I am writing this during the presidential nomination of Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Because this is 40 years after 1968, there are references by mass media personalities and others to what happened in the streets of Chicago during that historic time. Much of what has been written is often inaccurate, superficial or misleading. I know this because I was one of the people who initiated the call for the demonstrations and planned them. But the story behind these events, the political issues that we dealt with and the state repression that we faced are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago. What then follows is my attempt to explain what happened and why. I hope these words will help clarify some historical reality and provide some helpful observations for those of us who continue to organize against U.S. injustice today.
On the 35th anniversary of the sentencing in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (February of 2005) I was interviewed by a public television reporter for a retrospective piece on the Chicago 8. As he and his cameraman entered my house, he quipped, “I just interviewed Richard Schultz (Assistant Prosecuting Attorney). He insists that you came to Chicago to overthrow the American government. He knows it sounds silly but that’s what he believes to this day.” Without missing a beat, I retorted, “It doesn’t sound silly at all. That was in fact what we wanted to do. And in hindsight, it appears even more compelling today then it did at the time. Who wouldn’t want to overthrow a government that was in the process of murdering 2 to 3 million Vietnamese and 60,000 US troops? Who wouldn’t want to overthrow a government that had launched a joint FBI/police force campaign to destroy the Black Liberation Movement which resulted in scores of dead black revolutionaries and many others imprisoned for life?”
Back Story
To understand those events and what motivated us, you have to know something about the extraordinary times preceding them. Our small circle of friends, the Yippies, had come together around the October 1967 anti-war demonstration where we first successfully levitated the Pentagon. That is, we encircled the building and with drums, incense and incantations we caused it to rise, allowing the evil spirits to flee. My friend Abbie Hoffman, one of the original Yippies, would later complain that we only managed to get it ten feet off the ground. The levitation was followed by about 1000 arrests of people trying to shut it down altogether. It was the first time I had been arrested but far from the last.
We came together to shut down the Pentagon in particular but more generally in response to everything that was going on around us. We had by now been marching and demonstrating and participating in teach-ins for several years and felt our efforts fell on deaf ears.
In 1967 the U.S. pounded the Vietnamese people from the air in what was called Operation Rolling Thunder. In response the Vietnamese people continued to down American planes with anti-aircraft artillery. In fact it was during Operation Rolling Thunder that John McCain was shot down over North Vietnam. Perhaps it was by the group of young women I later met in 1970 who were operating anti-aircraft artillery out in a field in order to defend their small village in Thanh Hoa province.
But on January 30, 1968, at the time of the lunar new year, the Vietnamese launched an enormous and completely undetected popular uprising in South Vietnam known as the Tet offensive. The whole world was amazed by their ability to mobilize their entire nation right under the noses of the American military. A small country challenging Goliath, the most powerful military force in the world.
In February hundreds of people protesting a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg near South Carolina State University were fired upon by the police. Three young men were killed and 27 people wounded. There was little of the publicity that later surrounded the Kent State shootings because most, if not all, of the people involved were Black. This was known as the Orangeburg Massacre.
On March 21st we experienced a small taste of that violence directly. The Yippies went on WBAI New York radio and called for a Yip-In at Grand Central Station. It was to be a peaceful gathering complete with costumes, music and incense. 10,000 hippies and yippies showed up. The police over-reacted and it turned into a police riot. Abbie Hoffman was being clubbed to the ground by the cops when several of us threw ourselves on top of him in an unsuccessful attempt to protect him. The cops then peeled off Ron Shea, a Baltimore Yippie, and shoved him through a glass door, severing tendons in his left hand.
On April 4th the King of Peace, Martin Luther King, was assassinated in Memphis and urban centers around the U.S. went up in flames. There had already been major rebellions in Detroit, Newark, LA
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