Three hours later Angela Davis bought an airplane ticket at the San Francisco terminal. Then she vanished.
Under California law, anyone abetting a killer before the act is equally guilty of murder, and a warrant was issued for her arrest. Panther leader Huey P. Newton said he believed that she had been responsible for the courthouse shootings, was proud of her, and hoped others would follow her “courageous example.” Charles Garry, a white attorney for the Panthers, cried, “More power to Angela Davis! May she live long in liberty.” In fact she remained at large for over two months. On October 13 FBI agents arrested her in Manhattan after she had checked into a Howard Johnson’s motel with David Rudolph Poindexter Jr., a wealthy Negro. Poindexter was charged with harboring a fugitive; Angela was extradited and lodged in a San Rafael prison less than five miles from George Jackson’s cell in San Quentin.
Nearly a year later, on a hot August day in 1971, Jackson received a visit from his lawyer, Stephen Mitchell Bingham. Bingham was white, a Yale alumnus, and the grandson of Hiram Bingham, who had served Connecticut as governor and U.S. senator. Prison officials later became convinced that the younger Bingham, who had been active in the cause of minority groups, was on a smuggling mission that day. He was carrying two parcels which guards did not search: an expanding brown envelope and a small portable tape recorder. After he completed an hour-long session with Jackson and left, a guard noticed something different about the convict’s Afro hairdo. Asked about it, the Negro yanked off a wig and pulled a small automatic pistol from it.
Terror and death followed. On Jackson’s orders, twenty-seven prisoners, including the convalescing Ruchell Magee, were released. Then three white guards and two white trusties were murdered; two were shot in the back of the head, and the throats of the others were cut with a dull razor blade. The corpses were piled in a corner of Jackson’s cell like bloody rugs. By now San Quentin’s sirens were screaming. Still holding the pistol, Jackson bolted out a door and sprinted some seventy-five feet across an open courtyard before sharpshooters in the towers overhead cut him down.
Stephen Bingham was indicted for the murder of the guards and the trusties—the county district attorney said, “There is no way Jackson could have gotten the death gun except during his visit with Bingham”—but he disappeared without a trace, and by the following year authorities were suggesting that he might be dead: that black militants, having used him, may have then killed him. Law enforcement officers were embittered by the deaths of August 21. Negro activists were also outraged. Jackson became a martyr to them. His body was dressed in the Panther uniform—black leather jacket, black beret, and black shirt—and buried beside that of Jonathan. Julian Bond spoke of his “assassination” and of “the expected outcome of his constant attacks on a vicious system which was unable to crush his spirit or his body.” California Assemblyman Willie Brown said, “The people in the street are saying this is an execution, that it’s ridiculous Jackson could hide a gun in his hair,” and Angela Davis wrote of “the loss of an irretrievable love.”
Angela’s trial in the late spring of 1972 was an international event. Her elegant profile, with the high cheekbones and vast Afro coiffure—she had cut it off while a fugitive, but it had grown back—adorned posters around the world. Militant slogans called her a “political prisoner” and demanded “Free Angela!” The prosecution, protesting that the proceedings had nothing to do with politics or race, that this was a criminal trial, submitted 201 exhibits and testimony from ninety-five witnesses. Three people identified her as Jonathan’s companion at a gas station across the street from the courthouse the day before the escape attempt, and others put her with him on each of the three days beforehand.
The defense presented testimony from twelve witnesses (Angela chose not to take the stand) and ridiculed the idea that “a brilliant college professor” could have been implicated in such a harebrained scheme. She and Jonathan hadn’t been together as often as some people claimed, her lawyers said. Admittedly she had given him the shotgun, but it had been with the understanding that he would use it only to guard the headquarters of the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. She had kept the other weapons on a rack in her home for target practice by members of the Che-Lumumba Club. Jonathan had visited her there six days before the courthouse tragedy; probably he had stolen them then.
The attorney presenting the defense summation said that the only evidence against her was “that Angela was closely related to Jonathan Jackson, that her guns were used, that she expressed a desire to free the Soledad Brothers, that Angela expressed love for George Jackson, and that on August 7 Angela made herself unavailable to the authorities.” The jury would have fled, too, the lawyer declared, if they had been Negro and had discovered that four guns they owned had been used in the escape attempt at the courthouse: “I say to you, when you look at the situation through the eyes of a black person, you would not wonder why she fled. You would only wonder why she allowed herself to be caught.”
After thirteen hours of deliberation the panel found her not guilty. Turning her back on the jurors, Angela left the courtroom to address her admirers outside. A reporter asked her if she thought she had received a fair trial. She said she didn’t. “The very fact of an acquittal,” she said, “means that there was no fair trial, because a fair trial would have been no trial at all.” Setting out on a triumphant tour of the country, she told her supporters: “Starting from this day forward, we must work to free every political prisoner and every oppressed person in this country and the whole world.”
***
Four weeks after the Soledad murder, which had started the chain of events that culminated in Angela’s fame, Chicago had witnessed the end of another remarkable trial. It had opened with eight defendants: Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman; Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, and SDS’s Tom Hayden, the three leaders of the National Mobilization Committee which had brought the antiwar demonstrators to Chicago; Bobby Scale of the Panthers; and Lee Weiner and John R. Froines. Before their arrests some of the defendants had scarcely known one another, and in fact the key complaint against them was not the conspiracy count, but the accusation that they had entered Illinois individually to incite a riot—“crossing state lines with a state of mind,” said chief counsel William M. Kunstler, while Leonard I. Weinglass, their other attorney, called the statute—which had been passed as a rider to the 1968 Civil Rights Act—“the only federal law where the government can punish someone without the commission of an overt act.” They were the first defendants to be indicted under it, though that fact and a great many others were forgotten during the circus into which the proceedings deteriorated.
Kunstler set the tone on the first day of the trial, when he moved for a mistrial because of the way Judge Julius J. Hoffman read the charges to the jury. “Your Honor sounded like Orson Welles reciting the Declaration of Independence,” said the lawyer.
“I’ve never been compared to that great actor, Orson Welles,” said the judge, “but I deny the motion.”
Altogether, the defense would make more than a score of mistrial motions, and to a great degree the tempestuous character of the proceedings arose from the chasm between Kunstler, Weinglass, and their clients on the one hand, and Judge Hoffman and the state’s attorneys on the other. “The trial,” wrote Richard Ciccone of the AP Chicago Bureau, “was a collision of generations, ideologies, and life-styles.” Judge Hoffman wore a vest; Abbie Hoffman wore love beads and buckskin, and during one uproarious session he and Rubin appeared in judicial robes. Rubin and Hoffman had beards. The defendants and their lawyers grew their hair long, a fact caustically noted by the well-barbered prosecutors, Thomas A. Foran and Richard G. Schultz.
At one point, when Allen Ginsberg was testifying for the defense, the witness showed how he had quieted antiwar Chicago demonstrators in 1968—with a ten-second grunt: “Ah-ooom!” Kunstler protested that the judge was laughing. His Honor denied it. “I just don’t understand the language,” he said. Ginsber
g explained, “It’s Sanskrit.” The judge said, “That’s one I don’t know.” The transcript shows that there was a great deal the court did not know, but Hoffman did have a clear concept of the decorum which should be observed in his courtroom. During the seventy-four years since his birth in a humble Chicago neighborhood he had come to expect respect from the people who came before him, and neither the Chicago Eight nor their defense staff gave it to him. The first signs of what lay ahead came during a pretrial hearing. Kunstler and Weinglass wanted to ask veniremen how they felt about protest demonstrations, American slums, and the Vietnam War. Judge Hoffman turned them down; he said they couldn’t even ask prospective jurors their opinion of hippies and Yippies. The next defense request was for a postponement of the trial until Seale’s attorney, Charles Garry, could recover from an operation. Hoffman rejected that, too, and when he followed it by denying Seale’s appeal for the right to address the court, telling him that he would have to allow Kunstler to speak for him, he touched off judicial chaos.
“I can only see the judge as a blatant racist,” Seale said. The dwarfish judge bounded to his feet. “Did you hear that?” he asked a clerk in disbelief. The Panther leader was cautioned, then and repeatedly afterward, that interruptions would be “dealt with appropriately at some time in the future.” Seale retorted, “What can you do to me that hasn’t been done to black people for three hundred years?” In the eighth week of the trial the judge started to respond to a series of Seale outbursts: “Look, young man, if you keep this up—” Seale replied: “Look, old man, if you keep denying me my constitutional rights you are being exposed to the world—” Hoffman said: “Mr. Seale, do you want to stop or do you want me to direct the marshal—” Seale said: “I want to argue about this so you can get an understanding of the facts.”
His patience exhausted, the judge told the marshal, “Take that defendant into the room there and deal with him as he should be dealt with.” After a recess the Panther was carried in gagged and handcuffed to a metal folding chair. Even that didn’t silence him. He rattled his fetters against the chair and cried in a muffled voice, “That means I object!” He was moved to a wooden chair and the gag was tightened. At the next session he managed to work free of the gag and shout at the bench: “You fascist dog, you rotten low-life son-of-a-bitch!” Abbie Hoffman and Rubin jumped up, screaming, and Kunstler asked the court: “Your Honor, when are we going to stop this medieval torture? This is an unholy disgrace to the law… I feel so utterly ashamed at this time to be an American lawyer.” Judge Hoffman, who had frequently said that he blamed Kunstler and Weinglass for the misconduct of his clients, snapped: “You should be.” The following week he ordered the gag removed, and when Seale persisted in his interruptions he sentenced him to four years in prison for contempt. Now those left were christened the Chicago Seven.
They weren’t chastened. While Davis was on the stand he accused the judge of being asleep—His Honor warned him that his insolence would be “dealt with appropriately at some time in the future”—and Abbie Hoffman created pandemonium by coming into the courtroom walking on his hands and calling Judge Hoffman a “tyrant,” a “Nazi,” and “a disgrace to the Jews.”
The sharpest exchanges were between the court and the chief defense counsel. The judge explicitly directed Kunstler not to ask in the presence of the jury that Mayor Daley—who had insisted the trial be held despite Justice Department doubts—be declared a hostile witness. The attorney did it anyway, and he almost gave the judge apoplexy by asking Daley pointblank whether he had shouted an obscenity at Senator Abraham Ribicoff during the convention. At one point Abbie Hoffman raised his shirt. “Let the record show,” the judge said, “that man bared his body in open court.” Kunstler said, “Your Honor, I remember when President Johnson showed his stomach scar to a whole nation on television.” “Maybe that’s why he isn’t President any more,” His Honor replied. When the lawyer chuckled and was rebuked he said, “Come on, Your Honor, what’s the harm in laughter? Sometimes we can’t help ourselves.” The judge said, “Oh yes, I can see that you can’t help yourself.”
Toward the end of the trial the court’s hostility toward the defendants became flagrant. For two days Hoffman refused to let them use the toilet in the hall; the latrine in the jail, he said, was good enough for them. One day he said they would start a half-hour earlier the following morning. When Kunstler asked the reason he was told, “Because it will be at nine-thirty.” The lawyer commented, “That’s like a child saying, ‘Because, because.’” The judge said, “Let the record show that, in the presence of the jury, Mr. Kunstler compared me to a child.” The lawyer was effusive in court, often hilarious or in tears. Sometimes he hugged men, and he kissed Weinglass and one of the witnesses, the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy. “Let the record show,” Judge Hoffman said acidly each time, “that Mr. Kunstler kissed that man.” As the end of the trial was to prove, his reasons for these insertions in the transcript were not frivolous.
Defense witnesses included Pete Seeger, William Styron, Judy Collins, Norman Mailer, Julian Bond, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Terry Southern, and Ginsberg, who at Prosecutor Foran’s insistence read aloud some of his poems on homosexuality and masturbation, apparently because Foran thought they would offend the ten women jurors. Kunstler and Weinglass argued that Daley and the Chicago police had provoked the violence at the Democratic convention.
Most of the evidence against the Seven came from informers who had mingled with the antiwar demonstrators in Lincoln and Grant parks and had taken everything they heard literally. An undercover policewoman testified that Abbie Hoffman had yelled: “We need a lot of weapons. Get rocks, bricks, stones. Break the bricks in half—they’re easier to conceal that way and the girls can carry them.” An undercover policeman said the defendants had been determined to create violence as “the first step of the revolution.” A Chicago official told the court that Abbie had said to him: “If the city was smart, it would give $100,000 to sponsor our festival. Better yet, give me $100,000 and I’ll leave town.” The official had construed this as attempted extortion.
After nearly five months of testimony and argument the jury retired and the judge, with obvious relish, began meting out sentences for contempt. It took him two days, with time out for the defendants’ screams. As Kunstler heard his clients and his co-counsel being sent away—Weinglass was given two months—he staggered all over the courtroom and collapsed, sobbing, “My life has come to naught at your hands, Judge. Come to mine. Come to mine. Take me next, I don’t want to be here any more.” The judge took him last. Saying, “No lawyer has ever said the things to me that you said during this trial,” he gave him four years and thirteen days in prison.
The jury acquitted all the defendants of conspiracy but convicted Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin of crossing state lines to incite a riot. The judge sentenced each of them to five years in prison, fined each $5,000, and assessed them the costs of the prosecution—another $50,000. But the sentences didn’t stand. Nearly three years later a U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the convictions. The appellate court found the controversial antiriot statute—the so-called Rap Brown Act—constitutional by a two to one vote but threw out the verdict, citing Judge Hoffman’s “antagonistic” behavior and finding that his “deprecatory” attitude toward the defense was “evident in the record from the very beginning.”
Indeed, far from vindicating the prosecution, the case of the Chicago Seven became the first of an unparalleled series of judicial disasters for the government. It was followed by the trials of the Harrisburg Seven, the Camden Seventeen, the Seattle Seven, the Kansas City Four, the Evanston Four, the Pentagon Papers case, and the Gainesville Eight. In each of them the defendants were heretics in the eyes of the established order, and in every case the accused were vindicated by a jury, a judge, or an appeals court. Hostility to informers and judicial bias were common threads in the findings. In addition, as Martin Arnold pointed out in the New York Times, “despite all ev
idence to the contrary, people generally believe that the government is competent, and it angers them when the government goes into court with a weak case, often incompetently presented.”
***
The Vietnam War, the real fuel for the riots which had been blamed on the Seven, continued to divide and abrade the country in 1970. At the beginning of the year there had been hope for something better. During the first four months the news from Saigon had been mildly encouraging. U.S. troops under General Abrams were avoiding big battles with the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Nixon was reducing American troops from 543,000 to 340,000, and he assured the country that another 60,000 grunts would be withdrawn by May 1. But an end to the war seemed as remote as ever. In Paris the Communists scorned a five-point Nixon peace proposal, saying, “Our rejection is firm, total, and categorical.” David K. E. Bruce, the chief American negotiator, turned down a Communist plan, calling it “old wine in new bottles.”
U.S. combat deaths, which had stood at 25,000 during the Chicago protests two years earlier, now passed the 44,000 mark. Barring a breakthrough, Washington let it be known, some 200,000 American soldiers would stay in Vietnam for years. War weariness was becoming increasingly evident in the United States, among the South Vietnamese, and in fighting units. Grunts in the 4th U.S. Division refused to go into battle until they had been persuaded by desperate officers; troops in another division reviled Nixon, shouting obscenities about him when they spotted a war correspondent; soldiers wore peace medals with their dog tags; estimates of marijuana use among U.S. servicemen ran as high as 80 percent, while deaths from overdoses of hard drugs almost tripled. Augmenting all this was an appearance of incompetence at the highest levels of the American military effort. U.S. paratroopers executed a daring raid on a POW camp at Son Tay, twenty-three miles from Hanoi; seventy to a hundred American fliers were believed to be imprisoned there. The raid would have been a success, but intelligence had blundered—all the POWs had been moved. That same week U.S. warplanes pounded North Vietnam for twenty-four hours. The Pentagon first said the sorties were part of a “protective reaction” operation, protecting unarmed American aircraft, then changed its story to acknowledge that supply bases were being attacked. In fact, the shocked nation later learned, the targets of the bombardiers had included hospitals.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 181
