When the founders of the Black Panther Party composed their platform, they included a list of ten demands of America. One of these demands was for the release of all black prisoners in the United States. They claimed the courts are unjust to black men. The American judicial system, they said, is nothing but a farce.
Justice in Chicago?
In Chicago, Judge Julius Hoffman has done his best to make them appear right. His handling of the trial of the "Chicago Eight" will provide ammunition for many new attacks on the "corrupt system."
Fortunately, this case is not typical of American justice. But many people aren't going to believe that. The whole affair brings back memories of the Dr. Spock trial and even Sacco and Vanzetti. These were cases in which politics seemed to influence the courts more than evidence. If they point out a flaw in the judicial system perhaps it is that the system tolerates judges who can't control their courts without acting as tyrants.
And it will be hard for anyone to argue that the Panthers' demand is absurd, while party chairman Bobby Seale is serving a four-year prison sentence for contempt of court. How long will it take the courts to recover from the damage they suffered when Hoffman had Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom?
The whole trial of the eight men has been questionable. Indicted on the vague charge of conspiracy to incite a riot at the Democratic National Convention, the defendants feel they have been singled out because they are symbols of a movement. They think they are being punished in retaliation for the embarrassment suffered by the establishment in Chicago that August.
Speaking on the conciliation of the American Colonies, Edmund Burke once said, "It looks to me narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people."
Is the trial of the "Chicago Eight" an indictment against a whole people? Who is really on trial—Seale, Rubin, Hoffman and friends or the whole mass of anti-war demonstrators? If this trial was conceived to cripple the protest movement, it is doomed to failure.
This is the stuff on which such movements thrive, from which rebellions grow. The court is making a mockery of the system it wanted to protect.
Judge Hoffman evidently learned very little from the events of the Democratic Convention. Provocation was the tactic of the demonstrators there and it was used again in his courtroom. The objective in both cases was to trigger an irrational reaction by the establishment,
For the defendants, this trial has been an opportunity to discredit the system they oppose so bitterly. By bringing in Viet Cong flags and a birthday cake which they tried to present to Seale, the defendants were obviously trying to make a mockery of the court. But they could not have succeeded without the aid of Judge Hoffman.
Seale must have appeared to be a madman, shouting "Facist Pig" and Facist Dog" over and over. But Judge Hoffman quickly stole that role for himself by having Seale gagged, shackled and chained to his chair.
But Seale continued the provocation as well as he could under the circumstances. Judge Hoffman then charged Seale with contempt of court, which might have been the correct procedure much earlier. But Hoffman, once again proving that he could be more unreasonable than any of them, sentenced Seale for sixteen counts of contempt—a total of four years in prison.
The results of this trial will probably not stand up under appeal. If the affair has proved anything at all it is that there should have been no trial in the first place. The court set out to punish the revolutionaries, but instead it has damaged the image of American justice.
Joe Naas
Sorel's News Service
I am, therefore I think I think
WASHINGTON—Spiro Agnew or Spiro Agnew: "I'm still fighting the idea of being a rather ill-equipped, fumbling, obtuse kind of person . . . it seems fashionable to make out Agnew to be some kind of goof . . . I've got an I.Q. of about 135 when it was last tested. I think that's pretty fair."
Readers' write
To the editor:
I am somewhat disturbed by and disappointed in a letter recently printed in the UDK from Professor Robert R. Findlay concerning the stipends paid assistant instructors here.
"The assistant instructor." Professor Findlay points out, "has not come to Kansas to earn his living at teaching. He has come to earn a degree." Quite right. However, the Assistant Instructor must, by some means, earn a living (i.e., and income sufficient to maintain him throughout the entire year) while he is earning a degree. I say "by some means" because very few A.I.'s seem able to support themselves on the $2,400 per annum beginning salary (less taxes, of course) the University now pays. In many cases the result is that the A.I., already burdened with what is in fact two-thirds of a normal teaching load, must further sacrifice study time, and particularly any opportunity to attend summer classes, in order to take a second job. An increase of $200 in the base salary paid A.I.'s would certainly alleviate the problem slightly; an increase of $600 would perhaps solve it. However, until that golden sequel, the assistant instructor who spends six years here working on his doctorate surely doesn't merit the kind of criticism Professor Findlay chooses to heap on Mr. Wallace.
Professor Findlay notes that "the University is, in a sense, subsidizing his (the A.I.'s) education by giving him an Assistant Instructorship." The phrase "in a sense" seems to me particularly apt since it suggests, ever so faintly, what Professor Findlay surely must know perfectly well: the University finds it quite good business to staff a large number of courses with A.I.'s (who after all can be hired for much less money than can Ph.D.'s). We educate freshmen and sophomores as cheaply as possible in order to be able to educate upperclassmen and graduates at all. Within certain limits the arrangement is genuinely beneficial to the entire academic community. Once those limits have been passed teaching graduate students are harmed in the ways I've already noted. What about the people they teach?
Professor Findlay's letter is suggestive on this point. "His (the A.I.'s) commitment is not to his teaching—we don't expect it to be—but rather to himself and his earning of a degree." If I were an undergraduate the prospect of being instructed by a man not committed to his teaching would scarcely delight me. (I doubt that there's much of that sort of teaching being done by Assistant Instructors here at KU—yet.) And indeed what can a chairman interviewing applicants for an assistant professorship suppose about a man who has spent five years, let us say, teaching introductory courses without any commitment to his teaching while earning his doctorate and who now wants, as Professor Findlay puts it, to make "a career commitment to teach" at some university? A commitment to the teaching? No, one must suppose, a commitment to the career.
Roger M. Laub
Assistant Instructor,
Department of English
To the editor:
I would like to apologize for the disgusting and inhumane treatment Marquita Cross and the black students received when the University Symphony Orchestra traveled to Clay Center, Kansas. It is unfortunate that all the citizens of Clay Center are blamed for the ignorance and prejudice of a few people.
Kari Elliott
Karl Elliot Clay Center, Kansas, sophomore
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