1968 – Tragedy, Hope and Future Trouble
1968 was an extraordinary year, with tragedies, protests, and political change affecting countries across the globe, but it was a year in which I was largely insulated from what was happening. A college tutor living in a quiet, modern housing estate, my life was split between helping bring up three children, adapting to life in the suburbs, and teaching. In many respects I was little more than a disengaged observer, although not entirely so. In the college common room, talking to some of my increasingly radical students, I was becoming more militant in my political views. In March of 1968, I joined them on a Vietnam war protest at the American Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. Did that rally make a difference? Probably not, though from a personal perspective it was memorable, if only because a policeman on horseback pushed me into a hedge, while his horse trod on my foot. Just three months after the protest any radical sensibilities were set aside as I went to the other extreme, and attended the college ‘May Ball’!
May Balls are held in June: so Cambridge! A May Ball was promoted as an important social event, a sort of ‘coming out’ if you like. Public (private in US terms) school educated students would dress in dinner jackets, or even top hats and tails; their partners would accompany them in expensive dresses; and, in one of the key forms of one-upmanship back then, they would arrive in a limousine, a chauffeured Rolls, on a camel (yes, that happened in my year), or by some other exclusive conveyance. A May Ball was an event for the rich and privileged. Not in that category, my wife and I scraped together the money for the tickets, took a bus to the College, and arrived looking clearly less well dressed compared to most attending that night.
The May Ball was a grand affair. Formal dinner served in Hall, together with a buffet available in a marquee on the front lawn. Champagne, Hock and soft drinks available at two bars; spirits and beer for purchase. From the College’s perspective, the highlight was hearing the Choral Scholars singing. For the students, there were several attractions. One was Tyrannosaurus Rex, a rock band on a path to become an enormously popular group between 1967 and 1973. Another super-star group was Fairport Convention, a folk rock ensemble, still performing well into the 2000s, but back then about to play a key role in establishing British folk music. However, for me the real splash was Pink Floyd, producing psychedelic rock at a volume that must have been heard all over Cambridge. At this stage in their career, Pink Floyd were developing songs that would comprise their Dark Side of the Moon album. At one point lead singer Roger Waters leapt into the crowd of fans in front of him; with their usual politeness, the assembled students and partners moved aside, and let him fall to the ground: no mosh pit in those days!
One evening, wildly out of synch with the times, and a brief foray into a world alien to many people like me. That indulgent world was about to be transformed. King’s College stopped holding May Balls. It was banned by the local police in the late 1970s, apparently as a result of the crush resulting from a performance by ‘The Stranglers’, a punk rock group. Now it holds an annual event known as the ‘King’s Affair’. Cheaper and more egalitarian than a May Ball, it has a reputation for ‘Beats not Bollinger’. Guests are invited to wear any costume they choose, and typically with seven different music stages focusing mainly on new DJs the atmosphere is said to be more like a festival.
From Grosvenor Square to a May Ball, life in my little bubble was largely immune from a world characterised by extraordinary events. Over twelve months in 1968, countries faced a series of frightening and violent protests, throwing governments into turmoil as they tried to manage angry dissent. It was a year of assassinations and gun control; of steps forward in areas of civil rights, steps back in others; a year of protests from Black Power to Prague Spring. Unexpected events made the year like a crazy mosaic of unrelated pieces pushed up against one another.
In the US, gun homicides had become a major issue. Five years earlier, President Kennedy had been assassinated. Lyndon Johnson became President, and Congress started to deliberate a Gun Control Act. Extraordinary to read now, but at the hearings an Executive Vice-President of the NRA supported a ban on mail-order sales, stating, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” [i] Despite this, there was still considerable resistance to any gun controls being introduced, but two assassinations in 1968, of Martin Luther King Jr in April, and then Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy (JFK’s brother) in June saw real pressure to complete the process. On October 22nd, President Johnson signed the Gun Control Act, banning mail order sales of rifles and shotguns and prohibiting convicted criminals, drug users and people found mentally incompetent from buying guns.
Tragedy spurring hope for the future? It might have seemed that way, but any initial support from the NRA over mail-order sales was lost as they soon began a campaign to restore the right for anyone to own and carry a firearm. Smart politics determined the path to success had to come from addressing rights. In 1982 the Republicans led a Senate sub-committee set up to examine the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”. It is a matter of non-trivial interest that several US States ratified the Second Amendment, but left out the commas, and in doing so left open a wide scope to interpret the meaning of the wording. For certain, that year the sub-committee determined: “The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.” [ii] Peaceful? It noted changes to the Gun Control Act “would enhance vital protection of constitutional and civil liberties of those Americans who choose to exercise their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.” [iii]
That statement was one key step in an ongoing process to undo the 1968 legislation, and the erosion of legislative controls over access to guns has continued ever since. In 1986 the Firearm Owners Protection Act was passed, taking on views in a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee report: reopening interstate sales of long guns on a limited basis, legalizing ammunition shipments by mail, removing the requirement to keep records of ammunition purchases, and giving federal protection for the transportation of firearms through states where their possession would otherwise be illegal. From 1968, handgun homicides had remained fairly stable, if stable is the right word to use on such an issue. However, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, homicide rates surged across the United States, almost all by handguns. In 1993, there were seven gun homicides for every 100,000 people, although by 2013, that figure had fallen to 3.6. Since that time, gun homicides have started to rise again, disproportionately more so for the African-American community. While many factors influence gun homicides, one thing is clear: the high rates in the USA are clearly tied to the lack of gun controls, partly the result of NRA lobbying.
Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination took place just one week before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. This was a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had first been proposed by Kennedy in June 1963, but after his assassination Johnson pushed it forward. The 1964 Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, (and in later amendments also on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity). It prohibited the unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, in public housing, and in employment. It was truly a landmark piece of legislation. Now the deaths of Robert Kennedy and MLK created the pressure for more change.
At the time the 1968 Act was passed, riots over the death of Martin Luther King Jr. were still taking place. Just a few weeks earlier, the Kerner Commission, set up to investigate race riots in Los Angeles and Chicago, in 1965 and 1966, and the subsequent riots a year later in Newark and Detroit, had issued its report. The commission’s work had many flaws, and it completed its task in half a year, without giving the time needed to give the detailed analysis the topic deserved. [iv] Despite its limitations, it exposed inadequacies at the federal and state levels over housing, social services and education, as well as a ‘white perspective’ in the media. It warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report was a strong indictment of white America: “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” [v] It clearly stated one of the main causes of urban violence and rioting was white racism, and that white America bore much of the responsibility for black rioting and rebellion.
Although the 1964 Act had addressed many of the issues, it had lacked ‘teeth’, and so did the new legislation aimed at housing issues. Moreover the Fair Housing Act (the alternative name for the 1968 Civil Rights Act) also lacked any effective means of enforcement. It failed in another sense, too, as talk about ‘anti-discrimination’ measures missed the need to implement positive measures needed to effectively addressing inequalities. As had been the case with gun control, affirmative action proposals came under sustained attack. It is salutary, if not depressing, to read the Kerner Commission’s comments and conclusions, and realise they could have been issued in 2021. Almost inevitably, the tragedy of the terrible race riots in the 1960’s led to legislation to address the issues, only to be undone through opposition and failures in the following decades.
While events within the US were both dramatic and compelling, they had other repercussions. The 1968 Olympics were held in Mexico. The USA’s Tommie Smith won 200 metre race in world-record time, Australian Peter Norman came second, and the US’s John Carlos finished third. At the podium to receive their medals, the two Americans gave a Black Power salute, wore black to symbolise black poverty, and Carlos wore a necklace of beads which “were for those individuals that were lynched, or killed and that no-one said a prayer for, that were hung and tarred. It was for those thrown off the side of the boats in the Middle Passage.” [vi] All three wore Olympic Project for Human Rights badges. Smith and Carlos delivered their salute with heads bowed as The Star Spangled Banner was played, while Norman stood quietly in support.
Their actions created a media sensation, with film of the ceremony including the sound of booing from spectators. Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee (an American) declared their actions constituted a domestic political statement, which he claimed was inappropriate in an international forum. Smith and Carlos were suspended from the US team and banned from the Olympic Village, but they were allowed to keep their medals. The cost to their careers was considerable. Criticised by the US sporting community, it took years before either could find alternative careers. Fittingly, in in 2008 they both received an Arthur Ashe Courage Award. Peter Norman died in 2006, and in 2012, the Australian Parliament passed a formal apology, stating his support in 1968 “was a moment of heroism and humility that advanced international awareness of racial inequality”. A little late?
There were other major events in 1968, well away from the US. In the UK, Enoch Powell, a Conservative Member of the UK Parliament, gave a speech on 20 April, (not coincidentally Hitler’s birth date). It was deliberately provocative, a flamethrower attack on immigration, especially targetted on increasing number of West Indians coming to the UK through family reunion policies. Powell represented the right-wing of the Conservative Party. In a style that seems so horribly familiar today, he declared: “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.” Later described as the Rivers of Blood speech, a description based on Powell’s referring a line from Virgil: “as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. He was sacked from his role as Shadow Defence Secretary (the Conservatives were in opposition in 1968), an action that highlighted the continuing divide between the moderates and the extremists in the party.
I could continue. This was the year of the Prague Spring, when Alexander Dubcek introduced reforms to liberalise an oppressive communist regime. For a brief period, it seemed reform might be possible in Czechoslovakia, only to be crushed later in the year by more than 500,000 Soviet soldiers. This was the year Pope Paul VI banned any form of artificial birth control, stamping on the promise of birth control through the contraceptive pill. This was the year a Saigon police chief was photographed executing a Viet Cong officer with a pistol shot to head. In many ways and in many places, the world was ‘on fire’. It was a year of tragedies, militancy and protests. It was a year of attempted reforms, some successful, some failed. It was the year that sowed the seeds of future trouble as resistance grew. It was the year that I became more politically critical, more militant in my thinking. It was the year I understood Shakespeare’s line: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here”. They still are.
[i] Davidson, O G, Under Fire: The NRA and the Battle for Gun Control, University of Iowa Press, 1998. p. 30. Cited in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Control_Act_of_1968
[ii] Right to Keep and Bear Arms: Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1982
[iii] Ibid
[iv] See M W Hughey, Of Riots and Racism, Sociological Forum, 2018, 24 pp
[v] http://www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/docs/kerner.pdf
[vi] Reported by Dean Lucas in a magazine story about famous pictures (sourced from Wikipedia)
