The heart-rending and senseless death of George Floyd has re-engaged a mass protest movement to once more demand equal justice for African Americans — a renewal of the centuries-long, seemingly never-ending battle against white supremacy in America. The brutish response of Trump, featuring cowardly and insidious glorification of violent repression that sunk to a new low with the fascist march across Lafayette Square in Washington D.C., has hurtled America into what seems a new phase in our history.
Except it is not new.
It is the fall of 1968. Americans gather once more to vote for President.
The Democratic Party candidate is Hubert Humphrey, Vice President to the incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson (who has decided not to stand for re-election). Humphrey is a former U.S. Senator from Minnesota and a long-time stalwart of the Democratic Party “Establishment.” Humphrey accepts the nomination at a tumultuous Democratic National Convention that features brutal treatment of protestors by police under the eye of the Democratic Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley. America is traumatized by a string of high-profile assassinations, including: President John F. Kennedy in 1963; candidate for President and former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1968; and most recently, the murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968 — the death of Dr. King set off nationwide unrest by African Americans.
In the wake of the passage of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, the mass defection of southern white segregationists from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party was well underway, shifting the former Democratic “solid South” into GOP bastions. Lynching and police violence against African Americans was rampant. All the phenomena we still see today — race-based disparities in education, health care, housing, and of course criminal justice — were present. Finally, looming over all, the Vietnam War, where a largely-conscripted U.S. military was mired in a conflict that would reach over 50,000 U.S. military dead and millions of Vietnamese.
To say many Democrats on the left were disenchanted with Hubert Humphrey as nominee would be an understatement. Despite his progressive credentials as a New Dealer during FDR’s administration, and his participation in LBJ’s Great Society agenda, Humphrey was seen as compromised by his association with a corrupt “Democratic Establishment” and record of support for a bloody and unpopular war.
On November 5, 1968, the Republican presidential candidate, Richard M. Nixon, prevailed over Humphrey in one of the closest general elections to that time: 31,783-783 votes to 31,271,839 votes (43.4% to 42.7%).
Unhappy with Humphrey and the Democrats, arguably with good cause, many of my relatives chose either not to vote in that election, or to vote for third party candidates (e.g. Dick Gregory). The reasons were complex, but suffice to say it was a combination of thinking Humphrey was going to win anyway, to a hope that the defeat of the corrupt Democrats would hasten the upending of an unjust system.
In later years, my relatives deeply regretted their votes, especially given how close the Nixon victory margin was.
History of course, as they say, doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme.
When I saw the photo I used as cover for this diary, I felt tears brimming in my eyes. Seeing all these young Americans, with their hands raised, out courageously on behalf not only of George Floyd, who can no longer speak for himself, but also for the many other African American victims of brutality, was inspiring.
But I was fearful they may get discouraged.
Now as before, the Democratic nominee may not have been their first choice. There are many reasons to think the system is so entrenched that it simply cannot be impacted by voting.
November 3, 2020, approaches. Whatever you do that day — and I profoundly hope it is to vote to unseat Trump - make sure it is not something in later years you will have cause to regret.
