Protests of 1968
The protests of 1968 comprised a worldwide escalation of social conflicts, predominantly characterized by popular rebellions against the military and the bureaucracy.
In the United States, these protests marked a turning point for the civil rights movement, which produced revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party. In reaction to the Tet Offensive, protests also sparked a broad movement in opposition to the Vietnam War all over the United States as well as in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. Mass movements grew not only in the United States but also in most European countries. The most spectacular manifestation of these were the May 1968 protests in France, in which students linked up with wildcat strikes of up to ten million workers, and for a few days the movement seemed capable of overthrowing the government. In many other countries, struggles against dictatorships, political tensions and authoritarian rule were also marked by protests in 1968, such as the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, and the escalation of guerrilla warfare against the military dictatorship in Brazil.
In the countries of Eastern Europe under communism, there were protests against lack of freedom of speech and violation of other civil rights by the Communist bureaucratic and military elites. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were widespread protests that escalated, particularly in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, in Warsaw, in Poland, and in Yugoslavia.
Background
Multiple factors created the protests in 1968. Many were in response to perceived injustice by governments, in the USA - the Johnson administration, and were in opposition to the draft, and the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.Post-war world
After World War II, much of the world experienced an unusual surge in births, creating a large age demographic. These babies were born during a time of peace and prosperity for most countries. This was the first generation to see televisions arrive in homes. Television had a profound effect on this generation in two ways. First, it gave them a common perspective from which to view the world. The children growing up in this era shared not only the news and programs that they watched on television, they also got glimpses of each other's worlds. Secondly, television allowed them to experience major public events. Public education was becoming more widely attended, creating another shared experience. Chain stores and franchised restaurants were bringing shared shopping and dining experiences to people in different parts of the world.The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War was another shared experience of this generation. The knowledge that a nuclear attack could end their life at any moment was reinforced with classroom "duck and cover" bomb drills creating an omnipresent atmosphere of fear. As they became older, the anti-war, civil rights, peace, and feminist movement for women's equality were becoming forces in much of the world.
Social movements
The Eastern Bloc had already seen several mass protests in the decades following World War II, including the Hungarian Revolution, the uprising in East Germany and several labor strikes in Poland, especially important ones in Poznań in 1956.Waves of social movements throughout the 1960s began to shape the values of the generation who were students during 1968. In America, the Civil Rights Movement was at its peak, and was at its most violent. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April by a white supremacist. In Northern Ireland, religious division paved the way for a decades-long violent, organised revolt against British governance. Italy and France were in the midst of a socialist movement. The New Left political movement was causing political upheavals in many European and South American countries. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict had already started. Great Britain's anti-war movement was very strong and African independence was a continuing struggle. In Poland in March 1968, student demonstrations at Warsaw University broke out when the government banned the performance of a play by Adam Mickiewicz at the Polish Theatre in Warsaw, on the grounds that it contained "anti-Soviet references". It became known as the March 1968 events.
The women's liberation movement caused generations of females to question the global status quo of unequal empowerment of women, and the post-war baby boomer generation came to reassess and redefine their priorities about marriage and motherhood. The peace movement made them question authority more than ever before. By the time they started college, the majority of young people identified with an anti-establishment culture, which became the impetus for the wave of rebellion and re-imagination that swept through campuses and throughout the world. College students of 1968 embraced progressive, liberal politics. Their progressive leanings and skepticism of authority were a significant impetus to the global protests of 1968.
Dramatic events of the year in the Soviet Bloc revealed that the radical leftist movement was ambivalent about its relationship to communism.The 2–3 June 1968 student demonstrations in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, were the first mass protest in the country after the Second World War. The authorities suppressed the protest, while President Josip Broz Tito had the protests gradually cease by giving in to some of the students’ demands. Protests also broke out in other capitals of Yugoslav republics—Sarajevo, Zagreb and Ljubljana—but they were smaller and shorter than in Belgrade.
In 1968, Czechoslovakia underwent a process known as the Prague Spring. In the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakian citizens responded to the attack on their sovereignty with passive resistance. Soviet troops were frustrated as street signs were painted over, their water supplies mysteriously shut off, and buildings decorated with flowers, flags, and slogans like, "An elephant cannot swallow a hedgehog." Passers-by painted swastikas on the sides of Soviet tanks. Road signs in the country-side were over-painted to read, in Russian script, "Москва", as hints for the Soviet troops to leave the country.
On 25 August 1968 eight Russian citizens staged a demonstration on Moscow's Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After about five minutes, the demonstrators were beaten up and transferred to a police station. Seven of them received harsh sentences up to several years in prison.
Protests
The protests that raged throughout 1968 included a large number of workers, students, and poor people facing increasingly violent state repression all around the world. Liberation from state repression itself was the most common current in all protests listed below. These refracted into a variety of social causes that reverberated with each other: in the United States alone, for example, protests for civil rights, against nuclear weapons and in opposition to the Vietnam War], and for women's liberation all came together during this year. Television, so influential in forming the political identity of this generation, became the tool of choice for the revolutionaries. They fought their battles not just on streets and college campuses, but also on the television screen with media coverage.As the waves of protests of the 1960s intensified to a new high in 1968, repressive governments through widespread police crack downs, shootings, executions and even massacres marked social conflicts in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China. In West Berlin, Rome, London, Paris, Italy, many American cities, and Argentina, labor unions and students played major roles and also suffered political repression.
Mass movements
The environmental movement can trace its beginnings back to the protests of 1968. The environmental movement evolved from the anti-nuclear movement. France was particularly involved in environmental concerns. In 1968, the French Federation of Nature Protection Societies and the French branch of Friends of the Earth were formed and the French scientific community organized Survivre et Vivre. The Club of Rome was formed in 1968. The Nordic countries were at the forefront of environmentalism. In Sweden, students protested against hydroelectric plans. In Denmark and the Netherlands, environmental action groups protested about pollution and other environmental issues. The Northern Ireland civil rights movement began to start, but resulted in the conflict now known as The Troubles.In January, police used clubs on 400 anti-war/anti-Vietnam protesters outside of a dinner for U.S. Secretary of State Rusk. In February, students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston University held a four-day hunger strike to protest the Vietnam war. 10,000 West Berlin students held a sit-in against American involvement in Vietnam. People in Canada protested the Vietnam War by mailing 5,000 copies of the paperback, Manual for Draft Age Immigrants to Canada to the United States. On March 6, 500 New York University students demonstrated against Dow Chemical because the company was the principal manufacturer of napalm, used by the U.S. military in Vietnam. On March 17, an anti-war demonstration in Grosvenor Square, London, ended with 86 people injured and 200 demonstrators arrested. Japanese students protested the presence of the American military in Japan because of the Vietnam War. In March, British students, physically attacked the British Defense Secretary, the Secretary of State for Education and the Home Secretary. In August, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was disrupted by five days of street demonstrations by thousands of protesters. Chicago's mayor escalated the riots with excessive police presence and by ordering up the National Guard and the army to suppress the protests. In September, the women's liberation movement gained international recognition when it demonstrated at the annual Miss America beauty pageant. The week-long protest and its disruption of the pageant gave the issue of equal rights for women significant attention and signaled the beginning of the end of "beauty pageants" as any sort of aspiration for young females.
United States
In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement had turned away from the south and toward the cities in the north and west with the issues of open housing and the Black Consciousness Movement. The civil rights movement unified and gained international recognition with the emergence of the Black Power and Black Panthers organizations. The Orangeburg massacre on February 8, 1968, a civil rights protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina, turned deadly with the death of three college students. In March, students in North Carolina organized a sit-in at a local lunch counter that spread to 15 cities. In March, students from all five public high schools in East L.A. walked out of their classes protesting against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District high schools. Over the next several days, they inspired similar walkouts at fifteen other schools. On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, sparking violent protests in more than 115 American cities, notably Louisville, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. On April 23, students at Columbia University protested and alleged the university had racist policies, three school officials were taken hostage for 24 hours. This was just one of a number of Columbia University protests of 1968. The August 1968 Democratic National Convention became the venue for huge demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the Johnson Administration. It culminated in a riot, seen as part of television coverage of the convention, when Chicago police waded into crowds in front of the convention center and beat protesters as well as assaulted media figures in the building. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics during a televised medal ceremony, track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith each raised gloved fists in solidarity with black power.Poland
On January 30, 300 student protesters from the University of Warsaw and the National Theater School were beaten with clubs by state arranged anti-protestors. On March 8, the 1968 Polish political crisis began with students from the University of Warsaw who marched for student rights and were beaten with clubs. The next day over two thousand students marched in protest of the police involvement on campus and were clubbed and arrested again. By March 11, the general public had joined the protest in violent confrontations with students and police in the streets. The government fought a propaganda campaign against the protestors, labeling them Zionists. The twenty days of protest ended when the state closed all of the universities and arrested more than a thousand students. Most Polish Jews left the country to avoid persecution by the government.Pakistan
In November 1968, mass student movement erupted in Pakistan against the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan. The movement was later joined by workers, lawyers, white-collar employees, prostitutes, and other social layers. Unprecedented class solidarity was displayed and the prejudices of religion, sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, clan or tribe evaporated in the red heat of revolutionary struggle. In 1968 at the height of the movement against him, young protesters in Karachi and Lahore began describing him as a dog. Troops opened fire, killing dozens and injuring hundreds of students and workers. In March 1969, Ayub khan resigned and handed power to Army chief Yahya Khan.West Germany
The German student movements were largely a reaction against the perceived authoritarianism and hypocrisy of the German government and other Western governments, particularly in relation to the poor living conditions of students. Students in 108 German universities protested to get recognition of East Germany, the removal of government officials with Nazi pasts and for the rights of students. In February, protests by professors at the German University of Bonn demanded the resignation of the university's president because of his involvement in the building of concentration camps during the war.Scandinavia
On May 3rd activists protested the participation of two apartheid nations, Rhodesia and South Africa's, in the international tennis competition held in Båstad, Sweden. The protest was among the most violent between Swedish police and demonstrators during the 1960s, resulting in a dialogue between the Swedish Government and organizers to curb the escalation of violence. The match was later played in secrecy, with Sweden winning 4-1.At Stockholm University leftist students occupied their Student Union Building at Holländargatan from May 24–27 to send a political message to the government. Inspired by the protests in France earlier that month, the Stockholm protests were calmer than those in Paris. In reaction to the protests, right-wing students organized Borgerliga Studenter, or "Bourgeois Students", whose leaders included future prime ministers Carl Bildt and Fredrik Reinfeldt. The Student Union building would later be absorbed by the Stockholm School of Economics.