Lee Weiner

The book was published in August 2020 by Belt Publishing, and an excerpt was published by Belt Magazine on July 23, 2020.

In the years following the trial, Weiner continued to work and protest for causes, including by participating in protests for Russian Jews and more funding for AIDS research. In the 1980s, while residing in Washington, D.C., he ran a home-based fundraising and direct-mail firm for political candidates and organizations. He later worked for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in New York, and was a vice president for direct response at the AmeriCares Foundation in Stamford, Connecticut. He currently resides in Florida, and has offered commentary on similarities from his experience and protests in 2020, including the police response in Phoenix, such as what Weiner recalls in his memoir as the hair of the Chicago Seven defendants being displayed by a sheriff after they were taken to jail and given haircuts, and recent police challenge coins, with Weiner stating, "It's clear they're trying to accomplish the same goal, the same thing the federal government did in 1968, '69, '70 ... What they were trying to do is indict a bunch of people and scare the s*** out of anybody that looked like them."

People magazine reports, "At a birthday party for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in 1972, Weiner was overheard joking that he was "starting a new Communist party in New Jersey." The remark turned up in print, and he was told that his teaching contract at Rutgers would not be renewed." Weiner completed his PhD in sociology and dissertation, The Professional Revolutionary: Notes on the Initiation and Development of Careers in Revolution Making in 1975.

After being taken to jail following their convictions for contempt on February 14, 1970, the defendants "almost immediately" stood on top of tables in the common areas and gave speeches of "defiance", getting applause and laughter from fellow inmates, and were quickly put into isolation cells. With the exception of David Dellinger, jail officials cut the long hair of the defendants for 'sanitary reasons.' Weiner recalls Abbie Hoffman "yelled that we should fight, force them to pay a price, that our hair was a symbol of our freedom and of everything we believed and we couldn't just acquiesce," before being held down by guards for the haircut.

On February 19, the jury acquitted all seven defendants of conspiracy and only acquitted Weiner and John Froines on all charges. On February 23, Cook County Sheriff Joseph I. Woods showed pictures of the defendants after their haircuts to an audience that according to John Kifner of The New York Times included "about 100 laughing and applauding members of the Elk Grove Township Republican organization at a meeting in the suburban Mount Prospect Country Club." The defendants were released from jail on February 28, 1970.

Weiner is the only member of the Chicago Seven from Chicago, and was raised on Chicago's South Side. When the trial of the Chicago Seven began in September 1969, Weiner was a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at Northwestern University, had previously graduated from the University of Illinois, studied political philosophy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and earned a master's degree in social work from Loyola University's School of Social Work in Chicago. At Northwestern University, Weiner worked for Howard S. Becker as a research assistant.

First dubbed the "Conspiracy 8" and later the "Chicago 7", the defendants included Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale, as well as "little-known community activist and social worker" Lee Weiner. Each of the defendants contributed an essay to the 1969 book, "The Conspiracy," edited by Peter Babcox and Deborah Abel. In Weiner's essay, "The Political Trial of a People's Insurrection", Weiner writes:

At the 1968 Chicago demonstrations, Weiner served as a marshal with the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. In 2018, Weiner told Olivia Waxman of TIME magazine that "On Aug[ust] 28, during the huge battle on Michigan Avenue with the National Guard, I separated myself from the crowd to stand on the steps of the Art Institute and watch the crowd of people. It was the only time in my life I thought a revolution might happen in the United States."

Lee Weiner (born 1938 or 1939) is an author and member of the Chicago Seven who was charged with "conspiring to use interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot" and "teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices that would be used in civil disturbances" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He was acquitted of all charges by the jury and convicted on seven charges of criminal contempt that were later overturned on appeal. In 2020, Weiner published a memoir, Conspiracy to Riot: The Life and Times of One of the Chicago 7.