Anger at the Vietnamese war led numerous anti-war groups to plan a huge protest rally at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, August, 1968. Thousands came, among them various groups of radicals, Yippies, supporters of Senator Eugene McCarthy, and non-radicals opposed to the war. Speakers denounced the war, the Democratic Party and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Mayor Daley’s decision not to allow peace marches or to let protestors sleep in the parks, and to use the police to prevent violations of these orders, set the stage for these violent clashes.
An investigating committee chaired by a Chicago lawyer, Daniel Walker, called the violence a “police riot.” But in the judgment of many people, the primary responsibility for the outbreak was the city administration’s. The Chicago police had behaved with restraint in the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King in April, 1968, and had afterwards been rebuked by Mayor Daley for their leniency; he had ordered them “to shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters.” Most of the anti-war groups seem not to have planned any violence, although many of them apparently expected violence to occur, and a few hoped for the sort of police violence that would lend credence to their views. Before the Convention opened, early arrivals from the peace groups practiced defense tactics in the park, while Mayor Daley mustered 6,000 police, 6,000 Illinois National Guardsmen, and 6,000 regular army troops armed with rifles, flame throwers, and bazookas. On Saturday night, August 25, the police cleared Lincoln Park at 11 p.m., the curfew hour, with little difficulty. Protest leaders advised compliance. The next night, however, people began to refuse to leave, chanting “The parks belong to the people,” and screaming obscenities. The first episode of violence started. The culmination came on Wednesday, August 28, when a march was being organized to go to the Ampitheater where the Convention was being held. Violence started in the park when the police clubbed youths who were lowering an American flag. The crowd threw sticks, shoes, clods of earth, and bottles at the police, who retaliated with tear gas attacks, and blocked the march to the Amphitheater. The crowds then converged on the Loop and the Conrad Hilton Hotel, and there the police lost control, venting their fury at the protestors. The police also attacked journalists and news photographers, smashing their equipment and beating them. Angry condemnations of the behavior of the police were made by many persons, even on the floor of the Convention itself, where Senator Abraham Ribicoff denounced “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” By Friday the violence was over.
The following account is taken from the Walker Report: Rights in Conflict: The Violent Confrontation of Demonstrators and Police in the Parks and Streets of Chicago During the Week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968. A Report submitted by Daniel Walker, Director of the Chicago Study Team, to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1968), 255–65.
… at 7:57 P.M., with two groups of club-wielding police converging simultaneously and independently, the battle was joined. The portions of the throng out of the immediate area of conflict largely stayed put and took up the chant, “The whole world is watching,” but the intersection fragmented into a collage of violence.
Re-creating the precise chronology of the next few moments is impossible. But there is no question that a violent street battle ensued.
People ran for cover and were struck by police as they passed. Clubs were swung indiscriminately.
Two Assistant U.S. Attorneys who were on the scene characterized the police as “hostile and aggressive.” Some witnesses cited particularly dramatic personal stories.
“I saw squadrols [sic] of policemen coming from everywhere,” a secretary quoted earlier said. “The crowd around me suddenly began to run. Some of us, including myself, were pushed back onto the sidewalk and then all the way up against … the Blackstone Hotel along Michigan Avenue. I thought the crowd had panicked.”
“Fearing that I would be crushed against the wall of the building … I somehow managed to work my way … to the edge of the street … and saw policemen everywhere.
“As I looked up I was hit for the first time on the head from behind by what must have been a billy club. I was then knocked down and while on my hands and knees, I was hit around the shoulders. I got up again, stumbling and was hit again. As I was falling, I heard words to the effect of ‘move, move’ and the horrible sound of cracking billy clubs.”
“After my second fall, I remember being kicked in the back, and I looked up and noticed that many policemen around me had no badges on. The police kept hitting me on the head.”
Eventually she made her way to an alley behind the Blackstone and finally, “bleeding badly from my head wound,” was driven by a friend to a hospital emergency room. Her treatment included the placing of 12 stitches.
Another young woman, who had been among those who sat down in the intersection, ran south on Michigan, a “Yippie flag” in her hand, when she saw the police. “I fell in the center of the intersection,” she says. “Two policemen ran up on me, stopped and hit me on the shoulder, arm and leg about five or six times, severely. They were swearing and one of them broke my flag over his knee.” By fleeing into Grant Park, she managed eventually to escape.
Another witness said: “To my left, the police caught a man, beat him to the ground and smashed their clubs on the back of his unprotected head. I stopped to help him. He was elderly, somewhere in his mid-50’s. He was kneeling and holding his bleeding head. As I stopped to help him, the police turned on me. “Get that cock sucker out of here!” This command was accompanied by four blows from clubs—one on the middle of my back, one on the bottom of my back, one on my left buttock, and one on the back of my leg. No attempt was made to arrest me or anybody else in the vicinity. All the blows that I saw inflicted by the police were on the backs of heads, arms, legs, etc. It was the most slow and confused, and the least experienced people who got caught and beaten.
“The police were angry. Their anger was neither disinterestd nor instrumental. It was deep, expressive and personal. ‘Get out of here you cock suckers’ seemed to be their most common cry.
“To my right, four policemen beat a young man as he lay on the ground. They beat him and at the same time told him to ‘get up and get the hell out of here.’ Meanwhile, I struggled with the injured man whom I had stopped to help.…”
One demonstrator said that several policemen were coming toward a group in which he was standing when one of the officers yelled, “Hey, there’s a nigger over there we can get.” They then are said to have veered off and grabbed a middle-aged Negro man, whom they beat.
A lawyer says that he was in group of demonstrators in the park just south of Balbo when he head a police officer shout, “Let’s get ’em!” Three policemen ran up, “singled out one girl and as she was running away from them, beat her on the back of the head. As she fell to the ground, she was struck by the nightsticks of these officers.” A male friend of hers then came up yelling at the police. The witness said, “He was arrested. The girl was left in the area lying on the ground.”
The beating of two other girls was witnessed from a hotel window. The witness says, he saw one girl “trying to shield a demonstrator who had been beaten to the ground,” whereupon a policeman came up “hitting her with a billy club.” The officer also kicked the girl in the shoulder, the witness said.
A Milwaukee Journal reporter says in his statement, “when the police managed to break up groups of protesters they pursued individuals and beat them with clubs. Some police pursued individual demonstrators as far as a block … and beat them.… In many cases it appeared to me that when police had finished beating the protesters they were pursuing, they then attacked, indiscriminately, any civilian who happened to be standing nearby. Many of these were not involved in the demonstrations.” …
“It seemed to me,” an observer says, “that only a saint could have swallowed the vile remarks to the officers. However, they went to extremes in clubbing the Yippies. I saw them move into the park, swatting away with clubs at boys and girls lying in the grass. More than once I witnessed two officers pulling at the arms of a Yippie until the arms almost left their sockets, then, as the officers put the Yippie in a police van, a third jabbed a riot stick into the groin of the youth being arrested. It was evident that the Yippie was not resisting arrest.” …
While violence was exploding in the street, the crowd wedged behind the police sawhorses along the northeast edge of the Hilton, was experiencing a terror all its own.…
“I was crowded in with the group of screaming, frightened people,” an onlooker states. “We jammed against each other, trying to press into the brick wall of the hotel. As we stood there breathing hard … a policeman calmly walked the length of the barricade with a can of chemical spray [evidently mace] in his hand. Unbelievably, he was spraying at us.” Photos reveal several policemen using mace against the crowd.
Another witness, a graduate student, said she was on the periphery of the crowd and could see that “police sprayed mace randomly along the first line of people along the curb.” A reporter who was present said a woman cried, “Oh no, not mace!” He said a youth moaned, “Stop it! We’re not doing anything!” “Others,” recalls another witness, “pleaded with the police to tell them where they should move and allow them to move there.”
… a part of the crowd was trapped in front of the Conrad Hilton and pressed hard against a big plate glass window of the Haymarket Lounge. A reporter who was sitting inside said, “Frightened men and women banged … against the window. A captain of the fire department inside told us to get back from the window, that it might get knocked in. As I backed away a few feet I could see a smudge of blood on the glass outside.”
With a sickening crack, the window shattered, and screaming men and women tumbled through, some cut badly by the jagged glass. The police came after them.
“I was pushed through by the force of large numbers of people,” one victim said. “I got a deep cut on my right leg, diagnosed later by Eugene McCarthy’s doctor as a severed artery.… I fell to the floor of the bar. There were ten to 20 people who had come through … I could not stand on the leg. It was bleeding profusely.
“A squad of policemen burst into the bar, clubbing all those who looked to them like demonstrators, at the same time screaming over and over, ‘We’ve got to clear this area.’ The police acted literally like mad dogs looking for objects to attack.…”
There is little doubt that during this whole period, beginning at 7:57 P.M., and lasting nearly 20 minutes, the preponderance of violence came from the police. It was not entirely a one-way battle, however.…
“Some hippies,” said a patrolman in his statement, “were hit by other hippies who were throwing rocks at the police.” Films reveal that when police were chasing demonstrators into Grant Park, one young man upended a sawhorse and heaved it at advancing officers. At one point the deputy superintendent of police was knocked down by a thrown saw-horse. At least one police three-wheeler was tipped over. One of the demonstrators says that “people in the park were prying up cobblestones and breaking them. One person piled up cobblestones in his arms and headed toward the police.” Witnesses reported that people were throwing “anything they could lay their hands on. From the windows of the Hilton and Blackstone hotels, toilet paper, wet towels, even ash trays came raining down.” A police lieutenant stated that he saw policemen bombarded with “rocks, cherry bombs, jars of vaseline, jars of mayonnaise and pieces of wood torn from the yellow barricades falling in the street.” He, too, noticed debris falling from the hotel windows.
A patrolman on duty during the melee states that among the objects he saw thrown at police officers were “rocks, bottles, shoes, a telephone and a garbage can cover. Rolls of toilet paper were thrown from hotel windows. I saw a number of plastic practice golf balls, studded with nails, on the street as well as plastic bags filled with what appeared to be human excrement.” He said he saw two policemen, one of them wearing a soft hat, get hit with bricks.
A sergeant states that during the fracas, two men under his command had their plastic faceguards (which they pay for themselves) shattered by bricks or rocks.
A number of police officers were injured, either by flying missiles or in personal attacks. One, for example, was helping a fellow officer “pick up a hippie when another hippie gave [me] a heavy kick, aiming for my groin.” The blow struck the officer partly on the leg and partly in the testicles. He went down, and the “hippie” who kicked him escaped.