On September 13 Attorney General Edward Levi admitted there was no basis for the FBI "investigation" of the SWP.

Leonard Boudin, attorney for the SWP, answered the government, "We welcome the Attorney General's decision [and] regard it as an appropriate vindication of the plaintiff's position of the illegality of a forty-year vendetta against our clients...."

The Militant asked some SWP victims of this forty-year vendetta what they thought about the lawsuit and, in particular, the attorney general's announcement.

One of these former victims is Farrell Dobbs, former national secretary of the SWP. He was also a central leader of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike and headed the major Teamster organizing drive in the North-Central states during the late 1930s.

Dobbs told the Militant:

"The government today has to be more careful of its image. It's lied to the people so long and in so many ways that it's not believed anymore. Nobody believes the FBI and the Department of Justice when they argue that they had to carry out their dirty tricks against us in the interests of national security.

"This is very significant. It demonstrates why a party like ours can fight effectively in this matter. It's because we're a party with revolutionary working-class principles. We tell the truth. We mean exactly what we say when we say that we are seeking to exercise our democratic rights to try to convince the majority of the people in this country of the need to get rid of capitalism and establish a socialist society to solve the burdensome problems that are plaguing people."  
 
October 1, 1951
Try to imagine this: A striker is peacefully picketing his plant. A gang of strikebreakers come out, armed with clubs and blackjacks, and start to beat him up. A cop standing by turns his head the other way until they have finished their dirty work. Then he drags the striker off to jail on charges of "inciting to riot."

This is what the Cicero case is like. The police looked the other way while a mob, incited by racists, ran wild for several days and gutted the apartment rented by Harvey E. Clark, Jr., Negro bus driver. Clark's attorney, George Leighton of the NAACP, then went to court and filed suit for $200,000 damages and for a contempt citation against the Cicero police who had violated an injunction ordering them to protect Clark and his property.

A grand jury was called in Cook County to investigate the anti-Negro riot, which had aroused world-wide protest and condemnation. 117 persons had been arrested at the scene of the outrage, many of them in the act of burning and destroying parts of the building.

But the grand jury did not take any action against any of the 117. Instead, the grand jury, which was lily-white in composition, handed down indictments against five people, all of whom were opposed to the riot and most of whom were not even present when it took place.  
 
 
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