Voices in My Head
1968, New York, and What I Left Behind
Fifty years ago, in 1968, a roaring fire swept across this nation and the world. As ThinkProgress.com writer Sam Fulwood III described in a piece recently,
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of 1968, arguably one of the most traumatic years in our nation’s history, filled with war, riots, assassinations, political upheavals, and social unrest.”
That Was the Year That Was – 1968 Photo by brizzle born and bred
At the beginning of 1968, I could not see how deep the water was rising around me and how I would almost drown in it. I was 19 years old when the year began, living with my parents in the John Adams public housing projects in the South Bronx, and working on Wall Street as a trading clerk. In 1968, I was running fast, head first, into a year of contradictions. There would be the community activism, working with brown and black people around the issues of education reform and empowerment. But it was also a time for finding my Latino self. However, all of that would be overshadowed by drug addiction and finally surrender to rehabilitation.
All around me, the world order was being challenged and upheaval was in no short supply. I was scared, confused, angry, and surely doomed to a fate, six feet under. But, I didn’t die, in spite of my worst efforts.
Forces of Change in 1968
Yo también soy un hombre (Memphis, 1968) Photo by Recuerdos de Pandora
It was the year when all the forces of change and resistance to that change came together in one explosive moment. The roots of the 1968 upheavals and my growing political wokeness go back years. For me, it had been growing since 1964 when I left a Catholic junior seminary (yes, I was planning to become a priest) where I was repeatedly racially bullied. From 1964-1968, you could not watch television and read newspapers (no social media back then) and not be challenged to get angry about race (especially when you had experienced it first-hand), class and income disparities, arrogant politicians, and a war that didn’t seem to make any sense (Doesn’t this all sound eerily familiar?). There were the old voices that denied what many of us saw. Instead, they told us to believe that America was exceptional and perfect. Those of us who protested and called out the injustices were called communists, rabble-rousers, and traitors. Police and citizen violence against us followed (again, sound familiar?). My time on Wall Street, 1967-1968, was an awesome peek into how the ruling classes would stop at nothing to ensure that our bodies and blood would flow like a flash flood down history’s landscape.
Visions of War are Everywhere
Hue 1968 Tet Offensive – U.S. Marines take Cover Behind a Tank – Photo by manhhai
1968 is littered with so many memories. Even though I was old enough to go to Vietnam, I had squeezed out a 1Y deferral (Registrant available for military service, but qualified for military only in the event of war or national emergency). We would not call the Vietnam military action a war even as the American dead bodies kept piling up and the battles raged on. On January 31, 1968, the reality of war filled the evening newscasts.
“North Vietnam launched the Tet offensive at Nha Trang. Nearly 70,000 North Vietnamese troops will take part in this broad action, taking the battle from the jungles to the cities. The offensive will carry on for weeks and is seen as a major turning point for the American attitude toward the war. At 2:45 that morning the US embassy in Saigon is invaded and held until 9:15 AM.”
During first days of the Tet offensive, Saigon’s police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan is captured on film by American photographer Eddie Adams executing a “Viet Cong” prisoner. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph becomes one more reason to protest the War in Vietnam. While we would not find out about it for another year, there was the My Lai (pronounced Me Lie) Massacre of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians from infants to the elderly. I burned my draft card at a UN rally.
A Divided 1968 Nation
Washington DC: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall by wallyg
The Vietnam War created deep divisions and often a civil war in families, society, and politics. 1968 was a Presidential election year and the war was heavy on the minds of every incumbent and challenger. The New Hampshire primary election brought shocking results. Senator Eugene McCarthy (think Bernie Sanders today) runs a Presidential election campaign on a Vietnam peace platform and “…comes within 230 votes of defeating the sitting president Lyndon Johnson.” President Johnson would later announce that he will not run for reelection surprising the nation and sending the 1968 elections into a free for all. Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy is murdered in Los Angeles. Then, there are the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago which guaranteed a Republican win in November with the election of law and order Richard M. Nixon.
The Civil War for Civil Rights
King Photo by AdeRussell
We began 1968 on a historic note with President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (prohibiting housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, physical handicap or family status) but that does not stop the marches and protests against racism, war, and poverty. Martin Luther King Jr. embraces a message of peace in Vietnam and economic justice at home. He prepares for a Poor People’s March on Washington. (I spent one day at the Poor People’s March’s tent encampment, Resurrection City, in Washington, D.C. Trust me, that was enough to leave a lasting impression). But King is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and cities burn in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, D.C., and many others. Forty-six deaths will be blamed on the riots.
The fight for racial justice reaches into the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City. Thirty-Two African nations boycott the games to protest the participation of apartheid South Africa. In a now famous image of raised fists at the medals ceremony, U.S. athletes and medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos protest racial injustice in America. “Along with Harry Edwards, one of their professors at San Diego State University, Smith and Carlos had organized a group called the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) that tried to encourage African-American athletes to boycott the Games.”
Black Power salute by US medalists at Mexico City Olympics. by wbaiv
Other human rights battlefronts broke out. The so-called “Women’s Liberation” movement “…target the Miss America Beauty Contest in Atlantic City.” It’s hard to believe that this new front would be so controversial. But the news media would not focus on the issue of women roles in society. Instead, they would replay a “symbolic bra-burning” as a piece of theatre thereby creating the derogatory term “bra-burning feminist.”
Finding My Latino Identity in 1968
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- Dominican Republic Photo by L.C.Nøttaasen
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- Puerto Rico Photo by diana_robinson
While the world burned, my life wandered aimlessly through monotonous work days on Wall Street, weekends of getting high, searching for my Latino identity (Puerto Rican and Dominican) with frenzied Salsa dancing at the South Bronx Music Palace, and only dreaming to join what was becoming the worldwide rebellion against the old order. While my friends were marching off to war, I was marching down by subway to Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village to debate war and peace and hand out literature supporting America’s enemy, the National Liberation Front (I was young and naïve).
I knew I could no longer sit on the sidelines watching televised pandemonium and left Wall Street to join United Bronx Parents, an Education reform advocacy organization. Those last six months of 1968 were the greatest education in community organizing I could ever receive. The days were filled with marches, School Board meeting takeovers, and Black and Latino parent mobilization in order to fight for local control from the central Board of Education. The New York City Teachers’ Union would strike against the issue of local control. Community groups, parents, and teacher allies found themselves on the opposite side against the union. The community alliance protested the strike with actions to open then closed schools in defiance of the Teachers’ Union and the Board of Education. For me, it would all come to a climax with a wild melee at JHS 52 in the Bronx during an attempt to open the school. I, along with three other people, would be arrested on a range of charges, from inciting to riot, disturbing the peace, and resisting arrest. The arrest was followed by a sometimes equally raucous trial and eventual acquittal.
The Quiet but Deadly Menace of 1968
Heroin graffiti Photo by duncan
In the middle of the 1968 chaos came a quiet but deadly menace, Heroin. Its campaign of death would sweep me up, along with countless other young people, in its march across black and brown communities in New York City. Now appearing abandoned buildings in the South Bronx became shooting galleries for addicts who lived two lives: work during the day and dope fiends at night and weekends. Some will overdose alone in dark stairwells and candlelit apartments. The unlucky addicts will be found dead from “hot shots.” The lucky ones, like me, will learn that there is no life at the end of a needle (at least for now) and end 1968 checking into rehab at New York’s Phoenix House.
50 Years from 1968
United States Capitol 05 Photo by Daniel Mennerich
Through the subsequent fifty years, from New York to Washington, D.C. to Hartford, Connecticut and back to Washington, D.C. and then to Los Angeles, California, I’ve been grateful to have been a witness to and sometimes a participant in some of the most dizzying merry-go-round events in this nation’s history. 1968 would spawn more rebellions against the oppression of people of color, the breaking up of the smothering patriarchy’s rules of conduct for women, and the smashing down of cultural walls in everything from music to art to fashion.
Los Angeles Photo by Free-Photos
However, the old world order took none of this lying down. It struck back with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now Donald Trump. We are in the last gasps of a Euro-centric American History that can no longer survive the realities of the demographic and cultural changes of the 21st century.
Of course, that’s what we said in 1968.
Photo by brizzle born and bred
Photo by AdeRussell
