Pedro Baez
It began on August 26, 1968 and it ended August 29, 1968. It was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and it was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois.
Two months before I had graduated from Long Island City HS in Queens, NY.
Normally, a graduating senior is supposed to have a wonderful and happy year. It was anything but that. On April 4th, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot at the Lorraine Motel. I had supported the Civil Rights movement along with protesting the Vietnam war. I saw similarities between the Black struggle and the Brown struggle.
Then on June 6th, Democratic presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated like his brother President Kennedy was on November 22, 1963.
While us graduates tried to enjoy the moment, many of us wondered what the future held for us. For some like Willie Gonzalez, he was going into the Army. Come November in 1968, he was killed in Vietnam. Others were either going on to college or going to jobs.
In 1968, the voting age was 21, not 18 like it is now. I had planned to use my free time campaigning for Robert Kennedy. However, that was now out of the question. Hubert Humphrey didn’t get me or others excited. We all felt that he was a Johnson clone. He would continue the war, and I would continue my activism against it. On the first night of the convention,
President Johnson didn’t attend the convention. On April 1st, he announced to the nation that he wouldn’t seek or accept the Democratic nomination. So that meant the 1968 convention wouldn’t have an incumbent on the ballot.
So the convention began with Chicago Police working 12 hour shifts, and 6,000 National Guard troops patrolling and making Chicago look like a city under siege. Many people that I knew went to Chicago and with Mayor Richard Daley running things it wasn’t long before things got out of hand. Daley instructed his police force to break up demonstrations, whether they were peaceful or not. Before we knew it, riots broke out, people got arrested and some were killed with clubs being used to quell the crowd.
That’s a little about those events that took place in Chicago that year during the Democratic Convention.
Let’s hope that we don’t see a repeat at this year’s convention.
Sun City, AZ
August 16, 2024