaganda of peace. We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the equal fervor of the peace movement. We must demonstrate, teach, and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken.
His speech brought together the black struggles for equality and liberation and the antiwar movement. Both demanded action. Two years later, when I heard Fred Hampton speak with equal fervor, I wondered if he had been in that vast hall of the Coliseum, taking notes.
The press, as well as the leadership of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations, condemned Dr. King for expressing his opposition to the Vietnam War. They thought it would jeopardize his civil rights agenda. A month after his address in Chicago, Dr. King responded to these criticisms at the Riverside Church in New York in his most famous antiwar speech.
I do feel that the Negro people, because of their peculiar experiences with oppression through the use of physical violence, have a particular responsibility to not participate in inflicting oppressive violence on another people. This is not a privilege but an exceptional moral responsibility…. There comes a time when one must have a stand that is neither safe, nor popular, but he must take it because it is right. This is where I find myself today.
Dr. King accepted the responsibility of the formerly oppressed not to be oppressors.
That spring shortly after I heard Dr. King denounce the war, I met Mary Frank. She was twenty-three, a year younger than me, and lived in a studio apartment overlooking the botanical gardens and the grounds of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Mary had recently divorced a brilliant, alcoholic English professor at Northwestern University.
Mary was short, vibrant, and attractive, with an infectious smile, long dark hair, and big brown eyes. She was enthusiastic and warm, given to hyperbole, and had a great sense of humor. We “meshed.” Mary’s family, like mine, was upper-middle-class Jewish, although she possessed Hungarian passion in contrast to the German reserve I’d inherited from my mother.
Mary had been more precocious and aware than I was in my college years. She had attended Reed College and then Berkeley and participated in the free speech movement. When we met in 1967, she was working for the Film Group, a small progressive filmmaking company. The next year they began making a documentary film about a young charismatic Black Panther leader: Fred Hampton.
When I graduated from law school, I moved into Mary’s studio apartment, where we slept in a single bed for almost a year. I decided to stay in Chicago after I graduated law school and took a job with the Legal Assistance Foundation, representing indigent people in noncriminal cases.
In the summer of 1967, I worked half time and studied for the bar exam. When I passed, I took the train to the State Capitol in Springfield for the swearing-in ceremony. We were welcomed by one of the older members of the Illinois Supreme Court. I sat in the large crowd, with my lefty friends from law school and Legal Aid. I expected a bland speech. Instead, we were harangued by a Supreme Court justice, whose welcoming address was a warning:
As young men and women about to be admitted to the bar, I feel compelled to warn you about the greatest danger to civil liberties and to our peace loving society; that which threatens the very core of our nation, that which can only lead to the destruction of harmony and to the promulgation of violence. I am talking about Black Power.
I sat forward, irritated. Given the escalating war in Vietnam, and the degrading conditions in which urban blacks lived, Black Power hardly seemed the threat we should be worrying about. The justice continued to expound on the duty each of us young lawyers had to condemn Black Power in whatever form it took. His reactionary rhetoric made Black Power more attractive to me. Still, I had no hint that my next ten years would be spent representing some of its strongest advocates.