November 6, 1970: The Seattle Seven

“Did you ever hear of ‘The Seattle Seven’? … That was me … and six
other guys.”

And that stonily-intoned quote, culled from the script of the Coen
Brothers movie classic The Big Lebowski, has likely introduced many
to the memory of Seattle’s radical-historical counterpart to the Chicago
Eight, the antiwar troublemakers so famously indicted for their role in
disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The quoted character,
“The Dude,” was closely based on the personality of Jeff Dowd, these days
an independent screenwriter and movie-preservation activist, a close
friend of the Coens and, yes, one of the Seattle Seven back in the day.

The Seven were all members of the Seattle Liberation Front, a radical
anti-Vietnam War organization formed in January 1970 at the University of
Washington. One of the co-founders of the SLF, and one of the most
outspoken members of the Seattle Seven, was Michael Lerner, then a
27-year-old visiting philosophy professor at the UW whose academic (and
activist) home was the University of California at Berkeley. Along with
Dowd and Lerner, the other five of the Seven were Michael Abeles, Joseph
Kelly, Roger Lippman, Charles “Chip” Marshall III, and Susan Stern. They
all ironically achieved their collective infamy due to their involvement
in a February 1970 protest demonstration in Seattle in support of the
Chicago Seven, whose verdict was due that month. The demonstration, held
at Seattle’s Federal Courthouse on February 17, attracted a turnout of
roughly 2,000–many more than expected–and the crowd, mad about the bum
rap given to the Chicago Seven the day before, quickly got out of hand.
Rocks, bottles, and paint bombs were thrown, 20 were injured, and 76 (not
including the Seven-to-be) were arrested.

Two months later, on April 16, a federal grand jury indicted the
aforementioned SLF members on charges of inciting the February 17 riot,
along with an eighth, Michael Justesen, who immediately went into hiding.
Justesen’s disappearance denied Seattle our own Eight, and thus our Seven,
with their name’s alliteratively superior scansion, were born. The case
was assigned to Federal District Judge George H. Boldt, whose Tacoma
courtroom hosted a pre-trial hearing on the date in focus here.

One noteworthy moment in the November 6 hearing came when Lerner and
Marshall attempted to make the case that the political implications of the
pending trial–much like the Chicago Seven trial, according to its
respective defendants–reached far, indeed, beyond the geopolitical
confines of its legal jurisdiction. Lerner, directly addressing Judge
Boldt, declared:

“The key issues [in this trial] are the war in Vietnam and the use of
the courts as an instrument of repression in this society. … You [as a
member of the U.S. federal judiciary] are a party to the initial dispute.
… The federal judiciary has its hands dirtied by not declaring the war
immoral and unconstitutional.”

The actual trial, which formally began (after certain delays, mostly legal
in nature) on November 23, was equally marked by such ideological drama.
While roughly 200 protesters picketed outside the Tacoma courthouse in
support of the Seven, defendants and supporters alike inside the courtroom
refused to stifle either their emotions nor their political opinions. To
add to the ideological weight of the legal proceedings, one of the Chicago
defendants, David Dellinger, came to Tacoma in person to aid the Seattle
defendants in making their case, but Judge Boldt denied a request by
Lerner and Marshall to allow Dellinger to speak in the Tacoma courtroom
towards that end.

Eventually, on December 10, Boldt declared a mistrial, citing all the
defendants for contempt of court. The contempt charges were settled out of
court in 1972, and the Seattle Seven, save for Lerner, all served brief
sentences in federal minimum security prison.

As for the other aftermath, the SLF disbanded acrimoniously in 1971; Stern
(b. 1943) died in 1976 (reportedly of an accidental drug overdose);
Justesen was arrested in 1977 in California by the FBI as part of an
infiltration of the Weather Underground; and Lerner is currently editor of
the progressive Jewish journal Tikkun.

The Dude, meanwhile, likely remains in his own very stony kind of limbo.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: Seattle Post-Intelligencer archives; Seattle
Times archives; Walt Crowley, “Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties
in Seattle” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).