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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black;text-align:center"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2"><b><font size="4">Dennis Cunningham - transitions at the age of 86 on March 5th</font> <br></b></font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2"><span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">Dennis
Cunningham has been making art and practicing civil rights law at his home in
Bernal Heights, in San Francisco, for forty years, and prior to that, in
Chicago. He has four children, two nieces and two nephews, three grandchildren,
and a partner of thirty years; he is a central figure in a vibrant, committed
community of left-wing activists and radical lawyers. <span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">The
eldest of four siblings, including Damon, Margaret, and Rob, and the son of
Robert Maris Cunningham, Jr. and Deborah Libby Cunningham, Dennis grew up in
Glencoe, Illinois, and spent summers at the Libby family home in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan. At the age of fifteen in the early 1950s, he matriculated
at the University of Chicago as part of the Ford Foundation Pre-Induction
Scholarship (a program for students who had completed two years of high
school). After graduating, he traveled around Europe for several months on a
battered Vespa he bought from a guy in Paris, going over the Alps and the
Dolomites to Rome, connecting with various people for different legs of the
trip.<span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">Starting
in the early 1960s, he began collaborating with his great friend Paul Sills and
other contemporaries at Second City and in related projects where improvisation
was the order of the day—Game Theater, Story Theater, and the Parents School.
It was at Second City that he met Mona Mellis, who would become his wife and
the mother of Delia, Joe, Miranda, and Bernadine. In this period, he deepened
his lifelong devotion to art making and to jazz. He remembers a song on a childhood
Christmas record with a really cool jazz lick that he sees as triggering his
interest in the latter, and he co-owned a jazz bar in Chicago in the early
1950s with his friend John Court.<span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">Galvanized
by the civil rights movement, specifically the 1963 March on Washington (“the
engine of my enlightenment”), as well as by an article he read about lawyers
fighting housing discrimination, he went to law school at night at Loyola
University in Chicago. He was licensed in 1968, just in time to defend people
arrested in riots that followed the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the protests at the Democratic National Convention. <span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">Inspired
by lawyers and organizers working with the National Lawyers Guild, Dennis was a
co-founder of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, along with Jeff Haas, Flint
Taylor, Skip Andrew, and later Michael Deutsch. In more than fifty years of
practice, he has participated in numerous cases involving protesters and
protest movements, prisoners and prison rebellions. These include the twelve-year
civil prosecution of FBI agents, the State’s Attorney, and Chicago police
officers involved in the infamous “weapons raid” on December 4, 1969, in which
Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were shot to
death, and the defense of dozens of prisoners falsely accused as “ringleaders”
of the rebellion at the Attica State Prison in western New York in 1971. After these criminal
charges were thrown out in 1976, Attica Brothers led by Big Black and Akil
Al-Jundi organized Dennis, Mike Deutsch, Liz Fink, and other Guild lawyers to
sue state officials. The civil rights lawsuit held officials responsible for
the massacre of thirty-nine prisoners and state-employee hostages during the
retaking of the prison, and the mass torture of prisoners that followed. After
more than a quarter-century of litigation, this case culminated in a
multi-million-dollar settlement<span style="color:windowtext"><span></span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">Dennis
relocated to San Francisco in 1982 to be near his children, and continued to do
movement work and police misconduct cases. With other Guild lawyers, he helped to
represent protesters in mass arrests in the 1984 Democratic Party convention;
anti-nuke actions at Site 300 at the Livermore Laboratory; anti-apartheid
demonstrations in Berkeley and San Francisco; Central American solidarity
actions in the 1980s; the police sweep of Castro Street in 1987; the Rodney
King verdict protests in 1992; and actions by Food Not Bombs, ActUp, and
others. Dennis defended classical violinist Nicholas Leiser, who persisted in playing
his violin in BART stations despite repeated arrests, bringing a case to enjoin
BART police from further harassment. This verdict established the right of
musicians to play in such public places; “BART may not arrest this gentleman
for playing his violin,” wrote U.S. District Judge Sam Conti in his preliminary
injunction. Dennis also defended Religious Witness with the Homeless for multiple
sit-ins, leading Sister Bernie Galvin of Religious Witness to refer to him as
“the world’s greatest lawyer.”<span> </span><span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">In
1992, Dennis and his young law partner Ben Rosenfeld brought a case against FBI
agents and Oakland police officers involved in the frame-up and media smear of
Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, after a car-bomb
assassination attempt against Judi in Oakland in May 1990. The attack came at
the start of Redwood Summer, a planned season of mass protest and direct action
against destruction of old-growth forests on the North Coast. After Judi’s
tragic death from breast cancer in 1997, Dennis and Ben were part of a legal
team that brought the case to trial in 2002, and won. In what was apparently
only the second time FBI agents had faced a jury in a civil rights suit—the
Fred Hampton case was the first—a unanimous jury awarded Bari and Cherney $4.4
million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages. Notably, eighty percent
of the award was assigned to plaintiffs’ claims that the sensational false
arrest after the bombing was a latter-day <span style="font-variant:small-caps">cointelpro</span>
operation, in violation of the First Amendment. <span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">Following
the Bari case, the legal team was recruited to represent plaintiffs in the
“pepper spray” case, where in 1997 locked-down forest-protection protesters in
Humboldt County refused orders to unlock themselves, and had pepper spray
daubed in their eyes by police. After two hung juries, a third jury compromised
on a 2005 verdict for nominal damages of one dollar per plaintiff. A later
settlement of the plaintiffs’ claim for attorneys’ fees cut short a matter which
had seemed poised to break the record for long cases Dennis has fought. <span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">Dennis
received the Spirit of Justice Award from the National Lawyers Guild in 2007;
in 2006, Bernadine Mellis released <i>The
Forest for the Trees</i>,<i> </i>an
award-winning documentary focused on the Bari case that was featured in the
Human Rights Watch Film Festival, among others. Most recently, Dennis and
Yolanda Huang brought a class-action suit against the Santa Rita Jail and
Alameda County Sheriff's Office on behalf of female prisoners who were being
subjected to multiple forms of unconscionable maltreatment, including
systematic sleep disruption.<span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black" align="center"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">*<span></span></font></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2">In
1954, as managing editor at <i>Chicago Review</i>,
Dennis traveled with his co-editor and roommate—who had been brought into the
world by Dr. William Carlos Williams—to visit the poet in Rutherford, New Jersey.
Williams gave them a poem to publish, “View by Color-Photography on a
Commercial Calendar,” which concludes with these lines: <span></span></font></span></p>
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<div style="text-align:center"><img src="cid:ii_l0gvbwoh1" alt="image.png" width="291" height="229"><br></div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Celebration of life for Dennis will be forthcoming.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;color:black"><span style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><font size="2"><span> </span></font></span></p>
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