By Jim Hopkins
Boulevard Publisher
It’s summertime at the height of the presidential nominating contest, and the nation is transfixed by civil unrest: Protestors are attacking police amid dark warnings about terrorism on the streets and claims the powerful news media is spreading liberal propaganda.
Sound familiar? It should, because that was the scene 48 years ago this summer, when Democrats gathered in Chicago for a convention to pick Vice President Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine as their nominees for the 1968 presidential elections.
On The Courier-Journal’s front page that Friday morning, Aug. 30, 1968, a headline told the story: “Angry Daley Defends Police; Assails Press.” From Chicago, New York Times correspondent R. W. Apple Jr. wrote:
Infuriated by attacks upon himself, his city and his police force, Mayor Richard J. Daley yesterday defended the manner in which anti-war, anti-Humphrey demonstrations were suppressed in downtown Chicago Wednesday night.
Daley described the demonstrators as “terrorists” and said they had come here determined to “assault, harass and taunt the police into reacting before television cameras.”
“In the heat of emotion and riot,” Daley said, “some policemen may have over-reacted, but to judge the entire police force by the alleged action of a few would be just as unfair as to judge our entire younger generation by the actions of the mob.”
In fact, an independent study found four months later, the clash between 10,000 protestors and police devolved into a police riot when officers broke through and began beating one man as the crowd pelted cops with rocks and chunks of concrete. Protestors’ chants shifted from “hell no, we won’t go” to “pigs are whores.”
By then, civil unrest had come to Louisville in a different form: A popular amusement park reserved for whites for six decades had been integrated four years before. Fontaine Ferry Park would be heavily vandalized during racial turmoil less than a year after the Chicago convention.
None of that was reflected in an advertisement that Aug. 30 on page 21 Continue reading “48 years ago: Cops under attack, terrorism warnings in U.S., and racial unrest at a Louisville amusement park”
“As many as 23 of the 24 voting delegates may line up behind the Arizona senator on the first ballot Wednesday night,” The Courier-Journal’s Richard Harwood reported on the front page from the convention city of San Francisco.
With this latest purchase and the CJ, Gannett owns or operates 109 other dailies in 34 states and Guam, plus the U.K.’s Newsquest with more than 150 newspapers and other media brands.
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