1968 : politics takes to the pavement

While this book is concerned with riots, rebellions and political protests more generally in Great Britain and France, and there were no shortage of these in both Britain and France in 1968, the significance of the year in question cannot be accurately gauged without an appreciation of the wider global context. That being the case, this chapter gives an account of some of the key dramatic events that shook the world in 1968. Central to the tensions running through the year was the war in Vietnam and the widespread opposition to it, the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the general strike in France and the student uprisings that engulfed Paris and other French cities, the short-lived Prague Spring of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia under the government of Alexander Dubcek and the Tlatelolco Massacre of protesting Mexican students on the eve of the Mexico City Summer Olympics. In addition to these momentous events was a range of other headline grabbing moments throughout the year, including the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) seizure of the American naval intelligence ship the USS Pueblo, claiming that it had strayed beyond international waters into Korean territorial waters. This event sparked what became known as the Pueblo crisis. Upon claiming gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the men's 200-meter sprint final at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos controversially stood on the medal podium with their heads bowed and fists raised in a Black Power salute. Meanwhile, in western Afric, Biafrans continued to starve amidst the drawn-out Nigerian civil war. And at year's end, three American astronauts, Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell became the first humans to orbit the moon as they spent Christmas in space aboard Apollo 8, returning safely to Earth a few days later. From New Year's Day to year's end or so it must have seemed, around the world people took to the streets in protest: against the war, against capitalism, against communism, against liberalism, against authoritarianism and against authority in general. As the Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow put it 20 years later, there was 'blood in the streets of Chicago and Paris and Saigon'. And there were riots and violence and bloodshed on the streets of many more towns and cities around the world, as politics took to the pavement.