Louisville Motors Co. picnic at Fontaine Ferry Park.
The sign over a crowd gathered at a pavilion at Fontaine Ferry Park in western Louisville says: “Gigantic Display of Daylight Fire Works, Labor Day, Monday, Sept. 7,” above a smaller sign with the Ford Motor logo. The display they’re looking at appears to be part of a car with a steering wheel and gauges, according to the caption supplied by the University of Louisville Photographic Archives.
Ford Motor started making cars in Louisville in 1913 with 11 employees, a decade after Henry Ford founded the company in a converted factory in Detroit. More about Ford’s presence in the city.
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.”
A defiant Mayor Richard Daley on the convention floor reacts to criticism Chicago police were overacting to protests outside.
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.
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 
Boulevard 