What You Need to Know About ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’
Aaron Sorkin’s Netflix film dramatizes the notorious 1969 political trial with many players. Use this guide to understand the people and the issues at stake. The Trial of the Chicago 7
Scores of protesters in streets across the country. A looming presidential election. Violent stand-offs between law enforcement and the citizens they had sworn to protect. And, amid the prospects of political and cultural change, a chilling and inescapable backdrop: thousands upon thousands of Americans dead.
The summer of 2020 was, by any stretch, a historic one. But for some it’s a season that feels remarkably like the summer of 1968.
Instead of President Trump, it was Lyndon B. Johnson, succeeded by Richard M. Nixon. The tragedy that cost American lives was not a pandemic but the war in Vietnam. Racism was central to the protests — the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just months earlier — but so were a relentless draft and demands for peace. The Trial of the Chicago 7
In late August, tensions culminated in Chicago, in the shadow of the Democratic National Convention. The National Guard, U.S. Army troops and 12,000 Chicago police officers were mobilized against 10,000 demonstrators. (Who, yes, were called “outside agitators” then, too.) “Everything since Chicago,” the New York Times journalist Tom Wicker wrote one year later, “has had a new intensity — that of polarization, of confrontation, of antagonism and fear.”
