Disturbing the Universe

Jean Fritz, then 51 and a Republican, ran an auto supply store with her husband when she served jury duty on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial in 1968. The defendants’ antics, long hair and irreverence in the courtroom shocked her. But when the judge ordered Black Panthers activist Bobby Seale bound and gagged for refusing to sit down, she started distrusting her country.

"It was absolutely sickening,” she says in William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. “You just felt that the world was coming to an end that you were actually seeing this in the United States of America. Somebody tied up like he was."

Kunstler, the late radical civil rights lawyer, was famous for representing the “Chicago 8” activists who protested the Vietnam War, the inmates who took over Attica Prison and the American Indian Movement that demanded land rights at Wounded Knee.

He also represented alleged rapists, terrorists and El-Sayyid Nosair, who assassinated Jewish leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. 

His daughters, who produced and directed the documentary, grappled with their father’s later career after idolizing him during their childhood. Watching the film, a patchwork of personal and public histories, you almost feel like Kunstler’s child—or at least empathize with how it would have felt to be his daughter. To hero-worship the man that threw his fist in the air and yelled “Power to the people” at a press conference outside the courtroom. To feel betrayed when he represented a man, not much older than you, accused of gang-raping the central park jogger, found guilty.

Kunstler told them that everyone needs a lawyer. And he was vindicated after his death; Yusef Salaam, whom Kunstler represented, was absolved.

“That’s the terrible myth of organized society, that everything that’s done through the established system is legal,” Kunstler said. “And that word has a powerful psychological impact.”

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe debuts in New York on Nov. 13, in Los Angeles on Nov. 20. Visit Gina’s post from earlier this month to check out the trailer.