Students Are Protesting. The Democratic Convention Is in Chicago. Is This Another 1968?

Activists, convention planners and historians say there are key differences between what’s happening now and the uproar that took over the DNC in 1968.

1968 Democratic National Convention Violence

Demonstrators clashed with police and National Guardsmen in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Michael Boyer/AP

On Tuesday night, New York riot police shut down the roads around Columbia University and sent hordes of officers into a campus building students had occupied the previous day. Earlier in the day, administrators had promised to expel students who had trespassed Hamilton Hall. Across the country, police removed student protesters from an occupied campus building in California. Both occupations followed hundreds of arrests of student protesters on campuses across the country over the last month. And in 110 days, the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to gavel into session.

Add up the number of campus arrests and occupations with the number of days, multiply by the X factor that the convention is being held in Chicago, and an increasing number of pundits and political observers are coming up with the same figure: 1968.

They should go back and check their math, say organizers of the convention, organizers of the massive protest planned for outside of it, as well as historians. The swell of anti-war and civil rights protests that subsumed campuses, the American left, and ultimately the Democratic Party ahead of the 1968 election is a ready comparison for a certain type of doom-minded observer. But the new protest movement is different, organizers and historians say. Chicago is different. And national politics are different.