This year, 2010, we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day. On the first Earth Day I was walking among the displays of concerned students and faculty at Indiana University. It was an almost-cold, dank Indiana spring day.
The main display area was at Dunn Meadow where a series of momentous gatherings took place in that year of civil unrest. Dunn Meadow is a lawn at the west end of the main campus, across the Jordan River from the IU Student Union Building.
We first gathered at Dunn Meadow to protest the Kent State Massacre.
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"Kent State massacre" Wikipedia
Kent State shootings | |
| |
Location | |
Date | May 4, 1970 |
Target | Kent State University students |
Death(s) | 4 |
Injured | 9 |
Memorial to Jeffrey Miller. Taken from approximately the same perspective as John Filo's famous photograph.
The Kent State shootings, also known as the May 4 massacre or Kent State massacre, occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.
Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, which President Richard Nixon announced in a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.
There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of four million students, and the event further divided the country, at an already socially contentious time, about the role of the United States in the Vietnam War
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Our next gathering at Dunn Meadow was a gathering to listen to Jerry Rubin who was protester in the Chicago Seven riots and trial. It turned out that Jerry was soliciting funds to pay for his lawyer’s fees.
From Wisegeek.com
When the Democratic party announced plans to hold its national convention in Chicago, key leaders of these various factions urged members to hold rallies outside of the facility. The results were horrific. Protesters and law enforcement officers clashed violently, and Chicago's mayor, Richard Daley, ordered in National Guard troops to restore order. When the smoke cleared, eight men identified as leaders of the protests were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot. They became known originally as the Chicago Eight, later the Chicago Seven.
During the trial, the eighth co-defendant, Black Panther member Bobby Seale, was improperly denied his attorney of choice by 74 year old judge Julius Hoffman. Seale's heated protestations caused Judge Hoffman to order him bound and gagged while in court. Hoffman later separated Seale's case, leaving seven co-defendants: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, John Froines, Rennie Davis and Lee Weiner. Although their associations before the convention were often vague or non-existent, these men became inextricably linked in the media as the Chicago Seven.
Of the Chicago Seven, perhaps Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were the two most recognized faces. Both were members of the Youth International Party, or Yippies. The Yippies were notorious for suggesting outlandish acts of sabotage or civil disobedience, but rarely carried out these extreme plans. During the Democratic National Convention, the Yippies gained media attention by nominating a pig named Pigasus for president.
While in Chicago, both Hoffman and Rubin met with other leaders of counterculture groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the National Mobilization Committee (MOBE). Other defendants, such as David Dellinger and Rennie Davis, attended these meetings as well. Unbeknownst to participants, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had already placed undercover agents at many of these meeting sites.
The Chicago Seven were charged with violating a recently enacted federal Anti-Riot Act, which gave law enforcement officers more legal teeth against protesters. The trial of the Chicago Seven became a media circus, with some of the defendants arriving in black robes or openly defying the authority of the court. Judge Hoffman's questionable pre-trial decisions also hampered the efforts of defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass. Potential jurors could not be asked questions pertaining to their knowledge of popular counterculture entertainers, for example. This exclusion allowed federal prosecutors to seat a jury largely unsympathetic to the Chicago Seven's political and social culture.
Despite the theatrics and occasionally heavy-handed tactics used by both sides during the trial, the jury found two of the Chicago Seven, John Froines and Lee Weiner, not guilty of the charges. Weiner and Froines were considered peripheral characters, accused mostly of using their skills to create non-lethal stink bombs. The other five members of the Chicago Seven were found guilty of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 and were given various sentences.
Judge Hoffman did not stop at that point. He also sentenced all of the Chicago Seven and their attorneys to several years in prison for a number of contempt of court citations. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned these sentences in 1972, based on Judge Hoffman's behavior during the trial and the excessive length of the sentences.
Following the Appeals Court decision to overturn their original sentences, members of the Chicago Seven resumed their lives during the 1970s. Some returned to academia, while others remained politically active. Tom Hayden eventually became a congressional representative from California. Former radical Jerry Rubin decided to become a mainstream businessman in the 1980s.
David Dellinger, the oldest member of the Chicago Seven, continued to participate in civil demonstrations until his death from a heart attack. Abbie Hoffman, arguably the most impassioned member of the Chicago Seven, tried to reinvigorate the counterculture movement through media events and several books. Disillusioned by the apparent apathy of American society in the 1980s, Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989.
We “protested” the Kent State tragedy by “marching” from our various dorms and apartments to Dunn Meadow. There were to be speeches and announcements and a protest rally by thirty thousand angry students! We were told that there could be ‘police riots’ such as those that occurred at the Democratic Presidential Convention that the Chicago Seven disrupted.
As it turned out there were only about ten thousand un-angry students milling around the ‘Meadow.’ The police were held in place at intersections about three blocks away in case there was trouble. They were never called to quell our riots.
It was a rather quiet event with one speech by the Student Body President; a young man of color who had a very vigilant cordon of body guards in case there was a sniper in the trees or on the roof of the student center.
Our ‘protest’ was reported in the Bloomington and Indianapolis papers. There was a picture: is seems that some jerk with a flag from North Viet Nam had jumped in front of the march just as the pictures were snapped. I was mortified!
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Back to Earth Day
The whole Instructional Systems Technology Department was opened for assisting students who wanted to create displays for the ‘meadow.’ I was assigned a junior student who wanted to make everyone aware of the problems caused by over population. I was stuck in the dark room for five hours, making two hundred prints of a picture of a four person family. The display had all those same pictures stapled and taped to a backdrop and a large wooden frame: no one I saw was impressed: I certainly wasn’t!
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It is fun to remember those days of ‘teach-in’s’ in the dorm on how we got into the Viet Nam mess and how we were manipulated into a situation that poisoned our country. It all seemed both surreal and important at the time. It was a great time to be alive, really alive; or so we thought!
