Our Waukegan Movement didn’t join up with the big protest that was going in Chicago at the Democratic presidential convention.  Rosen had already left town to get ready for school.  I saw the melee and the chants of “the whole world is watching” in nightly news.  On the next day, I went to Grant Park to join the activities.  The Rolling Stones phrase, “to get my fair share of abuse,” from Sympathy for Devil was probably echoing in my head.  My first mistake was going alone.

A crowd tried to march to the International Amphitheater at the old stockyards 50 blocks away.   At every underpass, the police and the National Guard put up barricades of busses and men at the ready.  Folks kept diverting the march to other routes where possibly we could get through.  With each new route our ranks seemed to be thinner.  Eventually I found myself forging ahead in a platoon of one.

When I entered Bronzeville, I was attacked by a young African American guy.  His motive I can only guess.  It must have been the seething resentment that had given rise to looting and rioting in response to the murder of Martin Luther King just months earlier.  Maybe it was just a mugging, but he never reached into my pockets.  He put a gash in my forehead and broke my glasses.  Fortunately, some other protesters were making their way south about a block away.  They got a taxi to take me back to Grant Park.  There, of course, I was mistaken as someone who had been on the wrong end of a police billy club.  But I was just a naïve guy who seemed to enjoy fear and had an unreasonable will to just press ahead – all by myself if need be.

Back at Madison, Mike Rosen and I tried to promote the whole idea of extending anti-war organizing to working class youth.  We wrote a piece in the Madison underground paper, Connections.  It was called “Beyond Youth Culture”.  It told the story of our success in building a group of long-haired Waukegan kids who were definitely not interested in a trip to Vietnam.