1968

Position: 41°47’50″N 87°35’06″W

1968 was an ugly year in America. Here’s what I remember about it:

My grandfather died in January. He and my grandmother had come out to Chicago for Christmas. It was perhaps the most extravagant Christmas I have ever experienced. Almost all our family was there. Even my brother returned from boarding school in England. We got our first television. Wrapping paper flew while whiskey blended with cigarette smoke and perfume into the unmistakable smell of adults.

The riots of 1967 were memorialized in Life magazines that sat around the house. Photos starkly showed other realities of kids my age. One photo in particular stuck with me. It is a photo of a boy about three years older than I was lying bleeding on the ground. Shot because he was growing up in a black neighbourhood. It looked like it was taken in a different country, but I knew it could have been taken 10 blocks from where we lived.

Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4^th and the country erupted. Chicago burned for two days. I remember my parents standing at the window of our 11^th floor apartment looking at the pall of smoke rising just south and west of us. My mother nervously wondered aloud if the riots would overrun Hyde Park. My father didn’t know, but he seemed less tense. Perhaps it was his war experience. Perhaps it was his Teacher’s scotch and soda.

Hyde Park’s substantial neighbourhood boundaries date back to the 1890s. To the south, bordering Woodlawn, lies the Midway Plaisance. Three city blocks wide and 20 long, the Midway is an open area originally housing active side shows for the World’s Columbian Exposition. In winter, the Chicago Parks department would flood a couple of the empty sections to form ice rinks. An entire city block of skating is endless when you’re eight. To the west lies the massive, 372-acre Washington Park. To the east is Lake Michigan, while 47^th street served as our neighbourhood’s northern boundary. Any unrest would form inside those poly-cultural, intellectually grounded physical limits.

A few days after King’s assassination my mother took us to hear Jesse Jackson speak. Rockefeller Chapel was packed. Palpable sorrow and clawing tension hung over the assembled. I don’t remember what the reverend said, but he said it powerfully and persuasively. From then on, every time Reverend Jackson appeared in the news I paid a little more attention.

April’s crisis passed through the heavy hands of Richard Daley’s Chicago Police, the Illinois National Guard, and the regular army. Eleven people were killed and 2,150 arrested. Later that year Daley’s goons would attack peaceful protestors outside the Democratic National Convention. Hunter Thompson wrote afterwards, “It was the ultimate horror. The final groin-shot that only a beast like Daley would stoop to deliver. It was an LBJ-style trick: no rest for the losers, keep them on the run and if they fall, kick the shit out of them.” I learned to love Hunter Thompson a dozen years later.

Meanwhile, back in grade school we were treated to the regular presence of the National Guard on desegregation patrol. I don’t know if Bret Harte Elementary was tagged for forced integration or not. It was already a middle class, multi-ethnic environment. Nothing noticeably changed in the student body while my sister and I attended.

April closed and May trudged on towards school’s end. Summer, hot, humid and midwestern arrived in June. Outside the drug store where I’d occasionally buy Spiderman comics stood a group of older boys. One had a transistor radio that he held out in front of him. We listened as its tinny squawk told us that Robert Kennedy had been shot. My mother was in tears when I got home.

That summer my parents exercised their privilege card and my mom, my sister and I moved out to Cape Cod for a year. Both my elder siblings had decamped for schools in the UK, while my dad carried on teaching in Chicago during term time. He travelled a great deal, so it didn’t seem that odd.

The idea that we’d be safer in Massachusetts was in many ways misguided. Cape Cod in the off season is about as far from liberal Hyde Park as you can get. Each day we’d catch the bus to school, and I’d fend off the zealous attention of the town’s pre-teen redneck bullies. Intellectually a pacifist, integrating into a culture where might makes for a peaceful life was difficult. Finally, my mother gave me permission to go rogue if I felt the need. I was big enough by then that I soon had a quiet ride and some grudging respect, despite my long hair.

We had no television on the Cape that year and the rest of the world faded away into newspapers and magazines. Come Christmas time, Apollo 8 circumnavigated the moon and gave the world a whole new perspective on the fragility of planet Earth. It was a proud moment for a young lad with family ties to the mission. The next year we’d watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon just before my tenth birthday.

“No lie can live forever.” – Jesse Jackson

In 52 years so many things haven’t changed for the better that it’s kind of hard to believe America has made any progress at all. The same issues of race and inequality seem no closer to resolution today than they did then. Black lives still matter.

As smart and as wealthy as America is, it has the means to live up to its goals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. Privileged whites still own the keys to making systemic changes in America. This is the moment to step up, get educated and engage positively. History shows us that even the most entrenched institutions can be successfully deconstructed and rebuilt anew. Just ask George III.

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