I was still too young to vote. But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer.
The convening of the Democratic National Convention last night in Chicago takes me back more than five decades, to that other Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was August 1968, and I was 18 years old that summer before my sophomore year in college. I was just coming of age politically.
By that August, 1968 had already been a very rough year for the nation. Martin Luther King, Jr., the country’s civil rights and moral trailblazer, had been assassinated on April 4, shocking the conscience of the country. Two months later, on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, just a day after he had seized the momentum in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.1 The country–and the Democratic Party–were splintered by nationwide protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality. More than 100 cities had erupted into riots and arson after the King assassination.
I was a high school freshman when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, an unimaginable event. Perhaps I was too young then–13–to feel the full effect of that national trauma. But the events of the spring and summer of 1968 had landed more heavily against my idealistic self.
I was still too young to vote.2 But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer. Continue reading “Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968”
