Pownall bought more film from people in the crowd and roving Tribune reporters supplied him with fresh rolls so he could photograph lines of police brandishing billy clubs and National Guard troops bristling with rifles. They squared off with young, unarmed white and black protesters. In one shot, a woman with long blond hair stands face to face with a row of soldiers who gaze dispassionately over her head.
The anti-war crowd wanted to march to the convention hall, but the city refused the necessary permits. Many wanted to go anyway, but police and troops hemmed them in, and as Pownall remembers it, poet Allen Ginsberg and anti-war leader David Dellinger tried to talk everybody out of a confrontation. (Pownall shows the men speaking into microphones; Dellinger is surrounded by cops.) A line of police marched into the crowd, clubbing those who didn’t flee; “It was like having a tank roll down,” Pownall tells me. A pair of shots show a line of helmeted cops with billy clubs bearing down on a long-haired protester who seems strangely unaware of them. A cop maces the guy. Another shot shows persons tending to SDS leader Rennie Davis as he lies on the grass, his shirt and tie bloodied and the top of his head bandaged. A pair of photos show a protester hurling a tear-gas canister back at police and officers ducking.
“The police walked through the crowd and it was like stirring up a hornets’ nest,” Pownall says. Protesters overturned benches in front of the bandshell and attacked an empty police car. Pownall’s shots are gritty seat-of-the-pants photojournalism, a good glimpse of a single heated afternoon, but he’s often in not quite the right place at not quite the right time. He’s a better photographer than this. But the images maintain their spark because the events turned out to be historic.
There’s been much talk lately of conservative ideas trumping liberal ones over the past four decades — with little acknowledgment of the role played by conservative violence and government-sponsored extra-legal assaults. Since World War II, there’s been a right-wing throughline, from police and civilian attacks on civil-rights activists to Southern politicians’ brazen defiance of federal civil-rights regulations to the rioting of Daley’s cops against war protesters — which some blamed for Hubert Humphrey’s paper-thin loss to Richard Nixon that November. Bull Connor, the brutally racist and repressive former police chief of Birmingham, Alabama, seemed to recognize this conservative lineage on convention Thursday when he voted for Daley for vice-president.
Already right-wing fringe folks had assassinated John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The conservative violence continued with attacks on abortion clinics and the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Crime and violence weren’t the sole provenance of the right, but fringe left groups like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers attacked at the bottom (think cops) whereas the fringe right exterminated liberal leaders. After the Chicago convention, five protest organizers were convicted of inciting a riot. (The verdicts were later overturned.) The result: a generation of major liberal leaders murdered or sentenced to jail.
