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ATLANTA, GEORGIA 30310 Thursday, January 22, 1970
BOND CHARGES U.S. CONSPIRACY IN CHICAGO CASE
CHICAGO, ILL. - "The real conspiracy is in the government of the United States," Georgia State Representative Julian Bond said after testifying for the defense in the Chicago 7 Conspiracy trial here last week.
Bond told newsman "a conscious conspiracy exists in Washington and in police stations and prosecutor's offices across this land to stamp out dissent, either through midnight assassinations like those that murdered Fred Hampton or through judicial farces like the Chicago trial."
Bond testified January 13th on behalf of the seven men indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in Chicago last year for crossing state lines to conspire to incite violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. (An eight defendant, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, has had his case separated from the others when Seale vehemently protected the trial judge's refusal to let Seale choose his own lawyer. Seale was sentenced to four years in jail on contempt of court charges.)
The young Georgia lawmaker testified that two of the defendants, Tom Hayden and David Dellinger, had told him months before the convention in separate meetings that they feared violence from police during the convention from Chicago authorities.
Bond and Hayden talked in a Nashville, Tennessee motel room on April 5, 1968 and discussed the planned convention demonstrations as riot gunfire echoed in the streets a few hours after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.
He said Hayden expressed a few of the Chicago police, and that Dellinger told him four days later in Atlanta, on the evening after Dr. King's funeral "that violence - official, planned violence - might erupt in Chicago because of the city's lack of cooperation in granting parade permits for the demonstrators
Because of objections from U.S. Attorney Thomas Foran, the prosecutor, Bond was not permitted to testify about a speech he gave to Grant Park demonstrators during the convention and a conversation he had with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley at the site of the convention.
Bond was co-chairman of the Georgia Loyal National Democrats at the 1968 Convention. The Loyal Democrats, an insurgent group, successfully challenged the hand-picked nearly all-white delegation led by Georgia Governor Lester G. Maddox.
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