What happened, and when
The protests in Chicago that are most often linked with student activism took place in 1968, around the Democratic National Convention in August. The events of 1966 and 1967 were different and earlier. The two best-documented are a sit-in at the University of Chicago in May 1966, over the university’s release of class rankings that could be used for draft deferments, and a national conference of left-wing activists held in Chicago on Labor Day weekend 1967. Both belong to the story of how an increasingly organised student and antiwar movement grew in a Midwestern city.
Class rankings and the draft
During the Vietnam War, young men in college could often get a deferment from induction, and a draft board might decide who qualified partly by class standing. To help local boards, the Selective Service draft system asked universities to submit male students’ class rankings. It also ran a draft deferment test for students in 1966. In effect, a student’s grades could help determine whether he went to Vietnam.
In May 1966 a group of University of Chicago students objected to the university cooperating in that process. They argued that a university should not be rating its students for the military and that the practice favoured those with higher grades while pushing the less successful toward the war. Several hundred students took over the university’s administration building and stayed for several days; the occupation was one of the earliest major sit-ins against the war at a leading American campus. It was supported by the Chicago chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, which was then growing, and it led to a public argument involving students, faculty and administrators.
The university held on to its position at first, and some faculty criticised the occupation, while others sided with students. The matter led to discussions and, in time, changes in how the university handled the requests, although the exact details are less certain than the fact of the confrontation. Students at other campuses held similar protests that spring.
The sit-in is notable less for its immediate result than for the way it tied a campus matter, grades, to a national issue, the war. That linkage was repeated in much of the campus protest of later years.
A growing movement in 1967
By 1967 the antiwar and New Left movements had grown quickly, and Chicago was one of several large hubs. The city already had active student groups, a number of left-wing organisations and a large Black community in which the civil rights and Black Power movements both had followings. Chicago activists took part in the national Spring Mobilization in April 1967, with local events alongside the large marches in New York and San Francisco, and in the October March on the Pentagon in Washington.
The National Conference for New Politics
The most prominent Chicago event of the year was the National Conference for New Politics, held over Labor Day weekend 1967 at the Palmer House hotel in the Loop. Several thousand people attended, reportedly around 2,000 delegates and many more observers, and they came from the peace movement, civil rights groups, student organisations and the broader left. The organisers wanted to build a coalition that could challenge the Democratic Party’s war policy, and some speakers floated the idea of a third-party presidential ticket.
The gathering became best known for its divisions. A Black caucus, representing many of the Black delegates, demanded a large share of the voting power and the adoption of a set of resolutions that included strong language on Israel and the Middle East. Many white delegates, wanting to keep the coalition together, accepted much of what the caucus asked, and some other delegates left angry. The conference ended with less unity than hoped, and the plan for a unified electoral effort fell apart. Many historians treat it as an early sign of the strains between white and Black activists as Black Power gained influence.
The 1968 protests came later
It is easy to read Chicago’s later events back into 1967. The better-known confrontations, the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in August 1968, involved a mix of groups including the Yippies, other antiwar organisations and thousands of young people, and the police response was widely seen and criticised on television. The trial of leading protest organisers followed in 1969. They belong to a separate chapter, though the networks that made them possible grew in the years described here.
Putting it in context
Chicago’s student activism in this period was shaped by three things: the draft, which affected students directly, a strong civil rights movement in the city, and a political establishment under Mayor Richard J. Daley that was hostile to challenges from the left. The 1966 sit-in and the 1967 conference were not the largest protests of their time, but they show how, in these years, a campus dispute about grading and a hotel-ballroom argument about coalition-building both fed into the movement that came to national attention in 1968.