The Ghost of the 1968 Antiwar Movement Has Returned

Key Facts

Those young demonstrators had come of age seeing continual — and effective — protests during the civil rights movement and national mourning after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who a year earlier had staked out his opposition to the war, saying that while he wasn’t attempting “to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue” he wanted to underscore his belief “that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”
This was a generation primed for protest, with moral conviction as the foundation of its outrage about the Vietnam War — the first television war, one in which Americans could see the horrors of war, almost in real time — and the draft that saw around two million Americans conscripted during the era.
Before the convention, Rennie Davis, one of the organizers, told The New York Times, “No denial of a permit is going to prevent the tens of thousands of people who are coming to Chicago from expressing their convictions on these issues.”
As in 1968, the semester will soon end and those students will leave for the summer, allowing more time and energy for their efforts to be focused on the D.N.C. in Chicago in August.