In late summer of 1968, a farm kid from southern Illinois hit town to begin law school in the fall.
“I didn’t know a soul when I moved into the Lincoln Park area,” chuckled former U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb, who described himself as “being barely out of bib overalls with hayseed in my hair!”
Not for long.
“I quickly learned there was trouble in my neck of the woods,” he told Sneed. “The anti-Vietnam War demonstrators had practically set up shop in my backyard, pitching tents in Lincoln Park in a run up to rioting in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention.
“I remember coming out of my apartment one day and spotting Chicago cops dragging young protesters out of one section of Lincoln Park and shoving them into trucks, while nearby poet Allen Ginsberg was chanting in a circle of peaceful protesters not far away from the radical Abby Hoffman, who became legends during that 1968-1974 era,” he said.
Hoffman, a political activist who made headlines as a defendant in the “Chicago Seven” trial in 1969, also co-founded the “Yippies” — short for the Youth International Party.
Webb, who studied law at Loyola, went on to be U.S. attorney for northern Illinois and is now one of the nation’s top trial lawyers, still headquartered in Chicago. But back then, he was just a visiting student from downstate Illinois.
“Whoa! “This was all new to me,” Webb said. “I felt like Dorothy from Kansas in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at that moment.
“I actually understood it. But I was going to law school at night school with no money and no time to protest,” he said.
“Students have a right to protest, but a line is crossed when a movement takes over a building like the anti-Gaza war/pro-Palestinian protesters did Tuesday night at Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall in New York,” Webb said.
“The police and the university were right to immediately shut that takeover down. They acted responsibly.”
