(rock guitar music)
- When we walked in here this morning,
they were chanting that the whole world is watching.
This is what revolution looks like,
cultural revolution. - I don't have time
for cultural revolution.
It distracts from actual revolution.
(rock guitar music)
- "The Trial of the Chicago 7", it's not a documentary,
it's a painting where journalism is a photograph.
It's not as much about 1968 as it is about today.
- [Protestors] Our streets!
- [Protest Leader] Our streets!
- [Protestors] Our streets! - Who started the riots?
Was it the protestors or was it the police?
- If we leave here without saying anything about
why we came in the first place, it'll be heartbreaking.
(tense music)
- [Protestors] Our streets!
- [Protest Leader] Our streets!
- [Protestors] Our streets!
- 1968 was a bad year in America.
March, Martin Luther King
was shot and killed.
Eight weeks later, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed.
This is all happening against the backdrop
of the Vietnam War.
Tens of thousands of 18 year old kids
were being drafted every month,
going to Vietnam, getting massacred.
So a group of activists,
Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden,
Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines,
Lee Weiner, and an 8th, Bobby Seale,
the head of the Black Panthers, came to Chicago
to lead what were supposed to be peaceful protests.
- This is it, it's time.
(protestors chanting)
- We're not rushing the police.
- My name is Peniel Joseph, and I am a professor
at the University of Texas at Austin, and I run
the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy here at UT.
In a lot of ways '68 is gonna be a showdown
between two generations of Americans.
You have this sort of multicultural,
multiracial America that's coming in to being.
- There's a stereotypical idea
of what a 60s demonstrator was.
Some people meet that stereotype but the "Chicago 7"
represented all kinds of different groups,
- This is the Academy Awards of protests and as far
as I'm concerned, it's an honor just to be nominated.
- My name is Imani Perry,
and I'm the Hughes-Rogers Professor
of African American studies at Princeton University.
1968 is definitely playing
a role in what we see today,
how protesters are taking to the street but also how
states and the federal government are responding to that.
- My name is Ja'Mal Green, Community Organizer
and entrepreneur from the city of Chicago.
If you look at the protests today, they're not
much different from what was going on in the 60s.
The tactics changed a little bit
but when you look at the leadership of each movement,
what you see is people who are willing
to risk everything for the people.
- We watched for a decade while these rebels without a job
tell us how to prosecute a war.
- Section 2101, title 18.
- That's the federal law that was broken.
- That's the "Rap Brown Law".
- Now the law that the "Chicago 7"
were charged with breaking,
conspiracy to cross state lines in order to incite a riot,
or what was nicknamed the "Rap Brown Law",
That was passed in order to curtail the free speech
of black activists in the South.
That law, no one had ever been charged with it before,
no one has ever been charged with it since.
- We know you don't think we're criminals.
- I think you got the result you were looking for.
- So did Nixon.
- Abbie knew that it was a political trial,
that it didn't matter what they said or what they did,
they were going to jail.
His aim was to use this opportunity
to turn it into a huge media spectacle
and draw attention to the Vietnam War.
- You're asking for a parks permit?
- There's gonna be a Festival of Life in Grant Park
and we're gonna insist that
the next president of the United States
stop sending our friends to be slaughtered.
- You had this sort of progression of both
the continued blooming of activism
and also of the expansion of incarceration,
the increased funding of police departments.
- What's so extraordinary is that phrase
that comes out of 1968, "The whole world is watching",
still resonates today.
- [Protestors] The whole world is watching!
- They were watching US law enforcement
brutalize men, women.
- [Protestors] The whole world is watching!
- You see a shift away from the beloved community
into law and order.
- Mr. Seale, would you identify the man sitting behind you?
- His name's, Fred Hampton.
- Let the record indicate that Mr. Hampton
is head of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party.
- Fred Hampton's legacy lives
with all of the activists around the country.
- Bobby's life is at stake
and you guys are playing to the crowd?
- Thank you.
- Shut up.
White guys sitting in a furnished room and eating sandwiches
while Bobby's sitting in a holding cell.
- Fred Hampton really gained a deep respect
across "black" Chicago because he was able to broker peace
between street gangs by virtue of political education.
(gunshots ringing)
- Fred Hampton was shot and killed last night.
There was a police raid and there was a shootout.
- He was shot in the shoulder first,
you can't aim a gun if you've been shot in the shoulder.
- I know for sure, if what happened to Fred Hampton
happened today, social media, there
will be all kinds of information about what a bad guy he is.
All you have to do is say he's a Black Panther,
he's a terrorist, and no one would know who Fred was.
- How many Fred Hamptons do we have to have for them to
understand that black people deserve justice and equality?
(upbeat music)
- By the time you get to the 1980s, you see,
really the dropping off of one of the most vital
periods of political organizing in US history.
- This doesn't mean that the radicals of Chicago '68
and the Chicago eight are done and over.
They're there, but they're gonna be
much more localized movements.
You think about the election of Harold Washington in 1983
to become the first black mayor in Chicago.
We think about Jesse Jackson's run for president
in 1984 and 1988 which really set the stage
for Barack Obama in 2008.
We think about '68 and Grant Park.
It's really extraordinary that 40 years later,
Barack Obama is going to accept
his election night victory in Grant Park.
But certainly the progressive politics
that are later gonna lead to
the almost passage of the Equal Rights Amendment,
gay marriage being constitutional.
They're still bubbling in the 70s and 80s.
Like Tom Hayden said in '68, "Democracy is in the streets."
- We're going to the convention, let's get on the street!
Get on the street!
- I think the lasting impact of the Chicago eight
is this idea of transforming American democracy.
And even the slogan, "The Whole World Is Watching,"
showed us that violence wasn't coming
and emanating from the ground up,
violence was actually emanating from the top down.
- My most distinct memory is actually
that image of Bobby Seale bound and gagged.
I read that as a sign of one of the ways countries
responded to black protest and protest generally.
- I can't think of any meaningful change
that's happened in this country or anywhere else
that wasn't preceded by robust protest.
- [Protestors] Hold them all accountable!
(protest leader chanting)
- [Protestors] Hold them all accountable!
- With the murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd,
there were times when watching CNN's coverage,
I thought, you know, if you just degraded
the color on that a little bit, it would look exactly
like the file footage we used from 1968.
So, we're not done learning the lesson yet.
- [Protestors] Black lives matter!
- These are folks who are answering the highest calling
of citizenship and being persecuted and punished in America,
the world's best known democracy.
Which is the irony and the tragedy of that.
- When you look at those revolutionaries who are not afraid
of police, who are not afraid of the government,
those are people who usually have what it takes
to fight for the people, as I am.
♪ Here I am ♪
- [Ja'Mal] New leaders will always be bred
because the systems are not changing fast enough.
- Whether we're given permits or not, we're coming.
- Dissent is written into the constitution for a reason.
It's seen as a virtue, except when it feels as though
it's challenging the powerful too much.
And so articulating and re-articulating,
this too is part of the tradition,
this too is part of what it means to love a country.
It's really important.
- [Interviewer] Now how much is it worth to you,
what's your price?
- To call off the revolution?
My life.
- [Protestors] The whole world is watching!