<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-top-anchor"></div>
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://peopleslawoffice.com/a-tribute-to-iconic-peoples-lawyer-dennis-cunningham-1936-2022/">peopleslawoffice.com</a>
<div class="gmail-domain-border"></div>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">A Tribute to Iconic People’s Lawyer Dennis Cunningham (1936-2022)</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits"></div>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">March 2022<br></div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<p><strong>By<em> Flint Taylor</em></strong></p>
<a href="https://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/1976-office.jpg"><img src="https://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/1976-office-1024x840.jpg" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="322"></a>PLO Office 1976
<p>On March 5, 2022, Dennis Cunningham, who was the epitome of a true
and uncompromising people’s lawyer, transitioned peacefully at his son’s
home in Los Angeles, California.</p>
<p>Dennis was a unique and brilliant human being, who proudly wore his
radical politics on his sleeve and never shied away from writing about,
speaking on, or putting into action his passionately held and thoroughly
analyzed beliefs.</p>
<p>At the age of fifteen Dennis attended the University of Chicago as
part of a Ford Foundation program for students who had completed two
years of high school. After graduating, he traveled around Europe for
several months in a battered Vespa, going over the Alps and the
Dolomites to Rome, hanging out with numerous people, including jazz
musicians, most notably saxophonist Dexter Gordon. He worked as a
copyboy for the <em>Chicago Sun Times</em>, worked as a reporter for a
small Iowa newspaper, and returned to Chicago to be involved in the
starting of Chicago’s famed Second City, where he worked as a bartender
and improv actor.</p>
<p>Inspired by the 1963 March on Washington, which he called “the engine
of my enlightenment”, Dennis went to work for the City of Chicago’s
Human Relations Commission, investigating housing discrimination, while
attending Loyola of Chicago’ Law School at night. He left the City job
when he realized, in the wake of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s
response to Dr. King’s 1967 march for open housing, that he was working
“for the wrong side.” He was sworn in as a lawyer in November of 1967,
just in time to represent persons arrested in the uprising that followed
the assassination of Dr. King and the Chicago police riot at the 1968
Democratic National Convention. As Dennis recently described it:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>a zillion people got busted [at the convention].
Three weeks later [attorney] Ted [Stein] and I are sitting there, the
two of us, and everybody left town, and we had like 300 cases. . . I
started going to court. I had really good luck then because I got to try
a lot of cases, and they were all bench trials.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Shortly thereafter, filmmaker Howard Alk introduced Dennis to Fred
Hampton and Bobby Rush, who were starting the Illinois Chapter of the
Black Panther Party. Soon after that, Fred requested that Dennis
represent him in a multi-defendant mob action case that arose from a
demonstration against a segregated swimming pool in Fred’s home town of
Maywood, Illinois. As Dennis described the experience:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>This guy, Ivory (a co-defendant) was represented by
(notable Black attorney) James Montgomery, who I vaguely knew. But there
he was, and I’m like thank goodness I have someone to watch what he
does, and have half a clue as to what I’m supposed to do, and that’s the
way it went. . . I don’t have a lot of memory about how the trial went
except that I gave a rousing closing argument, which Fred really liked,
that sounded really good. Montgomery later acknowledged that it was
good, and we got a not guilty, that was really sweet. A big relief I’ll
tell you that. I sure didn’t want to lose that case.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>At about this time, Dennis was talking to two other young lawyers,
Skip Andrew and Don Stang, about starting a law collective, which they
decided they would “boldly” name the People’s Law Office. With Fred
Hampton and the Black Panther Party, Cha-Cha Jiminez and the Young
Lords, and SDS members as clients who were regularly subjected to
arrests and police violence, Dennis, Andrew and Stang, together with
attorney Jeff Haas, and law students Seva Dubuar, Flint Taylor, Ray
McClain and Jack Welch, opened the People’s Law Office in August of
1969.</p>
<p>When the Chicago police murdered Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a
pre-dawn raid in December of 1969, Dennis took a leading role in
coordinating the legal and political effort that the People’s Law
Office, the Panthers, and the Black community of Chicago mounted to
expose the lies that the raiding police and the conspiring Cook County
prosecutors were loudly trumpeting in the media and in the courts. A few
years later, the PLO, lead by Dennis, Haas and Taylor, undertook the
Herculean task of uncovering and exposing the FBI and its Cointelpro
program’s central role in the assassination of Fred Hampton, a legal and
political battle that spanned more than a decade and included an
18-month Federal civil rights trial. As Taylor described Dennis’ role:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>He was an advisor, a mentor, an inspiration; he
always had the big picture, he always thought about, and knew about what
one move would lead to with regard to the next move . . . his
involvement was crucial to our plotting out and making our 13- year
fight to expose the FBI’s role in the assassination.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Also in the early 1970s, Dennis became involved in the 30-year
struggle to defend the Attica Brothers and to expose the truth in the
wake of the 1971 prison rebellion and the law enforcement massacre that
followed. Michael Deutsch, who was recruited to the People’s Law Office
in 1970 and worked side by side with Dennis during the series of
criminal and civil legal battles, incapsulated Dennis’ leading role:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>Dennis had the unique ability of bringing the
political essence to the courtroom, not only in court but also in his
written advocacy. He was a master at capturing the political nature of
the case. For the 30 years we worked on Attica, Dennis was a key person
in organizing the Brothers, in putting forth the Brothers’ position, in
helping to maintain unity among the Brothers. He related to the Brothers
in a way they could trust and know that he believed in their struggle.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>In Chicago, Dennis also represented numerous leaders and members of
the SDS-Weathermen, and Rising Up Angry, and later provided counsel to
arrested FALN members and Palestinian liberation hero Rasmea Odeh. One
of the most famous of those clients, Bernardine Dohrn, eloquently linked
Dennis’ acting background to his unique lawyering skills:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>I picture him as lanky redheaded hipster, coolly
unlawyerly, Darrow returned as Nelson Algren. Dennis was a performance
of understated defiance, hurling himself into history on the side of the
dispossessed. Dennis does law as the theater of improv. He was an early
practitioner of the disciplined art of spontaneity, schooled in the
improvisational acting techniques of Viola Spolin and Paul Sills at
Second City and the Compass Players. Perhaps Dennis is the singular
fusion of improv and the practice of law, taking the drama of legal
performance into the uncharted territories of jazz riffs and invention.
His skills of listening, clarity and confidence, of wit and speed, are
seen in today’s progeny of poetry slams, hip hop and rap performances.</em></p></blockquote>
<div><p>In the early 1980s, Dennis moved to San Francisco where he
continued his career as a people’s lawyer, while maintaining a close
working and comradely relationship with the People’s Law Office. With
other Bay area lawyers, he represented protesters who were subjected to
mass arrest at the 1984 Democratic Party convention; during anti-nuke
actions at the Livermore Laboratory; at anti-apartheid demonstrations;
and at Central American solidarity actions. He also represented folks
arrested during the police sweep of Castro Street in 1987; at the Rodney
King verdict protests in 1992; and during actions by Food Not Bombs,
Act Up, and others. Dennis also defended classical violinist Nicholas
Leiser, who persisted in playing his violin in BART stations despite
repeated arrests, and brought a case that established the right of
musicians to play in such public places. After defending Religious
Witness with the Homeless for multiple sit-ins, leading Sister Bernie
Galvin of Religious Witness called Dennis “the world’s greatest lawyer.”
Remarkably generous in practicing people’s law, he represented numerous
prisoners without fee, and was a charter member of the Fleagle Aid
group that dispensed fee legal advice at a Berkeley flea market during
the late 1980s.</p><p> In 1992, Dennis and 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 May 1990. The
attack came at the start of Redwood Summer, a planned season of mass
protest and direct action against the destruction of old-growth forests.
Dennis and Ben were part of a legal team that brought the case to trial
in 2002, and won a $4.4 million verdict with eighty percent of the
award assigned to plaintiffs’ first amendment claims that the
sensational false arrest after the bombing was a latter-day Cointelpro
operation. Dennis’ youngest daughter, Bernadine Mellis, documented the
Bari case and Dennis’ role in it in the award-winning film <em>The Forest for the Trees</em>.</p></div>
<p>Following the Bari case, the legal team was recruited to represent
plaintiffs in the “pepper spray” case, where locked-down
forest-protection protesters in Humboldt County had 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 brought the case to a final
resolution. In typical Cunningham fashion, Dennis shared his hard-earned
fee with his clients.</p>
<p>Dennis, a career-long active member of the National Lawyers Guild,
was one of the originators of the Guild’s National Police Accountability
Project, and was honored first in Boston by the national Guild, and
later by the Guild’s San Francisco chapter who awarded him the 2007
Spirit of Justice Award. Importantly, he was also supported without fail
by his remarkable family, particularly including his daughters Delia,
Miranda and Bernardine, and his son Joe.</p>
<p>As the tributes continue roll in from clients, friends, colleagues,
and so many others whose lives Dennis touched, former People’s Law
Office lawyer Jeffrey Haas aptly summed up Dennis’ legal career:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>In court and in his writing Dennis was brilliant,
imaginative, a visionary, often histrionic, and a passionate defender of
many Movement leaders and causes.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>He was, without a doubt, a true people’s lawyer. </p>
<p>Note: the author gratefully acknowledges the use of information from
the Anti-Imperialist News article of March 7, 2022 entitled <em>Dennis Cunningham – transitions at the age of 86 on March 5 </em>as well as other interviews, tributes and collective recollections.<br></p>
<p>In Dennis’ memory, his family has organized a donation pool via the
National Lawyers Guild to the Water Protector Legal Collective: <a href="https://waterprotectorlegal.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=219a2239564e69b3f7671537b&id=9253631813&e=2e6f17fffc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.nlg.org/donate/waterprotectorlegal/</a></p>
<a href="https://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/10.24.13.L.-Flint.John_.Dennis.Rafael.Mike_.Jan_-scaled.jpg"><img src="https://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/10.24.13.L.-Flint.John_.Dennis.Rafael.Mike_.Jan_-1024x714.jpg" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="273"></a>NLG Convention 2013 San Juan Puerto Rico
</div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
<div></div>
</div>
</div>