The attorney William Kunstler first became a public figure in the early 1960s when he went to the South to work in the civil rights movement. But events in 1968 compelled Kunstler to begin taking on clients who promoted a full variety of radical causes. Only about two months after these tapes were recorded, eight prominent radical protesters were arrested in Chicago following disturbances at the Democratic Party National Convention. Kunstler later defended the group in court and became as fully identified with the charges in the public mind as were the defendants themselves. His flamboyance and didactic approach to the law made Kunstler many journalists' favorite radical lawyer.
Kunstler was born in 1920 in New York City. He attended Yale University and Columbia University Law School. In the 1950s he maintained a small conventional law practice with his brother but also wrote, lectured, and taught. Through most of the 1960s he worked primarily in support of civil rights. His autobiographical book of 1966, Deep in My Heart, was devoted entirely to civil rights issues and was prefaced with essays by James Foreman and Martin Luther King Jr.
These tapes record a speech Kunstler presented to a national meeting of Unitarians (location unknown) on June 24, 1968. Its subject is the trend toward political repression of dissent; its special focus is the numerous federal prosecutions of H. Rap Brown, a well-known black activist who was briefly chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The speech itself is complete on Tape No. 1. A short question-and-answer session is recorded on Tape No. 2, Side 1. (The audio introduction on the three sides of user cassette tapes refers to Tape 1, Side 1, Parts 1, 2, and 3 rather than to Tape 1, Side 1 and 2 and Tape 2, Side 1. That audio introduction pertains to the original reel-to-reel tape, not to the cassette copies used by researchers.)
