On July 29, 1968, seven Seattle policemen and two civilians are wounded by gunfire and rocks during a Central Area riot prompted by a police raid on the Seattle office of the Black Panther Party.
Aaron Dixon and Curtis Harris, co-captains of Seattle's Black Panther Party, were arrested for possession of a "stolen" (planted?) typewriter.
The riot continued despite an appeal from Dixon from the King County Jail, delivered by his lawyer William Dwyer (1929-2002), that such a response "will only jeopardize the lives of masses of black people" (Crowley).
In the matter of the typewriter, Dixon and Harris were later acquitted.
Sources:
Walt Crowley, Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 114, 118, 258.
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