Protest movements

RAMPARTS, September 1968

The editors and publishers of Ramparts–one of the most important voices of the American left in the 1960s–spent much of the first months of 1968 preparing for the Big Event of the summer, namely the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August.  Tom Hayden, who would later stand trial as part of the “Chicago Eight” (later, Seven) for conspiracy to incite violence at the Convention, wrote several essays on the antiwar movement for Ramparts leading up to the August debacle, in one of which he wrote: “The peace movement should catch up with the worldwide feeling that the Vietcong are the heroes of this war.”

Ramparts fielded a impressive lineup of reporters and contributors for its coverage of the convention, including Hayden, Adam Hochschild, Pete Hamill, Sidney Schanberg, and Hunter S. Thompson.  Later, Thompson wrote about his reactions to the bloody conflicts on the streets of Chicago:  ”I went from a state of Cold Shock on Monday, to Fear on Tuesday, then Rage, and finally hysteria, which lasted for nearly a month.”

The Hayden quote (from the July 1968 issue of Ramparts) comes from the wonderful history of the magazine by Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue:  How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (New York: The New Press, 2009).  Richardson devotes almost an entire chapter to the Chicago story, which begins:

“If 1968 was the year that America had a nervous breakdown, Ramparts was its most reliable fever chart.  The national crisis had complex and interlocking causes, including policy failures, mounting frustrations, social ruptures, and political violence.  Most of these developments were reflected–and in some cases, aggravated–by Ramparts and its coverage that years.  As the nation plunged into crisis, so did the magazine.  Ramparts began 1968 in the coils of conspiracy theories, became embroiled in the nation’s most controversial and violent domestic conflicts, and finished the year in fractious, chaotic collapse.”

The September issue–pictured here–contains the magazine’s reporting on the convention, and is necessarily somewhat anti-climactic.  By the time the magazine hit the streets, the tear-gas had long dissipated, the wreckage had been cleared from Grant Park, the damage to the Democrats’ reputations had been done–and Hubert Humphrey’s promises had ended up in the trash, literally and figuratively.

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At the end of June 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign–the enormous project that preoccupied Martin Luther King, Jr., in the last months of his life–came to a muddy, depressing end in Washington, D.C.

King had announced the plans in December 1967 at  a press conference, saying:

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference will lead waves of the nations poor and disinherited to Washington, D.C. next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all. We will go there, we will demand to be heard and we will stay until America responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination. … In short, we will be petitioning our government for specific reforms and we intend to build militant, nonviolent actions until that government moves against poverty.

By the middle of May, thousands of poor people of all races  were pouring into Washington from all parts of the country.  A vast encampment of plywood shanties and tents–”Resurrection City”–was set up on the Capitol Mall, between the Lincoln Memorial and what is now the World War II Memorial.  The goal was to re-focus King’s demands for civil rights for African Americans to economic justice for all impoverished people, to make LBJ’s famous “War on Poverty” (declared four years earlier) into a broader national commitment.

In this issue of JET from just before the start of the campaign, the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy–heir apparent to King and now head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference–said:  ”We used to sing a song in our church–’Take Your Burdens to the Lord and Leave Them There.’  We have decided that we are going to take all our problems, our bodies, our children, the rats and the roaches and everything to the White House and leave them with LBJ.”

But within a few weeks, Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign began to collapse under the pressure of indifferent Federal leadership, internal squabbling, massive infrastructural failure, and general acrimony.  Nearly constant rain turned the tent city into a muddy quagmire–all too vivid and obvious a metaphor for the campaign’s failings.

One last gasp of hope was held on this day, however, in 1968:  June 19th (coincidentally, a date celebrated in some parts of the U.S. as ”Juneteenth,” an African American holiday).  At Resurrection City, this was “Solidarity Day,” and nearly 50,000 people marched through Washington in support of the Campaign’s goal of ending poverty.  And on this day, the sun was shining.  But five days later, bulldozers moved in and demolished the last remnants of Resurrection City.

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