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CHICAGO—Organizers of protests at the Democratic convention, which kicks off Monday, would like to remind you that despite this year’s endless media tropes, it is not 1968.
Of course, that was the year that Mayor Richard M. Daley’s police force famously brought nightsticks crashing down on the heads of untold anti-Vietnam War DNC demonstrators. But an evolution in city leadership, protest tactics—and even the racial and gender makeup of today’s central pro-Palestine movement—have aligned for what, many hope, will make for a much different protest panorama.
Granted, there are undeniable similarities between the 1968 and 2024 conventions. Once again, the gathering is taking place against a backdrop of massive violence in the developing world overseen by a Democratic administration, which has inspired university protest movements on a scale seldom witnessed, and has been met with oftentimes-violent repression by authorities. The unpopularity of the Vietnam War and Israel’s War in Palestine—whose official death toll hit 40,000 last week—both played a role in a sitting Democratic president withdrawing his re-election campaign, leaving the vice-president in his stead.
Once again, there seem to be no third-party candidates with a real shot at the White House (the Yippies’ Pigasus the Immortal, a porcine who attended the 1968 protests before being detained by another kind of pig, notwithstanding).
And depressingly, anguish over lives lost in foreign lands is still only exacerbated by the violence perpetuated against US Black communities—combated by the civil rights movement and Black Panthers back in the day, and now, by racial justice protestors and community defense organizations.
“The way that the media is portraying the two years is similar,” US Palestinian Community Network Chicago co-chair Nazek Sankari—whose anti-genocide movement is explicitly at the center of the 270-organization Coalition to March on the DNC that is planning major actions on Mon/19 and Thu/22—acknowledged to 48hills in a phone interview.
“Corporate media, they try to focus on outside agitators, which really discounts the protest movement that we’re trying to uplift and our demands for Palestine,” continued Sankari, an activist with Lebanese roots who became active in the organization when Palestinian activist Rasmea Odeh’s house was raided in 2013, prior to Odeh’s eventual deportation. “But we will do what is necessary to keep us safe as community members, for the whole diversity of the people who are going to be there—age, gender, immigration status.”
Spokesperson Hatem Abudayyeh told the Chicago Tribune last week that the coalition was expecting 25,000 protestors.
Of course, this is the USA, a country given to random violence in supermarkets and kindergartens. But while it’s impossible to plan for every eventuality or provocateur, the coalition has a good track record when it comes to facilitating peaceful protests. RNC-assigned cops killed Samuel Sharpe Jr., a Black and unhoused man experiencing a mental health crisis, during the Republicans’ July convention in Milwaukee, but the protests themselves largely proved safe—thanks to the protestors themselves.
“There were RNC fascist counter protestors that were trying to create trouble, but the marshals were able to de-escalate and keep it a safe, family-friendly protest,” says Faayani Aboma Mijana, an organizer for the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARP) and spokesperson for the Coalition.
RNC protests attracted roughly 10 percent of the number of demonstrators expected this week in Chicago. But the way the coalition has centralized the training and implementation of marshals, trusted individuals with ample protest experience who are educated in de-escalation, is in and of itself a departure from 1968.
That year had already been witness to bloodshed in the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, not to mention in police repression of anti-war protestors at Columbia University. Even seasoned protestors like Jack Weinberg, a leader of the UC Berkeley free speech movement who coined the infamous “don’t trust anybody over 30” motto, declined to attend the 1968 DNC protests. That was partly out of his concern over their organizers’ tactics.
“My experience came out of the civil rights movement, and I always had the view that when you’re mobilizing people, it’s your obligation to let them know what they’re getting into,” Weinberg, a labor and environmental activist who now lives in Chicago’s Loop neighborhood, where many of the DNC protests will take place, told 48hills over the phone. “[Yippie leader] Jerry Rubin’s view was you create a situation that you know was going to get out of hand, then you sit back and let it unfold.”
“I knew the protests in Chicago were going to end up with a lot of angry people and irrational police. It wasn’t the kind of organizing style I was accustomed to,” Weinberg said.
2024 protestors may benefit from the lessons the city learned from its disastrous experience with the 1968 protests, and from all the major events that were to follow. Chicago has now hosted more major-party political conventions than any other city—this week’s will be its 26th rodeo.
Plus, it’s a new day at City Hall. Current Mayor Brandon Johnson, multiple organizers said, “comes from the movement” and is a former elementary school social studies teacher and labor organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, a powerful leftist force in local politics.
Under his watch, the city of Chicago has been more open to granting protest permits. In 1968, a lack of proper permitting left the protestors’ every gathering vulnerable to police interference. This year, the coalition was granted a 1.2 mile-stretch for its two marches, crucially within sight and sound of the site where the convention is being held.
Still, coalition organizers filed a federal lawsuit that was unsuccessful in getting the route length extended—but did announce Friday that they’d manage to successfully push back against a city ban on a sound system and toilets for Monday and Thursday’s rallies at Union Park.
“We will still march and keep us safe, with or without permits,” said Sankari.
The Israeli American Council has also decried its difficulty in obtaining DNC protest permits, but plans to mount an art installation on a private lot close to the United Center.
Though the violence in 1968 was instigated and led by Chicago’s police force, many blame media images of the brutal attacks against protestors for having polarized the country’s voters during (another) key election year.
“It was important locally in Chicago, where we were able to organize independent Democrats against the Daley organization,” former National Mobilization Committee to End War in Vietnam press secretary and spokesperson Don Rose, who continues to live in Chicago after a long career in journalism and progressive political consulting—including managing the campaign of Jane Byrne, Chicago’s first woman mayor, in 1979—told 48hills. “But the bottom line is that it tipped the election to Nixon.”
Coalition organizers are not moved by such mathematics in their condemnation of both parties.
“If the Democrats lose, that is 100 percent on them,” says Sankari. “They had many opportunities not to fund this genocide.”
Many from the class of ‘68 now believe a Trump victory would make organizing around many progressive causes nearly impossible. Rose in particular thinks, “Some of the Palestinian people are way off the mark by threatening to bring us Trump.”
But call it changing times or merely the effects of age—some of them didn’t always see such a sharp difference between the Democrats and Republicans.
“The notion [of the 1968 DNC protests] was not that we were going to win the election, but the notion is that we wanted to demonstrate our complete alienation from the system,” says Weinberg.
“It demonstrated that the Vietnam War was disrupting society, but the thing about protests is that they are also polarizing events. When you’re involved with organizing, it’s always good to calculate whether it’s a good time to polarize,” he said.
Of course, there’s another big difference between the 1968 and 2024. It’s difficult to track down a single woman or BIPOC DNC protestor from that fateful year. That’s not to say they weren’t present—but their impact on proceedings was undeniably limited. “The [planning] roles were gendered,” former Yippie Judy Gumbo told Time.
Gumbo said they added the Black Panthers Party (at the last minute, Bobby Seale stepped in to speak for Eldridge Cleaver) to the speakers’ lineup “to create a more integrated movement.” In the wake of MLK’s assassination, few protestors of color came to Grant Park.
Those who did faced outsized consequences. Though he hadn’t even met most of the protest’s organizers, Seale faced federal conspiracy charges alongside them as part of the original Chicago Eight (his case was eventually split off from the others) and wound up becoming the only defendant to serve serious time related to the case—on the longest contempt of court sentence in US history at the time. Seale went on to work with Bay Area youth and teach Black studies at Temple University.
This year, the major DNC protests are spearheaded by largely Black and Brown-led community groups, with USPCN’s Arab American protestors leading the way. Many official spokespeople are women. Such a dramatic re-centering may be one of the biggest differences from 1968 of all. Certainly, the organizers’ metric for success this week seems quite inclusive.
“When I see the tens of thousands of people of all different mobilities, of all different ages, gender identities and expressions, all of our communities, I think that’s going to be the biggest measure of success for me,” said Sankari.
