Grant Park 1968: The Night the Whole World Was Watching

In August 1968, as delegates inside the International Amphitheatre chose Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic presidential nominee, some 10,000 anti-Vietnam War protesters converged on Grant Park along the lakefront. Mayor Richard J. Daley's Chicago Police Department, augmented by the Illinois National Guard, responded with what an official investigation would later call a "police riot." Officers beat protesters, journalists, and bystanders indiscriminately in front of live television cameras on the night of August 28, as the crowd chanted "the whole world is watching." The images — young people being clubbed on Michigan Avenue as network cameras rolled — were broadcast to millions of living rooms simultaneously and became among the most defining images of the turbulent year 1968. The events radicalized a generation, fractured the Democratic Party, and contributed to Richard Nixon's election that November. Eight protest organizers — the Chicago Seven plus one — were tried for conspiracy to cross state lines to incite a riot in a proceeding that became a theater of political performance. The spot in Grant Park where the worst confrontations occurred is unmarked. Forty years later, Barack Obama stood in the same park to claim his presidential election victory.