1Afterword
Obviously "Chicago, 1968" was a work of fiction. The events that I described are not journalistic re-creations of what actually happened in Chicago in August of 1968, but are based in large part on descriptions of these events in the Walker Report. Daniel Walker and his panel interviewed hundreds of witnesses, studied thousands of still photographs and many hours of news footage of the riots, and issued their 230-page report on December 1, 1968.
I have taken some liberties with the truth. This is what really happened on Wednesday, August 28, 1968 on Michigan Avenue outside the Haymarket Lounge, as described in the Walker Report:
While violence was exploding in the street, the crowd wedged behind the police sawhorses along the northeast edge of the Hilton was experiencing a terror all its own. Early in the evening, this group had consisted in large part of curious bystanders. But following the police surges into the demonstrators clogging the intersection of Michigan and Balbo, protesters had crowded the ranks behind the sawhorses in their flight from the police.
From force of numbers, this sidewalk crowd of 150 to 200 persons was pushing down toward the Hilton's front entrance. Policemen whose orders were to keep the entrance clear were pushing with sawhorses. Other police and fleeing demonstrators were pushing from the north in the effort to clear the intersection. Thus, the crowd was wedged against the hotel. . . .
Films show that one policeman elbowed his way to where he could rescue a girl of about ten years of age from the viselike press of the crowd. He cradled her in his arms and carried her to a point of relative safety 20 feet away. The crowd itself "passed up" an elderly woman to a low ledge. But many who remained were subjected to what they and witnesses considered deliberate brutality by the police.
"I was crowded in with the group of screaming, frightened people," an onlooker states. "We jammed against each other, trying to press into the brick wall of the hotel. As we stood there breathing hard... a policeman calmly walked the length of the barricade with a can of chemical spray in his hand. Unbelievably, he was spraying at us." Photos reveal several policemen using Mace against the crowd...
"Some of the police then turned and attacked the crowd," a Chicago reporter says. The student says she could see police clubbing persons pinned at the edge of the crowd and that there was "a great deal of screaming and pushing within the group." A reporter for a Cleveland paper said, "The police indiscriminately beat those of the periphery of the crowd... "
As a result, a part of the crowd was trapped in front of the Conrad Hilton and pressed hard against a big plate glass window of the Haymarket Lounge. A reporter who was sitting inside said, "Frightened men and women banged. . . against the window. A captain of the fire department inside told us to get back from the window, that it might get knocked in. As I backed away a few feet I could see a smudge of blood on the glass outside."
With a sickening crack, the window shattered, and screaming men and women tumbled through, some badly cut by jagged glass. The police came after them.
"I was pushed through by the force of large numbers of people," one victim said. "I got a deep cut in my right leg, diagnosed later by Eugene McCarthy's doctor as a severed artery... I fell to the floor of the bar. There were ten to twenty people who had come through... I could not stand on the leg. I was bleeding profusely.
"A squad of policemen burst into the bar, clubbing all those who looked to them like demonstrators, at the same time screaming over and over, 'We've got to clear this area.' The police acted literally like mad dogs looking for objects to attack.
(From "Rights in Conflict: The Walker Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.")
© Melanie Mitchell, February 25, 2000