The 1968 convention commenced with the country on edge and bitterly divided over the Vietnam war.
The “long, hot summer” of 1967 saw racial uprisings as the civil rights movement persevered. Months ahead of his party’s convention, Johnson shocked the nation when he announced he would not seek another term as president. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated outside of a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Amid the riots in the wake of King’s murder, Chicago’s longtime mayor, Richard J. Daley, ordered his police to “shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters.” And Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Daley’s note to his police force, according to the Walker Report, emboldened officers during convention week. The report cites the city’s refusal to grant march permits and the police department’s dismissal of intelligence reports on plans to disrupt the convention as main factors that led to chaos.
“The nature of the response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night,” the report concluded.
More than 10,000 protesters descended on Chicago for convention week. Many camped out illegally in Lincoln Park, a large public space near the city’s lakefront north of downtown. On Wednesday, Aug. 28, the crowds were filled mostly with politically active yippies, anti-war protesters, draft resisters and college students. The report notes, based on interviews with protesters, that most had no intention of being violent — but certainly expected violence.
Michael Kazin was in his early 20s and a member of the Students for a Democratic Society chapter at Harvard University when he decided to attend the convention.
“I was angry about the war in Vietnam and the Democratic Party was, of course, the party in power in the White House, which was prosecuting the war. So I went to Chicago to protest what we thought of as the war party,” he said in a recent interview.
He said he threw rocks at empty police cars and hung out in Lincoln Park. On Monday night, while leaving the park, he was arrested for disorderly conduct. He was released in the early morning hours on Wednesday.
Around 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning, as detailed in the Walker Report, several police officers carrying rifles entered the apartment where Kazin and other college students were staying. The officers kept the students at gunpoint while two others searched their belongings — without showing them a search warrant.