The Angry Summer of 1968: How It Changed One Woman, and the Rest of Her Life

"1968 ended, but I never left it." The final piece in our series marking 50 years since the passing of the utopian era.

On August 28, 1968, Marilyn Katz, then 21, lived through the bloodiest and most violent anti-Vietnam War protest of that year on the streets of Chicago. She was one of its leaders.

Around her were thousands of young people her own age, marching and chanting: "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!"

Waiting for them up ahead were riot police in blue helmets, carrying batons and tear gas.

"A friend of mine had his leg broken, another friend's car was smashed into a heap of scrap by the police, and I was beaten too. But none of that was the worst of it. My friend Fred Hampton was shot dead by the Chicago police a year later, so getting beaten at a protest was, by comparison, not the worst thing," Marilyn Katz told QDaily.

Television and satellite technology carried the pictures of police beating young people into living rooms across the country.

Ron Ferrizzi, a young soldier who served in Vietnam, remembered the moment he saw the broadcast: "I saw a guy who looked a lot like my dad beating up a guy who looked like me. God, whose side was I supposed to be on?"

The Vietnam War dragged on from 1955 to 1975, and it unexpectedly became the thread that tied together the collective action of young people around the world in the 1960s.

They were the baby boomers. Their numbers surged; the postwar recovery gave them material comforts their parents' generation had never had; they stayed in school longer. Armed with new knowledge, they dared to say no, to push against traditional values, to refuse war.

Through mass media, young people everywhere discovered they shared the same anger. That pushed them one step further.

Michel Bonnin, who took part in France's May 1968 student movement, said: "How could this society tolerate such a brutal war? We didn't feel it as directly as Americans did, because we didn't have to serve, but we still felt the Western world had plenty of immoral problems. France and the United States, as the mainstream societies, would do anything in the name of fighting communism."

Toyama Makoto (a pseudonym), a Japanese student activist, said: "My high school teacher said the American planes bombing Vietnam took off from Okinawa, in Japan, so Japan wasn't unconnected to the Vietnam War. There were anti-Vietnam War movements all over Japan."

Marilyn Katz, in the United States, said: "Everything that happened in this country kept challenging the beliefs I'd been raised on, and made me ask what we had done to Black people, what we had done to the Vietnamese."

At first, the American public paid little attention to the Vietnam War. People spent more time watching television shows like Peyton Place and Gunsmoke; they cared more about whether the Yankees would take the World Series again, or about Marilyn Monroe, who had died in 1962, than about the fighting. A Gallup poll on January 2, 1968 found that only 45% of Americans thought intervening in Vietnam had been a mistake.

Not until January 31, when the Tet Offensive broke out in Vietnam, did the American public begin to pay attention.

On February 2, 1968, a photograph ran on the front page of The New York Times: South Vietnam's national police chief, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, executing the North Vietnamese agent Nguyễn Văn Lém in front of reporters from the Associated Press and NBC.

Walter Cronkite, the trusted lead anchor at CBS, then went to Vietnam and did something rare: he stated his own position on the war on air. The United States, he said, was stuck in a stalemate, and the best way out was a settlement.

Marilyn Katz believes mass media had a powerful effect on young people at the time. People began to see this as an absurd, destructive war.

Without coordinating, they lit fires everywhere. Some launched the Summer of Love and preached flower power; some marched to the Pentagon in Washington, holding up signs and shouting; some, fed up with the staleness of the universities, occupied their campuses; some, losing faith in the political parties, staged protests of their own.

President Lyndon Johnson told the American public that the Tet Offensive had brought the United States victory. "What we actually saw was Vietnam's roads being bombed, the bodies of soldiers shipped home, civilians being beaten — that was what was real to us," Marilyn Katz said.

The U.S. Army then announced it planned to draft another 206,000 soldiers. Americans demanded an answer from the government: "If the Tet Offensive was already a victory, why do we need so many more soldiers?"

At the same time, the Kerner Commission released a report on the racial unrest breaking out across the country: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white — separate and unequal."

The gunfire in Vietnam showed no sign of letting up, and at home one big event followed another.

In March, Lyndon Johnson, who had already secured his party's primary support, announced he would give up his candidacy; in April, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; in June, Robert Kennedy, who had just entered the race for the Democratic nomination, was assassinated; in August, Chicago saw the most violent, bloodiest protest of the year.

America was as divided as it had ever been — race, war, gender, generation, every intractable problem erupting at once.

Bill Zimmerman, author of Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties, said in the documentary The Vietnam War: "In the 1950s, we thought we were living in the best country in the world. Just as we were trying to work out what it meant to be a citizen of the best country in the world, the civil rights movement suddenly exploded in our minds. We didn't think we had any power. We never imagined we could play a part in history, that we could make a difference. And then, suddenly, some Black high school students in the South were doing exactly that, and it stunned us."

Bill Zimmerman was an anti-Vietnam War activist himself. In 1967 he became a professor at Brooklyn College in New York City. In 1968, as a professor, he threw himself into the antiwar movement and recruited students to join. The college fired him for it.

The years from 1948 to 1973, when the baby boomers were growing up, were also the fastest stretch of economic progress in human history — in this generation alone, more than 100 million people saw their lives improve sharply, and U.S. stocks climbed without a break from 1949 to 1957.

Over that period, U.S. gross domestic product rose 40%, and the accumulated wealth produced a large middle class. The whole of society became a consumer society.

Marilyn Katz had once belonged to that mainstream too, nowhere near any bloody, violent protest. She grew up in an ordinary middle-class family, worked part-time as a fashion model, joined a sorority, was even crowned "beauty queen." Soon she was engaged to an industrialist, on her way to becoming one of those "classic" American women from the advertising billboards.

One day in 1965, she saw that Black students could be beaten bloody by police simply for claiming their rights in the street, and she began to question the American values she had believed in all her life, and to wonder whether her childhood education had been a lie. Around the same time, she decided to give up her old life and her old friends, join the student movement organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and leave college — she meant to live history rather than read about it, to throw herself into the student movement, to become a "notorious student activist" on the streets.

From then on the course of her life changed completely. In three years she was organizing student actions across the country and had become a core figure in the movement.

Bill Daley, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and White House Chief of Staff, said: "1968, the most dramatic and traumatic year in American history. It all happened in Chicago. You could feel it coming." And Marilyn Katz did live that history firsthand, at the bloodiest, most violent protest of 1968.

After the Vietnam War ended, she did not stop. From the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s she has kept going ever since — building women's organizations, campaigning for abortion rights, joining the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-imperialism movement and the movement against the Iraq War, helping elect Chicago's first Black mayor and helping Obama become the first Black president of the United States.

Now 71, Marilyn Katz runs a public policy firm she founded in Chicago, "MK Communications," named after her own initials.

This year is the 50th anniversary of 1968, so the young people who took part in the student movements have naturally become a focus for the media. Marilyn Katz has been generous with invitations from American outlets to talk about what happened. She has also written opinion pieces for several publications on her own initiative.

Perhaps because she has spent so long on the front lines of social movements, or perhaps because she has told this history so many times, Marilyn Katz answered nearly every question in her interview with QDaily readily and at length. She remembers the details of those protests clearly and lays out cause and effect in order.

One thing stands out: when she responds to people's misunderstandings of the movement, she gets more worked up than when she describes the violence of 50 years ago. She particularly wants to break the link people draw between the movement's "failure" and the Republican Party's later election victories. On election results, she tends to point out that some values — less visible, and more important — need time to prove themselves.

In her own words, "the spirit of 1968 has carried through to today." Marilyn Katz has always believed the 1960s were a great generation, and that the ideals and the stories of those young people should not be forgotten.

My Life Changed for Good, Starting With the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s

"Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." — Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream"

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act, which gave Black Americans political voting rights. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was still fighting for Black Americans' rights to work, to housing and to economic opportunity. On April 4, he was shot dead in Memphis. That year, more than a thousand protests broke out across the country.

I was 16 when the civil rights movement turned me into an activist.

In the early 1960s I was just an ordinary college student, studying sociology and political science at Tulane University and Northwestern University, working part-time as a fashion model.

The year before I became an activist I was a "beauty queen," engaged to an industrialist. Then, during the civil rights movement, I saw what students were up against, and it changed the course of my life.

Mine was an ordinary middle-class family with no connection to politics. We had a Black housekeeper, and everyone at home supported civil rights, but nobody took part in any movement. Before my photo turned up in the newspaper, nobody at home even talked about civil rights.

In 1963 I was at school in the South, where I saw shocking things with my own eyes — Black students weren't allowed in the dorms, couldn't room with white students, couldn't play on the same football field, couldn't go into the same bars. That was racism experienced firsthand.

Later I transferred north, to Illinois, where there were race problems too: overcrowded Black schools, harsh housing restrictions aimed at Black residents.

One day in 1965 I was washing my face, getting ready for class, and heard a news report on the radio.

A group of Black demonstrators had been beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. They had marched from Selma, on one side of the bridge, toward Montgomery, the state capital on the other side, and the police beat them.

I still remember that day clearly. Washing my face, I told myself: as a student of sociology, history and political science, I should be out there with the marchers making history, living it, not just writing about it afterward.

Within a week I quit my sorority, called off my engagement to the industrialist, joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and started organizing demonstrations over Vietnam and civil rights.

At the time that counted as fairly radical.

I didn't know a single person in SDS. I was the sorority type, after all. At first I thought the people in SDS weren't my kind — they didn't care how they dressed, and next to them I was, well, a lot more polished.

I was the first person in my sorority to join SDS. My old sorority friends eventually lost touch with me, because I'd taken a completely different road and they couldn't understand why anyone would give up a comfortable life to go "make trouble." Most of them just wanted to make a lot of money, or marry someone who had it.

As a student, on top of coursework and organizing protests, I had to work — protesting doesn't pay. I'd moved out of the dorms, my parents weren't going to support me, and I wasn't married, so I had to support myself.

We often held meetings at three in the morning, because I had class in the mornings and worked nights as a waitress, taking orders and carrying plates for money.

Some weekends I'd go organize on campuses in the South; other times I organized in Chicago's poorer neighborhoods. In 1968 I met Martin Luther King Jr., and many other remarkable civil rights organizers, people who became friends for life.

From seeing that Black demonstration in 1965, in only three years, it was as if I'd walked into a new world, taken on a new identity, and built a whole new view of it.

In the end I never graduated — I chose to leave school. I have never once thought dropping out was a mistake. Out in the world, a company hires you for what you can do, not for your degree — because you're smart.

The truth is, before I threw myself into the movement I had nothing against the political status quo. But everything that happened in this country kept challenging the beliefs I'd been raised on, and made me ask: What had we done to Black people? What had we done to the Vietnamese? We were also thinking about what it would take to reach a better life.

My generation knew something about the racial question of the Civil War era: when Lincoln freed the enslaved and Black Americans gained their freedom, that proved we were a democratic country; and when America defeated fascism in World War II, that proved again we were a democracy worthy of the name.

But the student movements that erupted from the 1960s on revealed a reality that plainly contradicted what I'd been taught as a child.

My current husband was an active participant in civil rights back then too, though we didn't meet in the 1960s — he was a civil rights organizer in the South, in the movement alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Even though we didn't meet during the movement, our experiences ran parallel and looked much alike. He has since stepped back from activism; I've kept at it to this day.

So yes, my life changed for good starting in the 1960s — starting with the campus movement.

The First Generation Shaped by Mass Media

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of April 1, 1960, the U.S. population had grown by 28 million over the previous decade — 8 million more than in the decade before that.

Videotape and satellite broadcasting, two advances in television technology, completely changed how news was reported. According to CNN, by 1960 more than 90% of American households had a television. More and more people were getting their information from it.

That is why the Vietnam War came to be called the world's first "television war" and "living room war" — the first war broadcast straight into every family's living room.

Looking at it worldwide, I'd say ours was "a generation like no other."

Most of us were born after World War II, when society was steadying and material resources were plentiful, which gave us a stronger sense of security about the world around us. We basically didn't have to worry about money, and our job prospects were bright. We even thought America had saved the world, that we were more democratic than countries like Germany and Japan.

Our values were quite different from our parents'. That generation put great weight on family and marriage and on finding a good job. In ours, some people rejected marriage altogether, and women began to have the right to use contraception and not to have children (note: penicillin in the 1940s was an important driver of sexual liberation, and the birth control pill went on sale in the United States in 1960).

It was from the media that I learned it wasn't only the United States — students in France, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Spain and elsewhere were all launching movements of their own. Seeing the student movements in other countries made it plainer that we were part of a worldwide movement. Young people everywhere were changing the world together, making society more democratic, fairer, more just. We were all friends, part of one global community of young people. That feeling was strong.

There's no denying the media had a powerful effect on us then.

We believed America was the center of world democracy, and yet on television we watched young Black people beaten for exercising the most basic rights, like the vote, and we saw demonstrations in Vietnam against American intervention. That was genuinely shocking to us.

Back then there were only three national television networks — ABC, NBC, CBS — and journalists were widely respected. Even when people disagreed with their opinions, the pictures they showed were convincing.

Whatever President Kennedy or President Johnson said, what we actually saw was Vietnam's roads being bombed, the bodies of soldiers shipped home, civilians being beaten — that was what counted as fact to us.

The difference between the media environment then and now is that today there are far more channels. People's views of what a fact is vary enormously — say someone reports that a person was beaten, and someone else says it was only a banana tree swaying in the wind. Once people can't agree on the facts, having a conversation gets difficult.

In 1968 so many people joined the anti-Vietnam War movement, calling for U.S. withdrawal. Martin Luther King Jr. used the energy of the antiwar movement to push the civil rights movement forward and win rights for Black Americans. Black workers also launched a labor movement in Detroit.

By rights this should have been a year full of hope. Everyone caught up in it felt their blood running hot and felt excited about the future; we thought the world was moving in a good direction.

But none of us imagined that Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated, and Robert Kennedy assassinated too. The dream of building peace and progress was broken by those killings, and everyone's spirits sank, and then turned to anger.

A spring that began full of hope ended as a summer full of anger.

1968, a Summer Full of Anger

That spring, Democratic Senator Robert Kennedy promised Americans he would end the Vietnam War and repair the divide between Black and white America. He was assassinated at the California primary in June.

On August 26, the 35th Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago. The day before, the crowd Marilyn Katz had organized was already waiting outside in Grant Park. Two candidates were competing for the Democratic nomination: Hubert Humphrey, who supported the war, and Eugene McCarthy, who opposed it.

On the convention's second day, inside the hall Democrats fought hard over a platform plank calling for an end to the war. When Humphrey's supporters voted it down, the antiwar delegates erupted. Outside, thousands of demonstrators, barred from the area around the convention, marched toward the Democratic Party's headquarters at the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue.

After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, in late April, we first mounted a student-led antiwar action in Chicago. Police broke it up with force and arrested some 400 people. Looking back, that action was a preview — a preview of the worse things to come.

That same month, Mark Rudd, SDS's spokesman at Columbia, led the occupation of the Columbia University campus. I knew about it, but I was in Chicago the whole time and didn't take part.

Three months after the Columbia occupation ended, Mark Rudd came to Chicago and joined us to launch the protest against the Democratic convention.

I still remember clearly what happened in Chicago that summer.

A friend of mine had his leg broken, another friend's car was smashed into a heap of scrap by the police, and I was beaten too. But none of that was the worst of it. A friend of mine, Fred Hampton, was shot dead by the Chicago police a year later, so getting beaten at a protest was, by comparison, not the worst thing.

I was in charge of security for the action, which meant protecting the demonstrators. Those of us on security stood behind the main body of the crowd.

Because we had organized an antiwar action back in April, we had some idea of what a violent police clearing looked like, which is why we held "safety training" before the protest. That, plus the fact that I was one of SDS's leading organizers, is how I ended up running security — otherwise, given my build and my weight, I wasn't really suited to it.

There were no computers or internet then to mobilize students or crowds; everything went by telephone or word of mouth, very traditional organizing. So at first not that many people turned up.

On August 25, more than a thousand people gathered in Grant Park. At first everyone was just sitting around the park, smoking marijuana, having a good time. That night, without warning, the police began clearing the crowd, beating people with batons and using tear gas; a great many people were hurt. Thinking about it now, that scene was truly frightening. But it wasn't the worst — the night of August 28 was the most terrifying. That night the police hit anyone they saw in front of them.

The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!

On August 26 the protesters on the ground began chanting this together, and the phrase became the slogan of the protest.

A friend of mine, Don Rose, who handled media relations, said it first and turned it into our message to the press. Everyone who came to the protest understood clearly that there was a serious conflict between the mainstream political establishment and the younger generation.

Media coverage was bound to shape public opinion. We did hope that through the media people would see the protest for themselves, that ordinary citizens would understand what we were asking for, that they'd see several thousand young people opposing the Vietnam War — women, men, white, Black, all sorts of groups, very mixed.

What had been an issue only our own group cared about suddenly became national news, because of the coverage, and it changed the whole country.

At first we estimated at most five thousand people would come. But because of the police violence and the broadcasts, more and more gathered — close to thirty thousand people in the end.

Many people saw the police violence on television, and the fact that it was aimed at a group of white students genuinely enraged a great many of them.

Most of the participants in the Chicago protests were white students, so we actually worried the police might use the protests as an excuse to commit violence against Black people.

If you were a white student, the worst the police would do was arrest you; your life wasn't in danger. But if a Black demonstrator were caught out on the street, his situation would clearly be different from a white person's. A string of protests like this could well get a Black demonstrator shot by police, and that was one of our worries at the time.

In fact, during the protests, when people came under police attack they were bound to fight back, and we weren't going to stop them — you can't expect people to stand still and wait to be beaten.

The other thing is that this police violence taught many Americans a lesson, gave them a chance to learn. People saw, beneath the surface of a country that claimed to champion liberty, the true and darker face of state power.

After the protest ended I got in my car and drove to other cities, and in every one the local young people wanted to talk about what had happened in Chicago; they envied me for having been there.

Then I went to San Francisco and stayed through the winter. In the summer and fall of 1968, San Francisco State University had several demonstrations of its own. That was when I got to know the Black Panthers in California, and learned there was a group of Maoist student organizations at Stanford.

What I mean is that the protest really did have enormous influence — young people wanted to be part of it. I'd even say what happened that summer kept working on the country for another 40 years, right up to Obama's election as president in 2008.

The protest mattered in another way too: it cemented the relationship between white and Black activists.

The protests happened in Chicago because the Democratic Party of the day refused to reform. Everyone had hoped the Democrats would put up a candidate who embraced progressive ideas, so white and Black activists worked together, combined into a stronger force, and set off a large-scale protest movement.

Some American media later said this action was what made Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the Democratic presidential candidate, lose the next election to Nixon, and that this was when America started tilting right. I think that's wrong.

In fact, as early as the beginning of the 1960s, after Congress passed the Rights Act guaranteeing Black voting rights and ending segregation, the Democratic Party's share of the white vote in national elections never again topped 40%. In other words, it was Congress passing that Rights Act that pushed most white voters toward the Republicans, the right-wing party.

So the Democrats lost the 1968 presidential election because of racism, not because of this protest. The party itself refused to make room for different views on the war or on human rights.

America's Second Wave of Feminism

During the Chicago protests, when the well-known television correspondent Tom Brokaw interviewed me, or when anyone else did, they'd always mention that I was the only woman leading the protest. I've never taken pride in that.

I took that road because it was what had to be done. I never particularly felt that, being a woman, I ought to step forward more; I simply stood up for what I believed. It was that simple.

But as a woman activist, the antiwar wave of the whole 1960s really did wake up our sense of ourselves. America has had three waves of feminism, and many of the core figures of the second, from 1960 to 1980, came out of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

In the fight for civil rights and against the war, we also had to fight for women's rights; women's rights are part of human rights. In 1968 we founded the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and a women's union in Los Angeles; in 1969 we founded an abortion organization in Chicago. On the whole, the feminist movement was an inseparable part of the antiwar movement and the civil rights wave.

The Later Years of the Student Movement: SDS Splits Apart

I made many lifelong friends inside SDS. When we met in 1968, we were all still kids.

SDS's first generation of members were five to ten years older than us — highly educated intellectuals, graduates of Harvard, the University of Michigan and schools like them. Generally they were young people from the upper middle class, some raised in the world of the new labor movement, others from Jewish intellectual circles. They were the ones who drafted SDS's early manifesto, the Port Huron Statement.

In the 1960s most members were Marxists, and they wrote a great deal against capitalism. But different members had rather different ideas about socialism.

We went through several internal splits, of course. The first was more intellectual: the first generation leaned toward reforming capitalism, while later members leaned toward a revolutionary road.

In 1969 SDS split a second time. The questions of war and race had reached white heat, and a group of members no longer wanted to keep to the original path of student organizing. They were the ones later known as the "Weathermen"; they joined a more radical left-wing organization, the Weather Underground, whose line was radical and violent, and whose actions generally involved violence or bombings.

The media covered the Weather Underground heavily too, which distorted the public's understanding of the student movement as a whole.

Because of that split, by 1971 SDS existed in name only. Still, its members didn't stop taking part in movements because the organization broke up; many of them stayed active.

I Never Left 1968

1968 ended, but I never left it.

Richard Nixon was elected president, the United States pulled out of Vietnam, and after the 1970s the antiwar movement gradually went quiet. But we didn't stop organizing because of that; after the war ended I joined the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-imperialism movement and others.

In the 1980s, back in Chicago, I joined Harold Washington's campaign. From the 1990s on I joined the movement against the Iraq War, and later worked on Obama's campaign — always moving forward, never stopping, never dropping out. Now the problem we have to face is Trump.

A lot of people today misunderstand the activists of that era. They think that once these young people grew up they stopped caring about society and settled into comfortable middle-class lives with no money worries. That's not true. Plenty of the people who took part back then are still quite active in politics and still care about social questions.

Whether it was helping elect Chicago's first Black mayor or helping elect America's first Black president, both were connected to the core people of 1968.

In 2002 I organized a large demonstration against the Iraq War. Of the three thousand people at that rally, the core organizers were all friends I'd made in 1968.

That generation of young people was deeply idealistic — they held to justice and equality, they were curious about the world, and they were closely bound to one another.

Racial problems still exist, but the human rights of Black Americans have improved. Right now 19 Black women have been elected judges. This country really has changed, and we were part of that.

I have always believed the spirit of 1968 has carried through to today. It was a great era. We haven't won the victory yet, but we changed this country.

Cover image courtesy of Marilyn Katz