At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

22 On Trial

to satisfy his conscience but not to protect his life. Socrates drank the hemlock and died in 399 b.c., but it was a noble death. Twenty-four hundred years later it in®uences us still. 22 On Trial The trials were more of a circus than the sit-ins had been. When picking a jury, each side can challenge prospective jurors, some for cause and some without cause. The DA’s of¤ce systematically challenged all Negroes in the jury pool, either by getting them to admit sympathy for us during voir dire or with a preemptory challenge. On some days “the challenges were so thick and fast” that the jury pool became depleted. Some of the Negroes who were left on the juries complained of being browbeaten by their fellow (white) jurors during deliberations. We became a political football tossed between judges running for of¤ce, some playing to the liberal element in the city by being lenient toward us and some appealing to the less liberal by being severe. One judge increased bail to $500 each; another lowered it. The presiding judge ordered all defendants to be in court every day, including jury selection. Our lawyers protested that California law did not require this for misdemeanor trials, that the students would miss class and the workers would miss jobs, and that being present for the often-lengthy jury selection served no purpose. It was up to individual judges to issue bench warrants for missing defendants ; some did, some didn’t. I missed the ¤rst day of jury selection in my second trial because I wasn’t noti¤ed until that evening that it had begun. The judge issued a bench warrant for my arrest but it was rescinded when I appeared the following day. One of our lawyers, Vincent Hallinan, had four sons and his wife among the defendants. Terrance, nicknamed Kayo, 110 l At Berkeley in the Sixties a third-year student at Hastings Law School, was in his father’s trial group. The father told the son to go to class during jury selection for his trial. By the end of the ¤rst day, Kayo was in jail for failing to appear in court, even though he came for the afternoon session. Hallinan, known for his leftist politics and ®amboyant trial technique, subpoenaed Mayor Shelley, who, to everyone’s surprise, came to court. Judge Elton Lawless wouldn’t allow him to testify.1 My ¤rst trial began on April 16th, the week after my second arrest. It ended a month later, on May 12th. There were fourteen of us, all women. Our two attorneys, Beverly Axelrod and Alex Hoffman, would become much better known in a few years as legal counsel to the Oakland Black Panthers. Our judge, Fitz-Gerald Ames, was sympathetic to our cause but not to our personal schedules. He conducted our case only four hours a day to allow time for other court business. Jury selection lasted a week, during which we had to be in court every day. Judge Ames let us put into evidence pretty much everything we wanted, in particular information on why we were at the Sheraton-Palace and refused to leave. Roselyn Leonard, the one Negro in our group, sang “The Lord’s Prayer” for the jury (to show how we disturbed the peace). Only three of us were supposed to give extensive testimony about our motives, and I wasn’t one of those selected. The rest of us were just supposed to testify brie®y about where we were when arrested. But when my time came, the prosecutor asked me why I was there, and I told him. He probed more and more. I warmed to the task. For two hours we played verbal volleyball. He lobbed me hard questions, trying to get me to admit that I wanted to harm the hotel ¤nancially in order to force it to do something I had no right to force it to do. I bounced them back. I don’t remember quoting Socrates to him, but I did quote Edmund Burke and President Johnson to explain what I was doing there, as well as the statistics on how few Negroes were employed by the Sheraton-Palace hotel.2 All of this was part of our strategy to put the Palace on trial. Thanks to the judge who let everything in, the assistant district attorney couldn’t stop us. The indictment of race discrimination that came out in...