And as the files Seavey obtained through her lawsuit made clear, that included civil rights attorneys like Louis Gilden. That included King, whom the FBI surveilled and harassed (including via the infamous letter urging him to kill himself). Edgar Hoover’s death summarized the operation as “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.” A congressional committee examining COINTELPRO’s excesses after J. Originally begun in 1956 to neutralize communists in the U.S., the program expanded over the course of the 1960s to target everyone from civil rights leaders to Native American activists to the “New Left”- which included students in the antiwar movement. Seavey described her father as “something of a terrier … angry and unrelenting.” And after years fighting the government in court on behalf of his clients, he was no naif.Įven so, she believes he would have been shocked by the extent of the FBI’s harassment and wiretapping through its COINTELPRO operation. Louis in the 1960s and ’70s - and a daughter’s quest to make sense of history. Louis International Film Festival and excerpts from her podcast “My Fugitive” to tell a story about St. Louis on the Air was a one-hour special edition that wove together an interview with Seavey before a live audience at the St. Drawing on the FBI files she obtained, Seavey connects dots that were not public in her father’s lifetime. It also tells another, surprisingly connected story: about an apparent St. Louis field office to disrupt the antiwar movement. “My Fugitive” tells the story of Howard Mechanic and the zealous (and illegal) attempts by the FBI’s St. Instead, she’s released a podcast, “ My Fugitive,” a production of Pineapple Street Studios. Ultimately, she found film’s constraints too limiting for the tale told in those records. Now an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, Seavey sued the federal government to access her father’s FBI files as well as many of his clients. But his daughter picked up the story he couldn’t let go. Gilden died on Christmas Day in 2000, one month before Mechanic was pardoned by President Bill Clinton. Sentenced to five years in federal prison, Mechanic gave up his dreams of law school and went on the lam, eventually becoming the second-longest-running fugitive in U.S. His clients also included the Washington University students accused of burning two ROTC buildings to the ground during antiwar protests in 1970.īut Gilden was haunted by the case of Howard Mechanic, a Wash U student convicted of throwing a cherry bomb during the protest that followed the Kent State shootings. Her father represented Percy Green, whose protests rocked the city in the 1960s and ’70s. Louis, the child of civil rights attorney Louis Gilden.
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