On Fire: The City and American Protest in 1968

Abstract

This chapter argues that a diverse array of American social movements in the late 1960s regarded the city as a crucial terrain of struggles for visibility, empowerment and self-determination, while in much of American public discourse the city had come to represent the nation’s troubles. 1968 marked the peak of the fraught discourse of ‘urban crisis’ that had developed out of the postwar dynamics of urban disinvestment, government-subsidized white suburbanization, black migration and racialized inner-city poverty. The eruption of riots in black urban neighbourhoods in more than a hundred cities following Martin Luther King’s assassination crystallized a view of the city as the kernel of America’s lawlessness, anger and violence. Meanwhile, the protests and ‘police riot’ outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention in August indicate how the contestation of urban space functioned within countercultural and social protest movements. This chapter argues that these urban visions and urban confrontations exerted a powerful influence over American politics and culture into the 1970s and beyond.