2/15 5 pm KQED Arthur Kinoy, Civil Rights Lawyer

Arthur Kinoy, the famous civil rights lawyer who died September 19, 2003 at age 82, is the subject of a documentary, "Doing Justice: The Life and Trials of Arthur Kinoy" on KQED-TV, Sunday, 2/15/04 at 5 p.m. His life story is the history of a variety of workingclass struggles.

Arthur Kinoy previously documented his life story in his 1984 autobiography, "Rights on Trial: The Odyssey of A People's Lawyer."

He was a labor attorney for the United Electrical Workers and defended UE against the anti-communist witchhunts of the 1940s and 1950s, which were first and foremost anti-labor campaigns.

He defended the world-renowned martyrs of the workingclass, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, murdered on June 19, 1953 by the US capitalist class on the false and phony charge of conspiracy to commit atomic espionage.

He fought to have the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation seated at the 1964 Democratic Convention instead of the lily-white racist regular Mississippi Democratic delegation.

He represented civil rights and anti-war demonstrators in the 1960s, including the Chicago Eight. He brought a suit challenging Nixon's wiretapping of an anti-war group in Detroit known as the White Panthers. His clients included African-American congressperson Adam Clayton Powell, who successfully fought being barred from Congress, Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and Arthur Miller, the famous playwright who was subpoenaed to testify before HUAC and whose famous play on the Salem witchhunts, "The Crucible," was a bitter criticism of HUAC and their fellow fascists.

Arthur Kinoy founded the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York in 1966 and taught constitutional law at Rutgers Uinversity Law School. He was a longtime member of the National Lawyers Guild.

The cover of his book has a photo of him being dragged out of the hearings of the anti-communist witchhunting House Un-American Activities Committee in 1966 by US marshals when, in the course of his defense of his anti-war protester clients, he stood up to argue his right to cross-examine witnesses. The fascist chairperson told him to sit down, and Kinoy refused, at which point he was dragged out of the room and charged and convicted for disorderly conduct, which conviction was dismissed on appeal.

For more on Arthur Kinoy, see:
http://law-library.rutgers.edu/kinoy/kinoy.html

Whether you are young or old, new to the struggle or a veteran, you can only learn from and be inspired by such a documentary and find something from the extraordinary life of Arthur Kinoy to carry on the struggle today.