Preparations for the fourteenth national convention of the Young Socialist Alliance included an important legal battle to protect the civil rights of participants at the gathering.
On December 13, fifteen days before the convention was due to open. New York District Judge Thomas Criesa granted a motion of the YSA for an injunction against Federal Bureau of Investigation plans to spy on the gathering. The injunction prohibited FBI agents or confidential informers from “attending, surveilling, listening to, watching, or otherwise monitoring” the convention.
Although the ruling was overturned by a three-judge court of appeals on December 24, right up to the eve of the convention and throughout the convention itself, the YSA’s attorneys, Leonard Boudin and Herbert Jordan, were seeking a ruling from a Supreme Court justice to set aside the appeal ruling. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall heard the case on December 27. He ruled that the FBI should be allowed to infiltrate and spy on the convention.
In opening the convention, the national chairman of the YSA, Andrew Pulley, warned:
“I just want to say one thing to all you undercover neanderthals from the FBI who are monitoring this convention – we are not going to rest until we get a decision banning you from this convention and future conventions. And when we do we will find out who you are and send you to jail!”
The request for the injunction to halt FBI spying was part of a broader suit by the YSA and Socialist Workers party against all forms of government surveillance and harassment. The suit asks $27 million in damages.
The YSA found out about the FBI’s spying plans accidentally. An employee at the Jefferson Hotel in St. Louis, where the convention was to be held, told YSA leaders that an FBI agent had inquired at the hotel about what rooms the YSA would be using.
In its request for an injunction, the YSA said that the FBI’s presence would inhibit young people from attending the convention as well as inhibit discussion at the gathering itself, thus violating the First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly of convention participants.
Judge Griesa, who originally heard the case, noted that although the FBI justified its harassment and surveillance of the YSA on the grounds that the organization allegedly had illegal aims, including overthrow of the government “by force and violence,” attorneys defending the FBI had been unable to produce a scrap of evidence of any illegal activity.
“You have been looking at this organization for thirty-five years or so,” the judge told the government attorney, “and you haven’t been able to tell me of one single, solitary crime or illegal activity committed by anybody in this organization.”
In a last-minute attempt to get the ruling changed, the government attorney appealed to Griesa just as the decision was about to be released. He said that if the FBI’s undercover informers were not allowed to attend the convention, “their absence would be conspicuous,” since they would include persons who are “actively involved in SWP or YSA activities.”
Griesa refused the government’s request for a change in the injunction. He stated: “If they are informants of the FBI, they are playing a role which is just the role which I said they should not be able to play at this conference, and I don’t think they should be there.”
Leonard Boudin, one of the YSA’s attorneys, was quoted by the December 17 New York Times as saying that the order marked “the first time in American history that a Federal court has prohibited F.B.I. surveillance of any political organization.”
In an interview published in the December 27 issue of the revolutionary socialist weekly The Militant, Boudin also stressed the implications of the decision for the eventual success of the broader suit by the SWP and the YSA.
“All of the arguments the government is making in the case itself,” he said, “they made in relation to this motion for preliminary injunction. And the court upheld us. Therefore the decision might well foreshadow the result in this case, because so much of the substance was involved here.”
Even though in the end it was not possible to prevent FBI agents from attending the convention, the ruling by Marshall was not a complete setback. His arguments denying the YSA’s request for a stay of the order of the court of appeals and for reinstatement of Judge Griesa’s original injunction did not rule out an ultimate victory in the case. He argued that since there was a suit for a permanent injunction pending, it would not be correct to grant a preliminary injunction, since the permanent damage to the cover of the FBI agents outweighed the harm to the YSA at this late stage if they attended.
Moreover, as the December 28 Washington Post pointed out, “he rejected the Justice Department’s argument that the party’s fears of injury to their First Amendment rights were not serious enough to warrant court attention to the merits of the dispute.”
The court of appeals had ruled that although the FBI agents could attend the convention, they could not disclose the names of members and guests attending the convention to the Civil Service Commission and thus threaten their jobs or employment prospects. Marshall added to this that the government could not transmit any information obtained at the convention to any nongovernmental entities such as schools or employers. Nor could the government carry out any disruptive activity at the convention.
As Andrew Pulley pointed out in his opening address: “We know this isn’t going to stop those swine from doing it, but when we catch them this will expose the government even more as the undemocratic antiquity it is.”
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1975/IP1301.pdf#page=9&view=FitV,3