Description
Roz Payne took the more than 500 photos during the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. The protests degenerated into a police riot when Democratic mayor and party stalwart, Richard Daley, ordered an estimated 23,000 riot-clad police officers to attack roughly 10,000 demonstrators in and near Grant Park. The chaos outside of the convention hall, which was broadcast across the country and around the world, took place against the backdrop of growing public opposition to America’s War in Vietnam, the blossoming of the anti-war movement, increasing disillusionment with the Democratic Party and what many viewed as the slow rate of meaningful social change, as well as the shocking assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, earlier that year. The tumultuous convention resulted in the nomination of Hubert H. Humphrey and Edmund S. Muskie as his running-mate. Republican standard-bearer, Richard Nixon, won the fall election, capping one of the more unlikely political comebacks in recent U.S. history.
Images in this collection show a variety of protests, Abbie Hoffman, Phil Ochs, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Dick Gregory, Jerry Rubin, Pigasus, MC5, among others.