The Camden 28: How Catholic Radicals Won the Most Successful Political Trial of the 20th Century

In this presentation, I will talk about the “Camden 28,”, not only as the final nail in the coffin of Hoover’s career, but as twenty-eight people in a much larger movement of antiwar activists who raided draft boards, breaking into more than eighty of these offices over the course of four years. Led by priests, nuns, and devout lay Catholics, these raiders hit facilities in struggling cities, where draft boards poached the lives of men from working-class and poor families while granting deferments and exemptions to the nation’s most affluent. This “Catholic Left” not only disrupted the operations of the selective service, but also exposed illegal surveillance, political infiltration, and prosecutorial overreach by the FBI. I argue that they represent the most effective but understudied branch of the anti-Vietnam war movement. The story of the Camden 28 illustrates how the unrelenting, high-stakes activities that marked opposition to the war at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s made prosecuting the war as well as government interference into the political activities of its citizens far more difficult.