LETTER: More on 1968
I would like to expand on writer Edward Cotton’s April 14 letter, “Back to 1968,” wherein he revisits the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. As a cop who was at not only the 1968 Democratic convention at the Conrad Hilton on Michigan Avenue, but also the Chicago arson fires on the west side, I feel there were many reasons why the city was a tinderbox.
MLK had been assassinated. Blacks were rioting in the streets. The public wasn’t happy about President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War. Chicago was plagued by both white agitators, i.e. Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis and Jerry Rubin, (the Chicago 7), and Black agitators, i.e. Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton and Huey Newton (the Black Panthers). Mix these people and their various groups with the politics of the Democratic Party, and you had a cauldron ready to boil over — and it did.