"The idea of this prosecution was to chill all of us
. . . to set an example to show you what could happen if you
became involved in any social movement - to put fear where fervor
was and destroy fervor, to destroy involvement. No trial should
take place in the United States that embodies a threat to the
soul of mankind."
William Kunstler
February 25, 1970
at UCSB's Harder Stadium
William Kunstler was the most famous attorney of the times for
defending people challenging America's undeclared but ferocious
war in Vietnam and the general injustices of that period. Kunstler
was then defending the Chicago 8, eight anti-war activists on
trial in Chicago for disrupting the 1968 Democratic Convention.
Invited to speak on the UCSB campus, Kunstler spoke mostly about
this trial. However, he related his talk to events in Isla Vista,
where local government and police were trying to squelch the
student antiwar/counter-culture movement by arresting its leaders.
At the time, millions of people across the country were involved
in demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
Local Issues
Just the day before,
local activists Lefty Bryant, Greg Wilkinson, Jim Trotter, and
Mick Kronman had been arrested on trumped-up charges against
Lefty, then an active black student leader attending Santa Barbara
City College. That night, in response, between 150 and 200 people
gathered in the loop area of Isla Vista, setting fires in trashcans
and vandalizing realty offices. They also broke a window at
the Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America -- "the biggest
capitalist thing around," as someone said at the time.
Other issues had been festering for months.
-The Black Students' Union had taken over the UCSB Computer
Science Building in the fall of 1968 in a demand for a Black
Studies curriculum.
-The next summer saw the famous oil spill from an offshore drilling
rig, which covered Santa Barbara's beaches and launched the
environmental movement.
-Then there was a successful campaign to block a plan to build
a highway along the northern perimeter of the UCSB campus through
the Goleta Slough.
And in the fall of 1969, a popular anti-war instructor in the
Anthropology Department, Bill Allen, was denied tenure and 7,776
students signed a petition demanding an open review of the decision.
Demonstrations in front of the UCSB Administration Building,
often dispersed by police, had become almost a daily event.
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