Читать книгу History of the Trial of the Chicago 7 - Bruce A. Ragsdale - Страница 46

Table of Contents

David Dellinger Courtesy of Bettman/Corbis.

David Dellinger stood apart from the other defendants in his age and in his lengthy experience as a pacifist and activist for social justice. Dellinger was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, to a well-connected Republican family. He graduated from Yale University and attended Oxford University. After serving as an ambulance driver for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, he entered Union Theological Seminary to study for the ministry. When Dellinger refused to register for the draft in 1940, he was expelled from the seminary and served one year in a federal prison. When he refused to appear at an draft induction center in 1943, he was again convicted and served two years in a federal prison.

In 1956, Dellinger joined with other Christian pacifists to establish Liberation magazine. He organized some of the first protests of American involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1967, as chair of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, he coordinated a huge anti-war rally in Washington. Dellinger recruited Jerry Rubin to help organize the event that culminated with the march to the Pentagon. Beginning in 1967, Dellinger made several visits to the Paris peace talks, and in the months preceding the conspiracy trial he traveled to Paris to negotiate the release of American prisoners of war and then went to North Vietnam to escort the Americans back to the United States.

Dellinger, as a co-chair of the National Mobilization Committee, was closely involved in planning for the demonstrations in Chicago and hoped to attract huge numbers of people, such as had gathered for the march on the Pentagon in October 1967. At the only rally with a city permit, Dellinger directed the events in Grant Park on Wednesday of convention week, but when police charged on the crowd after a demonstrator lowered the American flag, Dellinger’s pleas over the microphone could not stop the violence. Dellinger also clashed with Tom Hayden, who wanted the demonstrators to defend themselves. Later that day, Dellinger attempted to negotiate a permit for a march to the site of the convention, but city officials denied it, and the worst violence of the week followed when police sought to disperse the assembled demonstrators.

Following the indictment of Dellinger and the seven other participants in the demonstrations, he urged the defendants to continue their anti-war activity and to use the trial to publicize their views on the war. Dellinger rejected the advice of potential defense lawyers who suggested their case should focus on narrow legal questions.

The prosecution described Dellinger as “the principal architect especially of the riots which occurred on Wednesday,” and the case officially bore his name in the court records. Near the end of the trial, when a police officer serving as a rebuttal witness accused Dellinger of inciting violence in Grant Park, Dellinger responded with what the New York Times called a “barnyard epithet,” and Judge Hoffman revoked his bail. Dellinger’s return to jail prompted the most chaotic scenes in the trial since Bobby Seale had been bound and gagged.

The jury found Dellinger guilty of intent to incite a riot, but the U.S. court of appeals reversed the conviction and remanded the charge for retrial. The government declined to retry him. Near the close of the trial, Judge Hoffman convicted Dellinger of 32 counts of contempt and sentenced him to more than two years and two months in prison. After the court of appeals reversed all of the contempt convictions of the defendants, the government brought eight contempt charges against Dellinger on retrial, and Judge Edward Gignoux found him guilty of seven—the most for any of the defendants or defense attorneys. Dellinger was found guilty on charges related to his courtroom statements, many of them personal insults of the judge. Gignoux found that Dellinger had spoken out when he was adequately represented by his attorneys, and that the outbursts had significantly obstructed the courtroom proceedings. Gignoux did not sentence Dellinger to any additional time in jail.

In 1993, Dellinger published an autobiography, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter.