SOUTH BEND – Flowers of summer bloom in Chicago’s Grant Park, vivid colors along South Michigan Avenue, across from a Hilton hotel. Inside the hotel’s entrance, a broad, carpeted stairway leads to the busy mezzanine.

It’s the same as it looked in the August of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

But what happened was so different then. That was the location of violent confrontations during a chaotic, divisive convention, with differences over the war in Vietnam leading to battles in the streets.

I went back to walk through Grant Park, to go into the Hilton, to prepare for  writing now about the 1968 convention I covered then.

Sitting on that carpeted stairway, I looked down on where about 200 “McCarthy kids,” young supporters of Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a Vietnam War opponent, were sitting back then. They were disillusioned, bitter, some crying, during early morning hours after the convention nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, not McCarthy, for president. 

“You killed the party!” they jeered at Humphrey delegates returning to the hotel where Humphrey was staying.

Killing the party? Delegates? Protesters? Chicago police, with indiscriminate club-swinging? It all combined, with the nation watching divisiveness on the convention floor and violence in the streets, to help elect Richard Nixon that fall.

A high school student, there to support McCarthy, there for an experience in democracy, instead experienced terror.  In a  tear-choked plea, he asked two reporters from Indiana for help.

He was trapped there by Chicago police, the terrified kid said, and cops would club and arrest him once the lobby was clear of the few remaining reporters and delegates. He had tried to leave. Police ordered him back into the lobby.

We calmed him and told him that only the front entrance was blocked. He could leave by the 8th Street side doors.

He escaped from a trap that really had not existed.

Others were “trapped” in believing untrue tales that stoked anger in the streets. Protesters believed untrue rumors that police had slaughtered dozens of peaceful demonstrators. So, some responded by throwing objects at the cops. Police, some using clubs too freely against anyone in the crowds, were reacting to untrue rumors that dozens of fellow officers had been blinded or shot by snipers.

But confrontations were violent. People were injured. The Democratic Party was seriously injured. So was the image of Chicago.     

Police lined the sidewalk in front of the Hilton the day after violence there. Illinois National Guard troops, with bayonets fixed, rifles ready and machine guns mounted on jeeps, lined Michigan Avenue to stop encroachment of demonstrators, including “Yippies” more interested in disruption than in the nomination.

Edging around the police and Guard lines that next day, I got into Grant Park. Throngs of angry protesters remained, some injured, some hurling objects at troops and cops.  

Since reporters weren’t welcomed by either police or protesters, I removed my jacket, tie and press credentials. I sat on the ground, looking around Grant Park. Not to see the flowers, many now trampled, but to see what might happen next. 

Scary? Sort of. But rewarding, being there for one of the most persuasive speeches I ever heard.

It was impossible to take notes. Writing or even having a notebook wasn’t advisable in that seething atmosphere. But I couldn’t forget the message, never to be reported in national news. No national reporter was there.

Julian Bond, a young civil rights leader, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, spoke to an angry, milling audience. Some were throwing rocks. They would at least quiet down to hear Bond. 

“Don’t lash out blindly at blue uniforms or brown uniforms,” Bond urged. “You don’t know the people in those uniforms. You may lash out at somebody in a uniform who dislikes the war just as much as you do.”

Not all cops swung clubs at protesters’ heads, he said. There were good cops and bad cops, all wearing the same uniform but not all the same. 

Stone throwing stopped. At least there at that time.

Many cops were professional, ignoring taunts and protecting delegates, students and Chicago residents amid the chaos.

Also, there were cops like those looking on approvingly at violence by a gang near the Hilton entrance. The toughs were shouting “Wallace!” and beating up any long-haired suspected protester wandering into the area. They knocked down a TV cameraman, sending the camera crashing.

 A cop shouted at the cameraman: “Get the hell out of here!”

There will be protests at this convention in Chicago — noisy, perhaps disruptive. But it will  be nothing like the conflicts of 1968 in Grant Park or at the Hilton. 

Nothing at all like that.

Jack Colwell has covered Indiana politics for over five decades for the South Bend Tribune. Email him at [email protected].