The great civil rights attorney, Arthur Kinoy. Photo: National Lawyers Guild.
As it has for the past few summers, August ends with a gathering of the east coast wing of our family on Block Island.
It is an hour’s ferry ride from Point Judith, Rhode Island.
We rent a house next to the Fire Department. It sits on a hill overlooking a lagoon and beyond to the beaches that face the Atlantic.
Block Island does not have the reputation for wealthy and celebrity summer visitors of its northerly neighbor, Martha’s Vinyard.
It does have some resident celebrities like Christopher Walken.
But celebrity watching is not why anybody comes here. It is certainly not why we come.
Like most others, we come for time with our family and the beauty of the island.
I am always pleasantly surprised by what I discover when I come.
A few summers ago I came upon the story of Monroe Engel, a Block Island summer resident who went to Mississippi in 1964 to take part in Freedom Summer.
Block Island is where the Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, who was outspoken in opposition to the war in Vietnam, came after his conviction for destroying draft records in Catonsville, Maryland.
Berrigan was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
He was arrested by federal agents on August 11th, 1970 when they raided the Block Island home of William Stringfellow, an attorney and Episcopal theologian and Anthony Towne, a poet.
Stringfellow and Towne named their farm Eschanton, meaning hope.
Berrigan had been staying for four months in an 8 by 15 foot room, a former stable, sleeping on a thin mattress.
Block Island was also the summer home of the great Civil Rights attorney, Arthur Kinoy.
The National Lawyers Guild writes of Kinoy:
As a young lawyer in the early 1950s, deep into the Red Scare, Kinoy took on progressive work with a commitment few attorneys were brave enough to muster. He served as counsel to the communist-labeled United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, defended witnesses called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and made a last-minute appeal on behalf of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg following their espionage conspiracy conviction.
Kinoy also fought alongside civil rights activists in the South, guiding the establishment of a Mississippi legal office to support the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign. Two years later, he was once again before HUAC representing student anti-war activists when the acting chairman, taking issue with Kinoy’s vigorous argument of a point, had him forcibly removed from the hearing by three marshals. A famous photograph of the event arguably turned public opinion against the long-running tribunals once and for all.
In perhaps his most famous case, following the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention, Kinoy joined fellow Guild attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass in representing the Chicago Seven. After a tumultuous trial in which all the defendants and attorneys were cited for contempt, Kinoy and his team ultimately secured freedom for the Seven on appeal.
I am told that when Arthur Kinoy first came to Block Island fifty years ago he became immersed in its history which led to him writing the book, The Real Mystery of Block Island.
Kinoy died in 2003 at the age of 82.
Fred Klonsky 
I like his hat too!