Biography
Aaron Dixon was a University of Washington Black Student Union leader who, after the March 1968 sit-in at Seattle's Franklin High School demanding Black teachers and curriculum, was arrested and convicted of unlawful assembly. He was sentenced to six months and briefly jailed in 1968, and shortly afterward became the founding captain of the Black Panther Party's Seattle chapter. The unlawful-assembly conviction was later challenged and prosecutors declined to retry it, so he never served the full term. He remains a living activist and author.
Detective Stanley K. Fridell told the House committee on May 13, 1970 that Dixon had been arrested on a burglary allegation and charged with petty larceny on October 9, 1968, followed by a July 7, 1969 conviction and a $50 fine plus costs. He described a typewriter taken from a model-city program building. In separate testimony, investigator Thomas Q. Simmons described Dixon's arrest after an October 3, 1968 bus-radio theft allegation, also reduced from grand to petit larceny and ending in a $50 fine. The hearing does not clearly reconcile these accounts; they are not merged with his documented March 1968 unlawful-assembly case or treated as established periods of imprisonment.
