Media 68

In the United States the year 1968 did not mark the beginning of the protest and revolt but rather its full tide. Since 1964 all the currents that would then flow together in the United States "movement" had already developed: the protest against the war in Vietnam, the revolt of the black people, the protest in the university campuses, the hippie counter-culture, the new feminism.

The year 1968 is that of radicalism and of the maximum extension of these currents of movement. It is also the year in which it seems possible to make all the various, and often very different, voices of the protest flow together in a sole revolutionary project.

The various avant-garde artistic experiments, above all those of poetry and theatre, which had developed in the first half of the decade around the centres of New York and San Francisco become politicized and assume a directly militant aspect.

The war in South East Asia is the element that more than any other determines the precipitation of the crisis. For the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, determined to run again for the Democratic Party in the November elections, the year seems actually to begin in the best possible way. The war in Vietnam is in fact believed by the Pentagon to be about to end victoriously. The optimism turns out to be an illusion at the end of January.

In coincidence with the Tet, the Buddhist new year, the troops of North Vietnam and the Vietcong partisans launch a very strong offensive on the whole front taking the American troops completely by surprise. A Vietcong suicide commando manages to actually reach and occupy the US embassy in Saigon.

Apart from its military results, the Tet offensive shows just how far away is that military victory that the White House considered imminent and irreparably undermines Johnson’s credibility. The mass demonstrations and the speeches by the exponents of culture and show business against the war, already numerous in 1967, now multiply. Both in the ranks of the Democratic party and of the Republican Party candidates openly contrary to the continuation of the war show their cards. The first is the Democratic senator Eugene Mc Carthy, long-time pacifist.

On 19 March Robert Kennedy, brother of John Fitzgerald, the popular president killed in Dallas in November 1963, puts himself forward as a candidate for the Democrats. For the Republicans, the billionaire Nelson Rockefeller puts himself forward on pacifist positions.

Favourable to the continuation of the war is the other Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, former Vice President in the Eisenhower administration and defeated by Kennedy in 1960. In this situation, on 31 March, Johnson announces the withdrawal of his own candidacy, the interruption of the bombardments on North Vietnam and the opening of negotiations with Hanoi.
In Johnsons place, Hubert Humphrey, his Vice-President puts forward his candidacy. In the various primary elections, the pacifist candidates are invariably victorious.
On 5 June Robert Kennedy is killed while celebrating his victory in the primaries of California.

Kennedy’s death opens the way for Humphrey who obtains the nomination at the Democratic Convention that is held in August in a Chicago under siege. Just a few weeks previously, in Miami, the Republican Convention had crowned Nixon.

As well as by the protest against the war, 1968 is peppered with the continuous explosions of black insurrections throughout the country. The most extensive revolt explodes after the assassination of the pacifist leader Martin Luther King, in Memphis, on 4 April. The protest involves 130 cities.

The clashes, often with gunfire, finish with tens of dead and thousands of arrests. Luther King is replaced at the leadership of the non-violent movement for civil rights by his collaborator Ralph Abernathy, who in June will lead a march of the poor to Washington in which hundreds of thousands of people take part.

The march concludes with the construction of a huge tent city, Resurrection City, which is demolished by the police. The destruction of Resurrection City and the arrest of Abernathy trigger off in Washington one of the most violent black revolts of the year.

In 1968 a third component of the black movement flanks that of non-violence and the cultural nationalism of the Black Power. It is the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, soon to be joined by the former detainee and writer Eldridge Cleaver. The Black Panthers unite the teaching of Malcolm X with that of the Algerian intellectual Franz Fanon, they oppose the cultural nationalism typical of the Black Power, and they soon go so far as to declare themselves Marxist.

In January 1968 Newton is arrested and incriminated for the killing of a policeman. The campaign for his liberation will provide the Black Panther Party with the occasion for crossing the frontiers of California and attracting the attention of the whole country, rapidly conquering supremacy over the whole black movement.

During the weeks of clashes that follow the killing of Luther King, the leaders of the Black Panthers engage a gunfight with the police in the street. Sixteen year old Bobby Hutton, among the first registered with the party, is killed. Eldridge Cleaver, who had in fact taken control of the organization after the arrest of Newton, is accused of homicide. In October the black protest takes on a particularly clamorous aspect. The athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos, respectively gold and bronze medallists in the 200 metres of the Olympic Games in Mexico City, arrive at the prize-giving barefooted and with their fists gloved in black.

The student movement, led above all by the radical organization SDS, is interwoven with both the protest against the war and with that of the blacks. Its main centres are the Columbia University in New York and Berkeley in California. It is the black students who, on 25 April, start the occupation of the Columbia University, to be immediately followed by the whites. The occupation will come to an end five days later with a very violent intervention of the police. The occupation of the Columbia University will be resumed a number of times over the following months, always followed by police intervention.

In Berkeley too it is the protest against the war activities of the university and that against the prohibition of the seminars of the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver that trigger off the tensions that will explode in violent clashes with the National Guard at the end of June and again in the autumn.

The process of radicalization also involves the counter-culture. In September 1967 the hippies had publicly celebrated their own funeral in San Francisco to escape the commercialization of their movement. In 1968 the counter-culture increasingly acquires distinctly political meanings. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, already leaders of the student protest, organize the yippies, politicized and radical hippies. At the end of August the yippies call a national protest demonstration in Chicago.

The year of revolt ends in November with the victory of Richard Nixon at the presidential elections. Shortly afterwards the bombing of North Vietnam will begin once more.