7 Reasons Why the Chicago 8 Trial Mattered

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago is most-remembered for what happened on the streets outside of it. Before the convention began on August 26, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley refused protest permits to most anti-war demonstrators and deployed 12,000 police officers, 5,600 members of the Illinois National Guard and 5,000 Army soldiers on the streets to meet any who showed up. These police and military forces violently clashed with Vietnam War protesters, resulting in hundreds of injuries and 668 arrests during the four-day convention.

“One day in Grant Park somebody took down a flag and the police used that as an excuse to go through the crowd beating people with nightsticks,” recalls John Froines, who helped organize the DNC anti-war demonstrations with Rennie Davis of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. “Rennie Davis and I were hit on the head with night sticks.”

Froines, who is now a professor emeritus of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, wasn’t arrested that day. But a year later, the U.S. government accused him, Davis and six other men of conspiring to incite a riot at the DNC. The others were Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party; David Dellinger, a longtime anti-war activist; Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (whose members were called “yippies”); and Lee Weiner, who had volunteered as a marshal for the DNC demonstrations to help with crowd control.

The evidence against the Chicago Eight, as they became known, was always slim. None were convicted of conspiracy, and although five of them were convicted of inciting a riot, an appellate court dismissed the charges because it found that the judge had been biased against them. Fifty years later, here’s why the Chicago Eight trial that opened on September 24, 1969 was such a big deal.