Protests and Riots

Growing up in Chicago in the late 1960s, I felt that the world was always on the edge of protests and riots.  

This feeling started in 1966 when I was 18 years old and living just east of Humboldt Park.  One day early in June, Mayor Richard J. Daley announced there was going to be a week-long celebration of Puerto Rican culture and people.  It turned into a riot on Division Street that lasted 3 days.  I remember squad cars and sirens everywhere and cops threatening to beat us if we didn’t stay in our homes.  

Less than two years later, Martin Luther King’s assasination sparked a series of riots on the Southside that resulted in 11 deaths, 500 injuries, and more than 2,100 arrests in two days of rioting.  Five months later, there were the Democratic Convention riots, and two years after that the Kent State killings where the National Guard’s killing of four students fueled riots on college campuses all over the city.  These, of course, weren’t the only protests and riots in Chicago.  These were just the big ones.

I was involved with some of these protests.  Starting in 1966, I actively protested against the Vietnam War.  I marched and picketed, and once I even rioted.  

Most of the time, these protests were peaceful.  We would gather at Grant Park and listen to speakers telling us how wrong the war was, or we would march up State Street with signs that said no more war.  But sometimes the protests became violent.  

Why did they become violent?  Sometimes, they became violent as a response to cops being violent.  One time, we were picketing the University of Illinois’ ROTC building at the corner of Halsted and Roosevelt, and the cops there started breaking windows on the first floor of the building with their billy clubs. Some of the protesters ran to safety, others started throwing rocks and bricks at the cops, breaking even more windows.  

I'm not saying the cops are always to blame.  I also saw protesters become rioters without any kind of provocation, breaking windows, throwing rocks, starting fires.  Why did they become rioters?  I think they were people who wanted violence.  I knew some of these rioters.  The protest was just an excuse to be violent for them.  

After the 1968 Martin Luther King riots, the City of Chicago set up a committee to look into the riots.  One of the things they determined was that one of the causes of the riots was “a spontaneous overflow of pent-up aggressions.”

That statement comes close to summing up what I learned from my years of protesting.  I learned the majority of the protesters and a majority of the police officers understood why they were there.  The protestors wanted you to know that something in our society is not right, and the police officers wanted the protesters to know that protesting is okay up to a certain point.  I learned also that there’s a minority of protesters and police officers who wanted to express their “pent-up aggression.”  They wanted to throw bricks and burn things and bust heads and shoot tear gas because it made them feel alive.

These are the people we need to watch out for.