Johnson: Conditions Of 1968 Enhance Impact Of 2008 Election, Pt. 1

By Jim Johnson
Guest Columnist

There are few, if any, advantages that come with aging … the "wisdom" of age is from my perspective more than offset by the physical aches and pains that escaped my earlier years and now become a part of my daily life. Last week, however, the benefit of living my 57 years became so very meaningful.

At 10:59 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, I sat on the set of a television affiliate providing commentary on election results. All major networks concomitantly declared Senator Barack Obama the president-elect of the United States. The television monitors before me switched to the scene at Chicago's Grant Park. Well over 100,000 people cheered and cried as Obama and his family walked out on the stage to greet the nation he would soon lead.

At that instant, as the gravitas of the moment became apparent, I was struck by the irony: Grant Park in 2008 compared to Grant Park in 1968. The divisive issues which afflicted this nation precisely four decades earlier were remarkably similar to the very issues which face us now.

1968 was a year of national discontent, populated with a most unpopular war, assassinations, economic strife and racial division. 2008 contained many of the same issues, but now standing before the world was a newly elected black man: Erudite, Harvard-educated, telegenic and emblematic of one single word – "hope."

I was so thankful to have lived long enough to see our progress and evolution toward race fulfilled.

1968 was an ominous year filled with prescient events consistent with tragic recent years and a premonition of things to come. The nation still reeled from the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 and the 1965 shooting of Malcolm X. In April 1968, Martin Luther King was slain. In the weeks which followed, cities burned and racial divisiveness consumed our life.

Like 2008, it was a presidential election year. But, the hopes for a rebirth of Camelot ended on a Los Angeles hotel kitchen floor with the assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy. The Democratic National Convention was marred by the riots in Grant Park.

The war in Vietnam spun out of control with the year dominated by the Tet Offensive. In a single week ending Feb. 18, 1968, 543 U.S. personnel were killed and over 2,500 injured. A new wave of 48,000 draftees was ordered by the Pentagon.

Half a world away disproportionate numbers of black soldiers died to preserve a still-segregated environment back home. Minorities had a more than equal opportunity to die for a country that provided them with a less than equal life.

1968 was so similar in many ways to the world we find now in 2008. That similarity seemed to end, however, on that crisp Tuesday evening a week ago...

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Jim Johnson is a lecturer of political science. Read part two of his faculty op-ed next week.