“THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING! THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING!”
When I’m on my feet, Diane starts running, pulling me after her. Everyone around us is running east, back into the park, but Diane pulls me west, dodging protesters and cops and clubs. I have no choice but to trust her. I don’t even know how my legs have the power to carry me. Around us, people are on the ground, moaning, bleeding. Cops are dragging more and more people through the streets.
Diane pulls me under an awning.
“Floyd,” I mutter. “Tom. We’ve got to find them.”
“I saw them when I was looking for you,” Diane says. “They were running back into the park, but there weren’t any cops after them. They’ll be all right.”
Oh. Floyd didn’t wait for me.
All right, then. I guess I know where that leaves us.
Diane looks back over her shoulder. The pain is shooting down my side now that we’ve stopped moving. Diane loops her arm under my shoulders to prop me up. Her grip hurts, but I don’t tell her that. It feels good to have her holding me, even with the pain.
“I can’t believe it.” I close my eyes and lean my head into her shoulder. The movement makes me wince. “You shouldn’t have come back for me.”
“I was going to come back anyway.” Diane runs her hand over my hair. “I didn’t know there was going to be a riot, though.”
“I can’t believe you tried to reason with that cop.” I laugh. “And it actually worked.”
She smiles. “I can’t believe it either.”
“You saved me,” I say.
“Yeah, well. I wanted to keep you around.” Her smile gets wider.
“Even after what I said?”
Diane shrugs, the light in her eyes fading slightly.
“I’ll tell them,” I say.
I think about Floyd, running off into the trees. I think about Diane, standing in front of that cop who would have been just as happy to bring his club down on her as on me.
“You don’t have to do that.” She looks away. “This doesn’t have to be a trade.”
“It’s not about that.” I shake my head and lay my hand on her chin. “It’s about this.”
I kiss her.
I kiss her right there, on the street, in front of the other protesters. In front of the cops. In front of everyone.
She kisses me back. We’re both laughing, our faces filthy with dirt and tear gas, but it’s the sweetest kiss of my life.
My body still aches, and the world around us is still nothing but chaos, but for that second, it doesn’t seem to matter. It took something awful to make me realize it, but Diane means more to me than I ever wanted to admit.
And this isn’t just about Diane. It’s about me. It’s about not always looking over my shoulder to see who might be watching. Not always thinking about who everyone else expects me to be. What I think of myself is what matters.
I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. All I know is, in this moment, it feels like the whole world is watching me. And that’s exactly what I want it to do.
The summer of 1968 was a tense period even before the Democratic National Convention got under way in Chicago. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just a few months earlier. So had presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. In Chicago, the riots following Dr. King’s murder had resulted in numerous deaths. When protesters announced their plans to hold demonstrations against the Vietnam War during the convention that August, Chicago mayor Richard Daley and other leaders called in extra police officers and the National Guard, trained them in riot-control techniques, and equipped them with Mace and tear gas in addition to their standard guns and billy clubs. The ten thousand protesters who gathered in the city were met with more than twenty thousand police officers and National Guardsmen.
Clashes between police and demonstrators were common throughout the weeklong convention. More than a thousand demonstrators and about two hundred police officers were reported injured, and nearly seven hundred protesters were arrested. Some plainclothes officers were later accused of inciting violence while disguised as protesters. Although police attacks against protesters took place throughout the convention week, the violence on the night of August 28 was broadcast on network TV, and it was that night’s brutality that incited a national outcry. It became known as the “Battle of Michigan Avenue,” and a government report later called it a “police riot.”
Chilling video of what happened that night is available on YouTube. For a firsthand account of the entire week of protests, read John Schultz’s book No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, August 1968.