Alumni
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RIOTS REVISITED Forty years after riots broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, former students and faculty recall those five tumultuous days in August of 1968. |
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By Cara Jepsen '86 | Photos by Ron Pownall '69*
One of many notorious photographs to appear in the Chicago Tribune during the 1968 Democratic National Convention shows five Vietnam War protestors tipping over a police truck.
Two of the protestors are Lake Forest College alumni — Michael James '64 and Patrick Sturgis '65.
Both were national officers in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) working to organize white migrants in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood when they joined the thousands of antiwar activists clashing with some 28,000 Chicago police officers, Army troops, National Guardsmen, and Secret Service agents during those five long days in August.
"Thousands of people were having a demonstration in the street in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where the delegates were," explains James, co-founder and co-director of the Heartland Cafe and several other Chicago businesses. "A police squadron came careening into the center and sent people running and scurrying. Next thing I know people started to rock the van. And then the cop came out. And he jumped on somebody, and I jumped on him."
They never did tip over the vehicle. "They really are too heavy," says Sturgis, co-owner of Beans & Barley restaurant in Milwaukee.
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SDS officers Michael James '64 and Patrick Sturgis '65 (pictured third and fourth from right, respectively) tried to push a police truck over outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. (Photo courtesy of Michael James '64) |
He and James were among the many Lake Forest College alumni, students, and faculty who not only witnessed the riots at the convention but were directly affected by them. Most of the protests took place August 25-29, 1968, during a year when universities across the nation were erupting in protests about the Vietnam War and the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
The Tide Begins to Turn
Although many at Lake Forest were against the Vietnam War, the campus itself was fairly calm — at least in part because the College had been changing right along with the times. Indeed, change was in the air on campus long before the riots took place. "It was by land largely a fairly conservative white college," Sturgis recalls. "But when I was there the consciousness changed a lot. There was a concerted effort to broaden the student base into something with a lot more diversity — racially, culturally, and geographically."
The tide began to turn in 1960, when new president William Graham Cole began to implement a decade's worth of changes that would bring more black and East Coast students and new professors to campus. Fraternities and sororities that discriminated against minorities were outlawed. Housemothers disappeared from the dorms, and new buildings appeared, including the Johnson Science Center, Donnelley Library, Durand Commons, South Campus coed residence halls, and the Sports Center.
Student groups also began to form and became increasingly active around political issues. James remembers bringing to campus the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers, who were on the front lines of the civil rights movement. "They were a big influence on us," James says.
"Just as I was leaving, you didn't have to go to chapel every week," says Penelope Rosemont '64, a surrealist artist and secretary-treasurer of the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company in Chicago. "What was new to Lake Forest was having a little beatnik group that hung out together in Commons. We always went to the assemblies, and we'd ask the celebrities pointed tough questions about the war, like "What do you think about nuclear testing?" We would also stand next to the military recruiting tables and hand out Student Peace Union bulletins."
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Franz Schulze, Professor of Art, Emeritus, used to play original folk music with Professor of Philosophy Robert Sharvy and students in the College Hall coffeeshop. "Bob's son, Richard, would do one of his own compositions, which was called 'Jesus was a Teenager too,'" Schulze recalls.
By 1967 the folk scene was at The Dangling Conversation, a coffeehouse run by Gayle Pemberton '70, a professor of English and American studies and African American studies at Wesleyan University. The coffeehouse provided an alternative for students who weren't involved with fraternity life, she says. "There were two or three different worlds on campus," continues Pemberton. "The few black students who were there were involved in the heat of the time in terms of black nationalism and black power. I was a cultural straddler with a foot in both camps but not heavily into the black nationalist camp because it was not welcoming and not where my head was. And there was the world of fraternities."
One of the performers at her coffeehouse was the late folk singer Steve Goodman, who left the College in 1969 after being diagnosed with leukemia. According to Clay Eals' biography Steve Goodman: Facing the Music, Goodman saw the convention violence firsthand. But he didn't write his famous song "Daley's Gone" until after Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley died in 1976. The song included the line, "There never was another man who could inspire more love or hate if you were in the park and it was 1968."
A Turbulent Year
The riots came in the middle of 1968, a turbulent year that began with the Tet offensive — a series of surprise attacks by the North Vietnamese that changed the course of the war. The shocking television footage changed Americans' minds about the war and created unrest on university campuses.
"In those days, if you were a young man the law allowed the government to draft you, which is not the case with the Iraq War, and which is one reason there hasn't been an activist stir like there was in the late 1960s," Schulze says.
On April 4, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. caused the West Side of Chicago to erupt in riots and polarized the campus. "I remember that the black students were totally solidified and angry," Ron Pownall '69 says. "I think we were all angry."
Brian Quinn '71 remembers catching glimpses of the upcoming street fight when he worked downtown on the weekends. "One morning I was walking across Picasso Plaza and saw all these cops in riot gear coming out of the underground parking garage," says Quinn, who teaches writing at St. John's University. "When I got home that night I found out there had been a demonstration and that it had been ambushed by cops coming out of the parking garage."
His classmate, Scott Goldstein '71, had a run-in with police at that same April protest, which he attended with other students who took the train downtown. "When we got to the Civic Center, which was enclosed by all of those buildings and the Picasso statue, the cops gave the order to disperse," says Goldstein, a Hollywood producer who has won two Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. "But we couldn't get out. The police closed in, and I got a rib cracked by a cop."
Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California presidential primary. "I was walking across campus to go to class and there were two women friends of mine sobbing on the stairs outside of Durand," Quinn recalls. "When they told me what had happened, I was shocked. First Martin Luther King, then Kennedy — it was a horrible thing."
"There was a real sense of powerlessness," says Associate Professor of History Carol Gayle. "By the spring it seemed so clear that we had to act, that we had to do something." So she helped organize a fundraiser at the Lilace Barnes House (now Glen Rowan) for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy that featured Catch-22 author Joseph Heller. "It was a terrible year," Gayle says.
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After the crowd saw a protester beaten for raising the North Vietnamese flad, Pownall says, "That's when people near the side of the stage started to throw things and started yelling. The organizers tried to lock arms and calm everyone down. Other people started overturning the benches. That's when a line of police started coming through. It was a bees' nest. People went nuts. The police threw tear gas into the crowd, and a kid picked it up and threw it back at them." |
Five Days in August
No one was surprised by what happened at the convention, Goldstein says. "It was going to be the biggest event of all time." So in August he quit his summer job at WABC in New York and flew to Chicago, where he landed a job as field producer for Peter Jennings at ABC News.
"It was a very black-and-white situation," he says. "You knew the cops weren't doing the right thing. You also knew the kids were egging them on. It was also part of a massive culmination of four years of antiwar protest, and this was ground zero. This was the same summer Bobby Kennedy should have been there, but he was killed. It was quite emotional."
Inside the convention, Goldstein heard firsthand Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff's speech deploring police Gestapo tactics. "People were getting beaten, and Ribicoff gets up on the podium and says he wants to cry because of all of these police tactics going on, and Mayor Daley shouted, 'Go back to Connecticut, you [expletives].' And the next day, there were all of these posters that said, 'We love Mayor Daley.'"
National SDS officer Penelope Rosemont was part of a group that tried to march with comedian Dick Gregory and his mule to the convention at the International Amphitheatre. A police barricade at 18th Street stopped them. "There was a lot of police pressure from all sides, so people got hurt," she says. "There wasn't any place for them to go. Some started throwing trashcans in the street and pushing cars around. They did that out of frustration and rage and also maybe to keep the police from beating people up."
Ron Pownall '69 got teargassed while taking pictures for the Chicago Tribune. His photos documenting the main riot as it percolated in Grant Park on August 28 were picked up by the Associated Press and beamed around the world.
"Ten thousand people were trying to march away from Grant Park and go to the convention hall," explains Pownall, a Boston-based rock and roll photographer. "The police would not let them and turned everyone back to Grant Park. The organizers tried to calm everyone down. Then a kid started trying to take down the American flag and put up the North Vietnamese flag. The police started beating him before my eyes. I still get sick to think that I ran out of film when they took out their billyclubs and beat him."
Pownall spent all day in the park, taking pictures. "I'd go out to the street, hail a cab, and give them whatever film I had and they would take it back to the Tribune," he recalls. "I ran out of film a couple of times, and the paper sent out reporters with pockets full of film to give to me and the other photographers. That night, after bailing a photographer out of jail, I walked in and the lab manager said, 'Kid, we got your film, but what happened to your camera?' My heart stopped. Then he threw down the paper. The whole back page was full of photos of mine."
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Police used tear gas to break up the riots that took place in Grant Park and in other parts of the city. At one point, former Professor of History Ron Grossman reports that so much tear gas wafted up to his home across the street from the riots in Lincoln Park that he and his wife had to take their baby daughter to the hospital. |
Former Professor of History Tom Moodie and other faculty members took the train to the convention the day after the main police riot. "It was more to show sympathy for the demonstrators than to offer some sort of protection, and just to get a sense of what had gone on," he says. "By that point, I think, people were pretty discouraged by the whole business."
Former Professor of History Ron Grossman and his wife lived across the street from the protests in Lincoln Park and were leaving the building with photographer friend on the first night of the riots. "We were in the hallway intending to go out there and watch the human circus," says Grossman, a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune. "At that moment five or six cops came chasing out of the park and swung into our hallway and started beating on my friend, who had a camera. They refused to transport him or even call an ambulance to take him to the hospital. We had to take him ourselves. The next day the ACLU went to federal court and got an injunction in his name to prevent the police from harassing news people."
The following night his doorbell rang. "This time instead of the police it was some young ladies in public relations," he says. "They were quite agitated; they said they had some guests and that all hell had broken out in the park and could they come up and take shelter with their guests. One man put out his hand and said, 'I'm Jean Genet, the French playwright.' One of the others was (beatnik author) William S. Burroughs. I forgot who the third one was. Genet was a short, cubby little man. Burroughs was very tall and looked like a scarecrow.
"The ladies with them had been commissioned by Esquire to get their reaction to the whole thing, and it had gotten too close to them. What do you do in that situation? We had to offer them something. I think all we had was tostadas and bean dip."
Grossman says that at one point during the riots there was so much tear gas wafting up from Lincoln Park that he and his wife had to take their 10-month-old daughter to the hospital. "It was a terrifying experience," he says.
He later testified before a federal commission investigating the events, led by attorney and party activist Daniel Walker. "For the most part the attacks by police were either unprovoked or totally disproportional to the violence of the situation," he says. "I think I testified to being on Wabash Avenue in the Loop and seeing quite respectable middle class adults out for an evening on the town getting beaten along with everyone else."
The Aftermath
That fall a large convocation on campus coincided with an exhibit of Pownall's convention photos in the hallway of Durand Commons. One of the speakers was protest organizer Rennie Davis, a defendant in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial. "One of my pictures was of an unidentified man in a shirt and tie all bloodied and down on the ground and being tended to by medics," says Pownall. "After Davis spoke, his girlfriend found me and told me this bloody person was, in fact, Rennie Davis — and I didn't even know it."
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Pownall photographed a bloodied Rennie Davis, a protest organizer who was later a defendant in the Chicago Seven trial for conspiracy, inciting a riot, and other charges related to the convention protests. Davis later spoke at Lake Forest College. |
Goldstein says not much changed in the immediate aftermath of the riots. "The convention wasn't any point of demarcation. The Vietnam War was there when you started school, and it was there when you got back. It was impossible to think that it would ever end.
"Kent State had far more impact," he adds, referring to the 1970 incident in which the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the American invasion of Cambodia, killing four and wounding nine others. That's when students marched to Fort Sheridan but found the gates closed after arriving at the military compound, according to 30 Miles North: A History of Lake Forest College, Its Town and Its City of Chicago.
Campus may have been quiet after the convention, but students remained politically active. That November Pownall and others joined 500,000 protesters in Washington, D.C. for the largest antiwar march in history.
Pownall, who got hit with a police club for his efforts, traces part of the convention riots to the generation gap. "If you look at pictures of government officials at that time, they were all in their 70s," he says. "Kennedy was the first exception, the crack in the door. Old Chicago was such an old-style political hacker's haven. The kids just wanted to break it open."
Cara Jepsen '86 is a Chicago-based writer and yoga instructor. One of her favorite classes at the College was America in the 1960s, taught by Gordon Milne and Art Zilversmit.
* All photographs taken by Ron Pownall '69 at Grant Park on August 28, 1968, except for the pictureof Michael James '64 and Patrick Sturgis '65.