John Froines

John Radford Froines (June 13, 1939 – July 13, 2022) was an American chemist and anti-war activist, noted as a member of the Chicago Seven, a group charged with involvement with the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Froines, who held a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale, was charged with interstate travel for purposes of inciting a riot and with making incendiary devices, but was acquitted.

He later served as the Director of Toxic Substances at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and then director of UCLA’s Occupational Health Center.

Froines was born in Oakland, California, on June 13, 1939.

His father, George, worked as a shipyard worker and was murdered when John was three years old; his mother, Katherine (Livingston), was a teacher who raised John and his younger brother Robert as a single parent after her husband's death.

Froines enlisted in the Air National Guard after completing high school.

He then received an associate degree at Contra Costa Community College.

He studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1963.

Froines subsequently undertook postgraduate studies at Yale University, obtaining a Master of Science in 1964 before being awarded a Doctor of Philosophy three years later.

His graduate work was done in the laboratory of Dr. Kenneth Wiberg, Yale Professor Emeritus.

He won a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation to work in the laboratory of Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Dr. George Porter, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London from 1966 to 1968.

While at Yale, Froines was active in a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organizing project in the Hill neighborhood, adjacent to downtown New Haven.

Community organizing projects inspired by SDS, and in particular, its first president Tom Hayden, were launched by civil rights and anti-poverty activists in various cities such as Newark, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Oakland.

Just as civil rights organizations in the American South were organizing for voting rights and political power for Black Americans, a northern SDS-led movement supported peoples’ community organizations in urban areas to gain some control over policies that were affecting their lives, in particular the severely sub-standard housing and inadequate social welfare programs.

In September 1968, Froines joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Oregon as an assistant professor.

Upon the federal indictments for the activities at the Chicago Democratic Convention, he requested and was granted a leave of absence at the end of his first year of teaching because of the impending trial in Chicago.

The university administration resisted the calls for his firing from the university from some Oregon state legislators.

After the two years of full-time anti-war activism, Froines returned to teaching chemistry to undergraduates at Goddard College in Vermont.

Two years later he was hired to head the Occupational Health Division of the Vermont Health Department, a position he held for three years.

His work focused on health standards for the state's nuclear power plant.

Froines later served as Director of the office of Toxic Substances Standards of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) during the Carter Administration.

He was the principal author of important federal standards for regulating workers’ exposure to lead and to cotton dust.

Noted as a member of the Chicago Seven, Froines was indicted along with seven others by the U.S. Justice Department under President Nixon in March 1969 for their participation and leadership in events at the protest demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The two-count indictment cited “conspiracy to travel interstate to incite a riot,” and inciting a riot.

After a lengthy trial that drew national media attention, two of the defendants, Froines and Lee Weiner, were acquitted of the charges against them; the others were found guilty on one count.

The contempt of court findings, which included those against Froines, were rejected in their entirety after an appeal.

According to Gary Libman at The Los Angeles Times, "Froines' courtroom antics were comparatively mild," and included telling jurors that one of the defendants, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, had been sentenced to four years in prison for contempt while the jury was outside the courtroom.

Seale had his case severed from the other defendants after the judge refused to acknowledge his right to have an attorney of his choosing, and had him gagged and bound in the courtroom in an effort to silence him.

Upon appeals all convictions in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (the “Chicago Seven”) were overturned, along with the contempt of court charges leveled by trial judge Julius Hoffman against all defendants.

While still waiting for acquittal in the early 1970s, Froines joined the faculty at Goddard College in Vermont, where he taught chemistry.

From 1970 to 1971, Froines and his wife Ann lived in New Haven, Connecticut, where both worked with the Black Panther Party Defense Committee in support of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins during their controversial trial for conspiracy to murder.

That trial resulted in a hung jury and the freeing of both defendants.

Froines was also involved with organizing the May 1971 antiwar demonstrations in Washington, D.C., a demonstration which resulted in the largest mass arrests in American history.

Upon the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1981 Froines took his focus on occupational and environmental health to the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA, where he became a faculty member.

During his tenure at UCLA, he held many leadership roles, including as the director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (for 25 years), the director of the Southern California Particle Center and Supersite, associate director of the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center, the director of the UCLA Fogarty Program in Occupational and Environmental Health, and the director of the Sustainable Technology and Policy Program.

His research focuses covered the toxicology of arsenic, chromium, and lead, air pollution, and pesticides.

He retired in 2011 from the UCLA School of Public Health, in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences.

Also during his career at UCLA, he served for nearly 30 years with other scientists on a state advisory commission, the Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants, and was in later years its chairperson.

“Over the decades, the nine-member panel has reviewed 450 assessments on a witch’s brew of toxins: Chloropicrin, methidathion, metam sodium, benzene, tobacco smoke, endosulfan, and many other pesticides and air contaminants that are potential carcinogens, genotoxins, neurotoxins, or all of the above.

He also served as chair of the California Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants for nearly 30 years before resigning in 2013 amid controversy and claims of conflict of interest.