As the draft calls rose, SDS chapters organized rank-and-file resistance: burning draft cards, blockading induction centers, and confronting campus recruiters for Dow Chemical, maker of napalm — at Wisconsin in October 1967 police clubbed dozens of sit-in students in a battle that radicalized the campus. During Stop the Draft Week that same month, ten thousand demonstrators fought police around the Oakland induction center.
California answered with a political conspiracy case: seven organizers — the Oakland Seven, several of them SDS and Berkeley movement veterans — were charged with conspiracy to trespass and resist officers. Their 1969 acquittal by a jury that accepted the defense of organized dissent became a landmark of the era's movement lawyering, foreshadowing the government's larger conspiracy failures to come.