From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter 0679405917, 9780679405917

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DAVID DELLINGE R

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$27. 50 U .S.A . $36.00

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The son of a well-to-do Boston lawyer, David Dellinger seemed cut out for a distinguished career in law or government. But rejecting his comfortable background, he walked out of Yale one afternoon during the Great Depression, in his oldest clothes and without any money, to ride the freight trains, sleep at missions, and stand in breadlines. It was while sharing a warming fire on a street corner in a hobo jungle that he first knew that in his own way he would follow the path of Francis of Assisi. Dellinger lived among the poor in Newark, was bloodied in the freedom marches through the South, and led countless hunger strikes in jail. In the "hole" in Danbury prison he faced his own death, to be reborn with courage that would never desert him. Always, he reached out to his antagonist to find a common ground. Dellinger introduced Gandhi's principles of nonviolence to the political street struggles against the Vietnam War, holding together the broad-based antiwar coalition he forged by the sheer force of his personality. In 1968 he held the world spellbound with his cry "the whole world is watching," referring to the media coverage of the Chicago police riot. His life of service to social change had its crowning moment before Judge Julius Hoffman during the Chicago Eight trial, where Dellinger and his co-defendants turned the tables on their accusers to put the government on trial. His recollections of those years shed new light on many of the most crucial events of the 1960s, bringing to life again the drama of those turbulent years. His inside account of what happened in the sixties, and of the (continued on back flap)

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From Yale to Jail

Also by David Dellinger

Cuba, America, Lost Plantations Revolutionary Non-Violence More Power Than We Know: The People's Movement Toward Democracy Beyond Survival: New Directions for the Disarmament Movement (with Michael Albert) Vietnam Revisited: Covert Action to Invasion to Reconstruction

David Dellinger I

From Yale to Jail The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter

Pantheon Books New York

Copyright© 1993 by David Dellinger All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dellinger, David T., 19 l 5From Yale to jail : a memoir I David Dellinger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-679-40591-7 l. Dellinger, David T., 19152. Radicals-United States-Biography. 3. United States-Social conditions- l 960-1980. 4. Nonviolence. I. Title. HN90.R3046 1993 303.48'4-dc20 92-50473 BOOK DESIGN BY LAURA HOUGH

Manufactured in the United States of America

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3

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To Elizabeth For her life, for fifty years of inspiration and challenge, and for the new insights I have gained from reading the first chapter she has written for her own life story. And to everyone who has decided-or is thinking of deciding-to live in accord with her or his own feelings of human solidarity and love, rather than by the selfish competitiveness that is enshrined in the present society.

Contents

Prologue 3 I

Beginnings

9 II

Prison 59 III

Meeting Betty

99 IV

Prison Again

111

v Vietnam

187 VI

Martin Luther King, Jr. 257

Contents

VII

From Protest to Resistance

291 VIII

The Chicago Trial

319 IX

Behind the Politics

409 Appendix

467 Index 483

viii

With a Lot of Help from My Friends I

Since I did early drafts of some chapters several years ago, and since so many people read a chapter or more (or heard me read aloud), there is no way I can adequately acknowledge the help I received, let alone remember or list everyone who helped. My wife, Elizabeth Peterson, my son Dan Dellinger and my friend Dan Weiner read drafts of the entire book and responded with words of great insight and value. Others who gave important help with a particular section or a few chapters were Frederica Matera, Michael Ferber, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Marv Davidov, David Rome, Jay Craven, Eileen Willenborg, Jane Melnick, Lynn Bonfield, Karen Lewis, Nikko Bowen, Allen Ginsberg, Steve Sato, William Langley, Howard and Betty Douglas, my daughters, Tasha Singer and Michele McDonough, my daughter-inlove Cathy Dellinger, and my grandson Shenandoah Sundance. My editor at Pantheon, Fred Jordan, gave me outstanding advice and help, even though there were a couple of places (which I won't identify) where I didn't follow it.

From Yale to Jail

Prologue f

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS EASTERN DIVISION

presiding

JUDGE JULIUS J. HOFFMAN,

No. 69 CR-180 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Plaintiff vs. DAVID T. DELLINGER

et al.

Defendants

The court now has the responsibility of dealing appropriately with the contemptous conduct that has pervaded this trial from the very beginning . . . I will first consider the conduct of the defendant David Dellinger. [He reads thirty-two charges of contempt of court.] ... Mr. Dellinger, do you care to say anything? Only in respect to punishment. MR. DELLINGER: Yes ... and I hope you will do me the courtesy not to interrupt me while I am talking. THE COURT: I won't interrupt you as long as you are respectful. MR. DELLINGER: Well. I will talk about the facts and the facts don't always encourage false respect. Now I want to point out ... that the first two contempts THE COURT:

From Yale to Jail

cited against me concerned one, the Moratorium Action and , secondly, support of Bobby Seale-the war against Vietnam and racism in this country, the two issues this country refuses to solve, refuses to take seriously. THE COURT: I hope you will excuse me, sir. I ask you to say what you want to say in respect to punishment. I don't want you to 1 talk politics. ' ' MR. DELLINGER: You see, that's one of the reasons I have needed to stand up and speak anyway, because you have tried to keep what you call politics, which means the truth, out of this courtroom, just as the prosecution has. THE COURT: I will ask you to sit down. MR. DELLINGER: Therefore it is necessaryTHE COURT: I won't let you go on any further. MR. DELLINGER: You wanted us to be like good Germans supporting the evils of our decade and then when we refused to be good Germans and came to Chicago and demonstrated, now you want us to be like good Jews, going quietly and politely to the concentration camps while you and the court suppress freedom and the truth. And the fact is that I am not prepared to do that. You want us to stay in our place like Black people were supposed to stay in their placeTHE COURT: Mr. Marshal, I will ask you to have Mr. Dellinger sit down. MR. DELLINGER: Like poor people were supposed to stay in their place, like people without formal education are supposed to stay in their place, like women are supposed to stay in their placeTHE COURT: I will ask you to sit down. MR. DELLINGER: Like children are supposed to stay in their place, like lawyers-thank you [motions toward Bill Kunstler and Lennie Weinglass]-are supposed to stay in their places. It is a travesty of justice and if you had any sense at all you would know that the record you read condemns you and not us. THE COURT: All right. MR. DELLINGER: And it will be one of thousands and thousands of rallying points for a new generation of Americans who will not put up with tyranny, will not put up with a fac;ade of democracy without the reality.

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Prologue

Mr. Marshal, will you please ask him to keep quiet? MR. DELLINGER: I sat here and heard that man, Mr. Foran [the prosecutor], say evil, terrible, dishonest things that even he could not believe in-I heard him say that and you expect me to be quiet and accept that without speaking up. People no longer will be quiet. People are going to speak up. I am an old man and I , am speaking feebly and not too well, but I reflect the spirit that will echoTHE COURT: TAKE HIM OUT! MR. DELLINGER: Throughout the world. [Applause.] [And it] comes from my children, who came yesterday ... [Marshals grab Dellinger's daughters, twisting their arms behind their backs to force them out of the courtroom.] Leave my daughters alone. Leave my daughters alone. THE COURT:

My sentence on the contempt charges was two years, five months and sixteen days. I was already spending my noncourt hours in the Cook County jail, my bail having been revoked when a Chicago policeman whom I had known earlier as "an honest cop" made up lies about me in his testimony and I responded by speaking up in a way that the judge found offensive. Perhaps it was the effect of that overcrowded and repressive jail (see Chapter 56) that caused me to say "I am an old man ... speaking feebly." I was only fifty-four at the time but in some ways felt older than I do now at seventy-seven. The trial began with eight defendants: Bobby Seale (chairman of the Black Panther Party), Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Lee Weiner, John Froines and myself-the so-called Chicago Eight. We were charged with "conspiracy to incite a riot" at the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago and "crossing state lines to incite a riot." But months before our indictment a presidential commission had investigated the disorders and ruled that they had been primarily "a police riot." Long before the contempt sentencing, Bobby Seale's case had been severed from those of the other defendants and the rest of us had become known as the Chicago Seven. As I will show, the severance was caused by a series of gradually intensifying conflicts in response to governmental maneuvers that first deprived Seale of his right to be defended by the

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From Yale to Jail

lawyer of his choice and then, in the absence of his lawyer, of the right to defend himself. His last few days in court he was bound, gagged and chained to his chair. It was only after his rights had been denied and he had been physically assaulted by the marshals, even before the bindings and gagging, that I had begun to speak up in court myself. The Moratorium Action that led to my first contempt charge began in the courtroom one morning before the court was in session. One of the reasons we had demonstrated at the 1968 Democratic Convention was to stop the Vietnam War: "Bring the Troops Home Now!" But we had other goals that have been largely forgotten by most latterday commentators. Some are indicated by my references to Black people, people without formal education, women, children, a "justice" system that too often keeps the larger truth out of the courtroom and to the existence of "a fa