Lee Weiner

Lee Weiner, born September 7, 1939 and raised on Chicago's South Side, was a member of the Chicago Seven charged with "conspiring to use interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot" and "teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices that would be used in civil disturbances" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Weiner and his co-defendant John Froines were acquitted of the charges by the jury. When the trial of the Chicago Seven began in the early fall of 1969, Weiner was a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at Northwestern University, and had previously graduated from the University of Illinois, studied political philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a master's degree in social work from Loyola University's School of Social Work in Chicago. As a caseworker, Weiner had witnessed dire poverty in Black neighborhoods, and writes in his memoir that, “Every day … the work I did drove punishing truths into my head about what was wrong in America.” At Northwestern University, Weiner worked for Professor Howard S. Becker as a research assistant. The Chicago Eight defendants each contributed an essay to the book Conspiracy, published in November 1969. In Weiner's essay, "The Political Trial of a People's Insurrection," he writes: Using the artificial, state-controlled rules of the court, the U.S. government's prosecutors and judge will attempt to interpret the people's insurrection in Chicago as the private and deliberate manipulation of eight evil men. The government will be desperate to play down the independent action of thousands of people who openly resisted illegitimate political and police power. The trial, therefore, must blur and soften the contours of what actually happened, and instead focus upon and magnify the roles of these eight men in particular. The alternative image - one of a popular insurrection rooted in the experience and desires of people that was put down by the deliberate exercise of state-controlled violence - too clearly focuses public attention on what America is all about. The government effort is intended to punish and frighten a growing, insurgent mass movement of both the young and concerned adults, and to protect the official myths of political reality in America. J. Anthony Lukas described Weiner as "a strangely remote figure who shunned most of the defendants' extracurricular activities." According to Professor Douglas Linder at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, "Weiner rarely attended defense strategy sessions, perhaps out of a belief that their cause was hopeless. He spent most of his trial hours reading science fiction paperbacks or books on eastern philosophy. Weiner reacted to few courtroom developments, viewing the proceedings with a mixture of scorn and amusement." Groucho Marx was asked to testify at the trial, and Weiner wanted him to teach the courtroom about satire; Groucho said it would be “an honor” but declined, thinking his last name would bias the judge against him. According to Weiner, towards the end of the trial, "there was no question we would be put in jail. I ended up going, mostly for correcting my name. People always pronounced it Wee-ner. It's Wye-ner. When the judge would say Wee-ner, I would shout out, "It's Wye-ner," and he got pissed off and charged me with contempt, which was a perfect summary of my political stance. I was sentenced to two and a half months." After being taken to jail, the defendants “almost immediately” stood on top of tables in the common areas and gave speeches of “defiance,” getting applause and laughter from fellow inmates, and were quickly put into isolation cells. Both Weiner and co-defendant John Froines would be the only two Chicago Seven members acquitted of the more severe riot incitement charges. Weiner was ultimately convicted on seven charges of criminal contempt that were later reversed and remanded following an appeal; after retrial, Weiner was acquitted of all contempt charges. After he accepted an offer to teach in the sociology department of Rutgers University, Weiner left Chicago and moved to Brooklyn, NY with his girlfriend at the time, Sharon Avery. People magazine reports that "[a]t a birthday party for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in 1972, Weiner was overheard joking that he was "starting a new Communist party in New Jersey." The remark turned up in print, and he was told that his teaching contract at Rutgers would not be renewed." In the years following the trial, Weiner has continued to work and protest for causes. He has worked for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in New York and participated in protests for Russian Jews and more funding for AIDS research, and he has worked as a vice president for direct response at the AmeriCares Foundation in Stamford, CT. Weiner has also written a memoir, Conspiracy to Riot: The Life and Times of One of the Chicago 7, about how "the actions that brought him before a jury and a vindictive government were part of a long tradition of American radicalism that had shaped him from an early age and remain directly relevant to today's efforts to change America for the better." Kirkus Review describes the memoir as "a welcome addition to the library of the countercultural left" and notes "Weiner closes with a stirring paean to activism. “While a political life isn’t easy,” he writes, “and while frustration, anger, disappointment, fear, and confusion are sometimes pieces of it, I believe there is no more self-respecting, fulfilling life to try to lead.”"

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