Frank Beacham's Journal

The trial for eight antiwar activists charged with violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on this day in 1969 — 52 years ago today

Photo by Richard Avedon

The trial for eight antiwar activists charged with the responsibility for the violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on this day in 1969 — 52 years ago today.

The defendants included David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"); and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines.

Bobby Seale, the eighth man charged, had his trial severed during the proceedings, lowering the number of defendants from eight to seven. The group was charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with intent to incite a riot. All but Seale were represented by attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass.

The trial, presided over by Judge Julius Hoffman, turned into a circus as the defendants and their attorneys used the court as a platform to attack Nixon, the war, racism and oppression. Their tactics were so disruptive that at one point, Judge Hoffman ordered Seale gagged and strapped to his chair.

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.

When the trial ended in February, 1970, Hoffman found the defendants and their attorneys guilty of 175 counts of contempt of court and sentenced them to terms between two to four years. Although declaring the defendants not guilty of conspiracy, the jury found all but Froines and Weiner guilty of intent to riot. The others were each sentenced to five years and fined $5,000.

However, none served time because in 1972, a Court of Appeal overturned the criminal convictions and eventually most of the contempt charges were dropped as well.

Crosby, Stills and Nash perform "Chicago"

On this day in 1881 — 140 years ago — Sheriff Pat Garrett shot and killed Henry McCarty, popularly known as Billy the Kid, at the Maxwell Ranch in New Mexico

On this day in 1881 — 140 years ago — Sheriff Pat Garrett shot and killed Henry McCarty, popularly known as Billy the Kid, at the Maxwell Ranch in New Mexico.

Garrett, who had been tracking the Kid for three months after the gunslinger had escaped from prison only days before his scheduled execution, got a tip that Billy was holed up with friends. While Billy was gone, Garrett waited in the dark in his bedroom. When Billy entered, Garrett shot him to death.

Back on April 1, 1878, Billy the Kid ambushed Sheriff William Brady and one deputy in Lincoln, New Mexico, after ranch owner John Tunstall had been murdered. Billy had worked at Tunstall’s ranch and was outraged by his employer’s slaying, vowing to hunt down every man responsible.

Sheriff Brady and his men, who had been affiliated with rival ranchers, were involved with the gang that killed Tunstall on February 18. Billy’s retaliatory attack left Brady and Deputy George Hindman dead. Although only 18 years old at the time, Billy had now committed as many as 17 murders.

Following his indictment for the murder of Sheriff Brady, Billy the Kid was the most wanted man in the West.

In 1973, film director Sam Peckinpah, made Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which starred James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan. The film was about an aging Garrett, hired as a lawman by a group of wealthy New Mexico cattle barons to bring down the Kid. Dylan composed several songs for the film's score and soundtrack album, which was released the same year.

William Kunstler, radical lawyer and civil rights activist, known for his politically unpopular clients, was born 102 years ago today

William Kunstler: A Personal Remembrance

William Kunstler, radical lawyer and civil rights activist, known for his politically unpopular clients, was born 102 years ago today.

Kunstler was a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the co-founder of the Law Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the "leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country."

Kunstler's defense of the "Chicago Seven" from 1969–1970 led The New York Times to label him "the country's most controversial and, perhaps, its best-known lawyer ..."

Kunstler is also well known for defending members of the Catonsville Nine, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground Organization, the Attica Prison rioters and the American Indian Movement.

I remember William Kunstler for another reason. He was a wonderful poet. Once I attended a poetry reading in his New York City apartment.

As a reviewer wrote of his poems, “like most things William Kunstler does, his poems rattle the foundations of venerable American institutions.”

Kunstler won a lot of major cases, but I was impressed by his creative abilities as a poet. He saw the world in a unique way and expressed it vividly in his poems.

In fact, one his clients and closest friends was the poet, Dylan Thomas, who he had met while majoring in French literature at Yale. Kunstler became an expert on Thomas’s work and was called the night the poet drank himself to death at the White Horse Tavern in New York City.

In late 1995, Kunstler died in New York City of heart failure at the age of 76.

Above, Kunstler and his daughter, Sarah, is shown in 1977. Sarah and her sister, Emily, wrote and directed the film about their father.

Photo by Maddy Miller

On this day in 1964 — 57 years ago — President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act

On this day in 1964 — 57 years ago — President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House.

In the landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The ten years that followed saw great strides for the African-American civil rights movement — as non-violent demonstrations won thousands of supporters to the cause.

Memorable landmarks in the struggle included the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 — sparked by the refusal of Alabama resident, Rosa Parks, to give up her seat on a city bus to a white woman — and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech at a rally of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., in 1963.

As the strength of the civil rights movement grew, John F. Kennedy made passage of a new civil rights bill one of the platforms of his successful 1960 presidential campaign. As Kennedy's vice president, Johnson served as chairman of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities.

After Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, Johnson vowed to carry out his proposals for civil rights reform. The Civil Rights Act fought tough opposition in the House and a lengthy, heated debate in the Senate before being approved in July, 1964.

For the signing of the historic legislation, Johnson invited hundreds of guests to a televised ceremony in the White House's East Room. After using more than 75 pens to sign the bill, he gave them away as mementoes of the historic occasion, according to tradition.

One of the first pens went to King, leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who called it one of his most cherished possessions. Johnson gave two more to Senators Hubert Humphrey and Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Democratic and Republican managers of the bill in the Senate.

The most sweeping civil rights legislation passed by Congress since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, the Civil Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public places such as schools, buses, parks and swimming pools.

In addition, the bill laid important groundwork for a number of other pieces of legislation — including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which set strict rules for protecting the right of African Americans to vote — that have since been used to enforce equal rights for women as well as all minorities.

Sadly, the legislation would probably have never passed without the assassination of Kennedy in 1963.

Ramsey Clark, the later Attorney General who worked during the Kennedy Administration for Robert F. Kennedy, told me in an interview that the legislation was so unpopular when Kennedy was alive it never could have passed on his watch.

It was after Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Clark said, that Johnson was able to push through the legislation as a tribute to the slain leader.

Thanks History.com

On June 29, 1967 — 54 years ago today — Keith Richards sat before magistrates in Chichester, West Sussex, England, facing charges that stemmed from the infamous raid of Richards' Redlands estate

On June 29, 1967 — 54 years ago today — Keith Richards sat before magistrates in Chichester, West Sussex, England, facing charges that stemmed from the infamous raid of Richards' Redlands estate five months earlier.

Though the raid netted very little in the way of actual drugs, what it did net was a great deal of notoriety for the already notorious Rolling Stones. It was during this raid that the police famously encountered a young Marianne Faithfull clad only in a bearskin rug, a fact that the prosecutor in the case seemed to regard as highly relevant to the case at hand.

In questioning Richards, Queen's Counsel Malcolm Morris tried to imply that Faithfull's nudity was probably the result of a loss of inhibition due to cannabis use.

QC Morris: Would you agree in the ordinary course of events you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant?

Richards: Not at all

Morris: You regard that, do you, as quite normal?

Richards: We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.

With that one line, Richards emphatically established himself as the spokesman for a generation that did not share the values of the British establishment. The charges brought against him by that establishment, however, were quite serious.

While Mick Jagger stood charged with illegal possession of four amphetamine tablets he'd purchased in Italy, Richards faced the far more serious charge of allowing his house to be used for the purpose of smoking what the law at the time referred to as "Indian hemp."

Judging from his defiant attitude on the stand, Richards may not have taken the possibility of conviction very seriously. No marijuana had actually been found in Richards' possession, but on the evidence presented at trial of a "sweet incense smell" detected by police, Richards was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison.

Jagger was also convicted and sentenced to three months, but he was immediately released pending an appeal. Richards, on the other hand, was sent directly to Wormwood Scrubs prison on this day in 1969, where he was greeted like, well, a rock star by his fellow inmates.

Richards would spend only one night in prison. He was granted bail the following day, also pending appeal. His conviction would later be overturned based on the prejudicial nature of the evidence of the naked young woman in a bearskin rug.

For his part, Richards was definitively pleased: "I like a little more room, I like the john to be in a separate area," he later said, "and I hate to be woken up."

Thanks History.com

Just after 3 a.m. — 52 years ago today — a police raid of the Stonewall Inn in New York City caused the Stonewall riots

Photo by Fred W. McDarrah

Just after 3 a.m. — 52 years ago today — a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located on New York City's Christopher Street, turned violent as patrons and local sympathizers begin rioting against the police.

New York City’s gay community had grown weary of the police department targeting gay clubs, a majority of which had already been closed. The crowd on the street watched quietly as Stonewall's employees were arrested, but when three drag queens and a lesbian were forced into the paddy wagon, the crowd began throwing bottles at the police.

The police were forced to take shelter inside the establishment, and two policemen were slightly injured before reinforcements arrived for an attempt to disperse the mob. The protest, however, spilled over into the neighboring streets. Quiet came only after New York’s riot police arrived.

The Stonewall Riot was followed by several days of demonstrations in New York and was the impetus for the formation of the Gay Liberation Front as well as other gay, lesbian and bisexual civil rights organizations. It is also regarded by many as history's first major protest on behalf of equal rights for homosexuals.

Now, gay marriage is the law of the land. A year ago, the Stonewall Inn received official landmark status from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission for its role as the catalyst of the LGBT movement.

Last year, then President Obama formally recognized that history, declaring the Greenwich Village bar and its surrounding area the Stonewall National Monument, and creating the first National Park Service unit dedicated to the gay rights movement.

The White House said the monument designation will consist of 7.7 acres, protecting the tavern, Christopher Park across the street and several other streets and sidewalks where spontaneous protests were held for equal rights in 1969.

“The Stonewall Uprising is considered by many to be the catalyst that launched the modern L.G.B.T. civil rights movement,” the president wrote in a proclamation announcing the monument’s establishment.

“From this place and time, building on the work of many before, the nation started the march — not yet finished — toward securing equality and respect for L.G.B.T. people.”

At Kent State University on this day in 1970 — 51 years ago — 100 National Guardsmen fired their rifles into a group of students. Four were killed and eleven wounded

At Kent State University on this day in 1970 — 51 years ago — 100 National Guardsmen fired their rifles into a group of students. Four were killed and eleven wounded.

This incident occurred in the aftermath of President Richard Nixon's April 30 announcement that U.S. and South Vietnamese forces had been ordered to execute an "incursion" into Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese bases there. In protest, a wave of demonstrations and disturbances erupted on college campuses across the country.

At Kent State University in Ohio, student protesters torched the ROTC building on campus and Ohio Governor James Rhodes responded by calling on the National Guard to restore order.

Under harassment from the demonstrators, the Guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing four and wounding eleven. The Guardsmen were later brought to trial for the shootings, but found not guilty.

President Nixon issued a statement deploring the Kent State deaths, but said that the incident should serve as a reminder that, "When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy." The shooting sparked hundreds of protests and college shutdowns, as well as a march on Washington, D.C., by 100,000 people.

The National Student Association and former Vietnam Moratorium Committee leaders called for a national university strike of indefinite duration, beginning immediately, to protest the war. At least 100 colleges and universities pledged to strike. The presidents of 37 universities signed a letter urging President Nixon to show more clearly his determination to end the war.

Thanks History.com

A 60 Minutes piece on the shooting at Kent State, 1977

Neil Young performs "Ohio," 2010

On February 8, 1968 — 53 years ago today — white highway patrolmen killed three black college students and wounded 27 others at South Carolina State College. A state-sanctioned murder, the cover-up still continues

White highway patrolmen take aim at black college students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Feb. 8, 1968 — 53 years ago today

Racism is a very ugly thing. It escalated in the era of Trump, usually disguised as a public safety issue against immigrants or open prejudice against countries that the president deemed inferior. It will take a long time to undo the damage.

In the 1950s and 60s, racism took another form. Jim Crow laws were openly defended in the South and those demanding civil rights for all citizens were despised, beaten and arrested.

Today, the only difference is that police and racial beatings are often caught on video made by bystanders with iPhones. Law enforcement can’t deny the video, and more and more policemen are brought to justice.

The federal government — though on-board to stop racism in the late 1960s — still played catch-up in going to court to address the many civil rights violations in every aspect of life. For years, there were glitches in civil rights enforcement all over the nation.

One of those glitches — this time over a segregated bowling alley — happened in 1968 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a town founded on slavery 400 years ago. The Ku Klux Klan and lynchings prevailed there during the Jim Crow years. But in 1968, before Kent State, there was the Orangeburg Massacre, the first mass police shooting on a U.S. college campus.

On February 8, 1968 — 53 years ago today — white highway patrolmen killed three black college students and wounded 27 others at South Carolina State College. It was state-sanctioned murder and the cover-up still continues.

In 1968, a loophole in the Civil Rights Act passed four years earlier led to some delay in forcing All Star Bowling Lanes to admit blacks. With two black colleges in Orangeburg and nowhere else to bowl, the bowling alley became a target for civil rights advocates. The black students at the colleges wanted to bowl there and staged a demonstration.

A conservative Southern governor, wanting to appear tough to his white constituents, overreacted to the civil rights protest ordering a massive show of armed force. As emotions frayed and the situation veered out of control, nine white highway patrolmen opened gunfire onto the campus of South Carolina State College.

All the students were unarmed and in retreat from the highway patrolmen at the time of the shooting. Yet, without warning, they were shot in their backs with deadly buckshot.

Until the shooting, South Carolina was a southern state that had proudly celebrated a record of nonviolence during the turbulent civil rights years. It was all really a charade. Nonviolence in South Carolina was equated with racial harmony in a white community with a paternalistic attitude toward its poorer black citizens. Equal rights were another thing.

To help protect its “progressive” self-image on racial issues, a web of official deceptions was created by South Carolina’s young governor — Robert McNair — and his administration to distort the facts and conceal the truth about what happened in Orangeburg.

The state claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen at the college. The highway patrolmen insisted their shooting was done in self-defense in order to protect themselves from a attacking mob of students.

To bolster that claim and deflect responsibility from its own actions, the state hastily devised a media campaign to blame the riot on Cleveland Sellers, a young black activist working to organize area college students.

Time would prove none of it was true. At first, the state’s cover-up worked. Later, upon outside scrutiny, it began to unravel. Then, with his legacy threatened, McNair broke nearly forty years of silence in 2006 in an attempt to put the pieces back together.

Ignoring facts proven over the years in court cases and through the first person accounts of eyewitnesses, McNair used local media and friendly “historians” as a tool to help members of his community lie to themselves about their own history.

In the last year of his life, he deliberately fogged and distorted the story of the Orangeburg Massacre.

Ramsey Clark, who was U.S. Attorney General in 1968, knows the truth and minced no words in an interview with me about what happened there.

“They committed murder. Murder…that’s a harsh thing to say, but they did it,” said Clark. “The police lost their self control. They just started shooting. It was a slaughter. Double ought buckshot is what you use for deer. It’s meant to kill. One guy emptied his service revolver. That takes a lot of shooting. The (students) are running away. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow! My God, there’s a murderous intent there. We are lucky more weren’t killed.”

Clark told me the student deaths were caused by police criminal acts. “The provocation for the incident was an absurd, provocative display of force,” he said.

Gov. McNair responded to Orangeburg with excessive police power because that was the politically expedient thing to do in 1968, the former attorney general said.

“Fear, anger, a sense of self-righteousness to justify hating began to be seen as successful politics.” When the tactic backfired, Clark added, state officials fabricated stories that many South Carolinians believe to this day.

So, after 53 years, the story of the Orangeburg Massacre still simmers, unresolved. It is the chilling saga of the horrors of law enforcement motivated by racism and hatred — and the inability of a Southern state to admit the truth.

The central theme is “mendacity,” the web of lies a community spins in a desperate attempt to maintain it’s self-image and dignity when confronted by its own prejudice. It’s a culture where words are constantly being redefined in order that a people can more comfortably deceive themselves.

Today, racism has been dressed up and made more sophisticated by the policies of a Republican-controlled legislature that still refuses to even investigate the massacre. The sad story is after a half a century, the state of South Carolina will not admit it committed murder in the shootings at Orangeburg.

The complete story of the Orangeburg shooting is in my book, “Whitewash: A Southern Journey Through Music, Mayhem and Murder.”

Photo by Bill Barley

On this day in 1963 — 57 years ago — Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner

On this day in 1963 — 57 years ago — at 12:20 p.m. in the basement of the Dallas police station, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

Two days earlier, on Nov. 22, President Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in an open-car motorcade through the streets of downtown Dallas. Less than an hour after the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald killed a policeman who questioned him on the street.

On November 24, Oswald was brought to the basement of the Dallas police headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail. A crowd of police and press with live television cameras rolling gathered to witness his departure. As Oswald came into the room, Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver.

Ruby, who was immediately detained, claimed that rage at Kennedy's murder was the motive for his action. A Dallas jury found Ruby guilty of murdering Oswald, and Ruby later received the death penalty. Later, Ruby appealed his conviction, had it overturned and was granted a new trial.

On January 3, 1967, as the date for his new trial was being set, Ruby became ill in his prison cell and died of a pulmonary embolism from lung cancer. It has been hypothesized that Ruby was part of a conspiracy.

G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977 to 1979, said “the most plausible explanation for the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby was that Ruby had stalked him on behalf of organized crime, trying to reach him on at least three occasions in the forty-eight hours before he silenced him forever."

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Paul Metsa, the Minnesota-based singer-songwriter, revived his song "Jack Ruby" seven years ago for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Metsa first wrote the song in 1991 about Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who shot and killed Lee Harvey Osward, Kennedy's assassin.

Metsa's video includes archival television footage of Ruby shooting Oswald. The song questions whether Oswald and Ruby were hired guns.

It is featured on Metsa's compilation CD, "Blues, Ballads and Broadsides — Songs from the Blue Guitar Highway."

Here is Metsa performing “Jack Ruby”

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Jack Ruby — A Personal Remembrance

On Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, at 12:20 p.m., I was lying on a sofa in my home watching the televised coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was 15-years-old, but it seemed I had grown a couple of years in the two days since the president was shot.

Watching on live television, I was tuned to the basement of the Dallas police station where Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of the president, was to be paraded before television cameras. Moments after Oswald came into view, Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, shot him on live national television.

I must have jumped three-feet off that sofa. I called my mother from the kitchen. I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. Two days earlier, President Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in an open-car motorcade through the streets of downtown Dallas.

Less than an hour after the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly killed a policeman who questioned him on the street. Thirty minutes after that, he was arrested in a movie theater by police. The Dallas police were taking Oswald to what they said was a more secure county jail.

But the security state — as is today — didn’t really exist back then. It was all theatre for the masses. Ruby just emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded Oswald with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver.

Ruby, who was immediately detained, claimed that rage at Kennedy's murder was the motive for his action. Some called him a hero, but he was nonetheless charged with first-degree murder.

Ruby, originally known as Jacob Rubenstein, operated strip joints and dance halls in Dallas and had minor connections to organized crime. He also had a relationship with a number of Dallas policemen, which amounted to various favors in exchange for leniency in their monitoring of his establishments.

Ruby has been prominent in Kennedy-assassination theories for more than 50 years, and many believe he killed Oswald to keep him from revealing a larger conspiracy. The public still does not know the truth.

Regardless, the Kennedy and Oswald assassinations were the end of innocence for me. Most of the 1960s were still ahead and it would become the most extraordinary decade of my life.

Me, at 15

Police brutality, especially against people with dark skin, is nothing new. It has happened for many years. Only the recent emergence of smartphones has revealed its frequency.

The great musician, Miles Davis, was a victim of police brutality.

In this photo, Davis rides in an ambulance to St. Clare’s Hospital with Patrolman Gerald Kildduff on August 25, 1959. Davis was given ten stitches in his scalp at the hospital.

Davis was standing outside of Birdland, the jazz club, where he was performing, when Kilduff told him to move along.

A scuffle ensued, and a passing plainclothes detective hit Davis with his blackjack, dropping him to the ground. Davis was charged with disorderly conduct and assault.

His arrest was later ruled illegal and a “travesty of justice” by a three-judge panel.