Conscious Choice: Summer of '68

July 1996

Summer of '68

by Patricia Katherine Novick

It was my husband who first realized we were being followed in July of 1968. I was 21 years old, a community college sociology teacher driving the car on Hyde Park Boulevard when Al told me to pull over. "Lock the doors and stay inside," he insisted, leaving me deeply frightened as he walked back to confront the two men, buttoned up in suits despite 90-degree temperatures, who sat in the car that had stopped behind us. They (and I) were white; he, Al Raby, one of Chicago’s leading civil rights activists, was black.

I turned to watch him as he listened to the driver. My chest tightened as I saw him return to our car with a clenched jaw. I waited for him to speak. "They’re our very own police tail," he told me. "They’ll be with us until after the convention. My darlin,’ don’t forget — we’re dangerous characters. We oppose the war."

It shocked me that a respected leader in our city could be targeted by the Chicago police and that I was to be followed on my way to and from work. That first encounter on the street foretold much that was yet to come.

Al and I left our home every morning at 5:00 for the main bus station, where we joined others on a picket line demanding better working conditions for bus drivers. The two suits sat in the car and watched as we walked the lines alongside the strikers and other supporters. They also followed us to the laundromat, the beach, and the homes of our friends. On the one hand, this was all a game. Once I forgot my keys and was locked out of our house; told of my dilemma, one police tail contacted another police tail to notify Al so he could come home and let me in the house.

Sometimes, to make things easier on everyone, we just took rides from the tails, in their car. During that summer I was teaching a course at Roosevelt and one day one of the tails turned toward the back seat and asked me if they, both of them, could attend one of my classes. I told them it would be disruptive to a small interactive environment. It probably would have been a good idea for them to hear the students talking about the meaning of social movements and social change.

On the other hand, we wanted our privacy; our right to privacy. So, we went across the street to the home of Alison Davis, Jr., to make phone calls. We sometimes drove other people’s cars. We meet friends in an alley in order to escape the surveillance and to spare them from appearing on someone’s sinister list of troublemakers. As part of this strange game we gave ourselves secret code names, Harold and Harriet Schwartz. Still today many of my close friends call me Harriet.

Even when were were not tailed, however, we were targeted. One day when were going out in a friend’s car, just to picnic at Navy Pier, we were stopped at the entrance because of rumors that someone was trying to put LSD in the drinking water at the nearby filtration plant. We apparently looked like possible perpetrators of such an act and so we were denied entrance.

Working downtown at Roosevelt, I would dress in a summer suit and a pair of white Mary Jane pumps. After class each day I took out my homemade sign which read "Welcome to Massa Daley’s Armed Camp" and met two of my friends in front of the Hilton. They lived on the Southwest Side, in the Bogan area, tall blondes of Lithuanian ancestry. The three of us looked liked well-scrubbed girls going to church as we paced back in forth. Their signs read "The Whole World is Watching." Our all-American looks drew attention to us and our message. We met at the same time for days, hoping that the international community would see that there were protests against the war going on in Chicago.

One day we drew the attention of a French camera crew, followed close behind by a squad of police. I bent over to fix the buckle on my white Mary Janes, and as I was standing up an officer of the law stepped in next to me and burned a deep hole into my hand with a cigarette. I was frightened by the experience and didn’t want to go back to the Hilton the next day. Al and I talked about it for a long time that night until I was clear that my belief about protesting the war and all the killing I was seeing on TV was more important than my fear of being injured by police. I knew that the war was wrong and that I had no choice but to continue to protest the violence, though I was living in a nightmare, and I was afraid.

Committed to Dr. King’s non-violent views, I also knew that it was important for me to be a marshal in the park for the main demonstrations. I went to marshal training and learned to put Vaseline on my face to avoid the effects of tear gas, and how to lock my arms and stay connected with the next person in order to hold the crowd and prevent the police from harming the demonstrators. On the morning of the Grant Park demonstrations I took the I.C. downtown and walked to the band shell. I put the Vaseline on my face and tied up my long hair.

I listened to Allen Ginsberg exhorting: "I’m going to zap you with holiness, I’m going to levitate you with joy." He was talking about transforming consciousness. "How wonderful," I thought, feeling affirmed in my belief that this was God’s work — protesting the war and the killing. In the next minute I was again afraid. I could see the police moving in. I could hear my mother: "Patty, you are a good girl, a good girl, polite, responsible, well dressed, clean. Certainly not Vaseline-faced with your heels digging into the earth, your arms clasped with strangers and facing an armed militia. Patty, what are you doing here?"

I had no more time to think. The police moved in. I heard shouts from behind me of "Pig."

"Oh, no, please," I heard myself saying. "Just hold the line, just hold the line," my partners on either side kept repeating. I saw a pregnant woman I knew from the Hyde Park Co-op go down under police invasion. She later miscarried as a result of the blows. A rumor came down the line that Rennie Davis had been hit and was going down. I was terrified in the chaos and the shouting. The line at my end of chain collapsed as people were hit, went down, and as other people gave in to the terror and dispersed in the mayhem. The police moved in. There was no place for me to go.

I ran, back toward Michigan Avenue, tears pouring down my face. Another group of police was gathering. I was so angry at what I had just witnessed that I went up to them and shouted, choking, "You should be ashamed of yourselves! It is your brothers and your friends who are being killed in Viet Nam. You should be ashamed!" Hot tears burned through the Vaseline. They turned their backs to me, except for one who shouted back, hate in his eyes, "Commie!"

I continued back to Michigan Avenue, up to the sociology office at Roosevelt where I had a change of clothes. I washed the Vaseline off my face in the ladies room and put on my white seersucker summer suit and a bright pink shirt, and I went out onto Michigan Avenue carrying my sign. I walked alone this time, back and forth in front of the Hilton, a good girl against killing, a good American against the war, a good Chicagoan representing the good in her city. I just kept walking.

Al was in a meeting inside the Hilton, seating the southern freedom delegations that had been barred by the Democratic powers that be, meeting with minority leaders, strategizing about what could be done on the convention floor. We would meet at home each night, both exhausted, with our stories from inside and outside the Hilton. Which of our friends had been arrested; who were our allies inside the convention; who was listening? How many more had been killed in Viet Nam that day? We lived in the same building as the group that organized the Chicago Journalism Review, and we would often meet on our first-floor porch to talk about what had happened that day. It was a time of action, analysis, strategy and more action. During the day, I just kept walking in front of the Hilton.

I remember thinking about how strongly I believed in a democratic society, how shocked I was by this repression and the shoot-to-kill order the Mayor had made for the whole world to hear. Shoot to kill whom? My friends, fellow students, third- and fourth-generation Chicagoans? Families with young children who came downtown to protest the war. I saw my neighbors who taught at the Lutheran School of Theology and members of my family walking around with signs. Kill them?

Now, some 30 years later, I can reflect on the young person I was then. I saw myself then with far fewer options than I now have for expressing what I believe is right. Today I lecture, speak in churches, join organizations, write articles, and support political candidates. Many of those candidates were demonstrators in‘68. So many of us have not really changed. My friends work in public interest law firms, in nonprofit organizations, in lobbying groups, and elsewhere, supporting values we held then and still hold. In my own work with Sacred Spaces/Public Places, I facilitate consecration, supporting efforts by Chicagoans to nourish the private soul and invigorate the public one.

I know am blessed to have a daughter, Alison Raby, who practices daily the values for which my friends and I stood firm, Whenever I look at her, or at the scar on my hand, I reinvest in my commitment to being an active citizen participating in a democratic process. At this year’s Democratic Convention, I want to express exactly who we are, beneath the stereotypes based on something Carl Sandburg wrote or something Mayor Daley Senior said. It is important that we all remember, everything we do makes a difference. It is as important now as it was in‘68: the world is still, and always, watching.

Patricia Katherine Novick, Ph.D. is a Chicago-based clinical psychologist.

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