Between Donald Trump’s Republican Party coup, racial tension and protests, and unstable international politics, are we—as more than one recent headline suggests—reliving the dark days of 1968 all over again?
It’s tempting to draw a line between Chicago’s past and Cleveland’s present, but the lead-up to the ’68 convention were some of the most tumultuous in American history: The Vietnam war was increasingly looking unwinnable, and young men were resisting the draft in growing numbers. Two months after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from the election. Four days later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and riots consumed many major cities, including Chicago. Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was killed two months later.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey parallels Hillary Clinton. He was an early front-runner who was a bit too centrist for the base but garnered the unwavering support of the political establishment, unions, and African-Americans. Like Humphrey, Clinton is running on a similar platform to the current administration’s, and is weighed down in part by foreign policy decisions of the past that have proved unpopular in the present.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control reported by Mother Jones, the rate of cops fatally shooting black Americans has fallen steadily in the decades since 1970. In 1970, 8.4 out of every million African-American deaths were due to “legal intervention” involving guns. In 2011, the most recent year cited in the statistics, the rate is 2.7—an improvement but still more than twice the rate for white Americans.
