1968-2020: A Tale Of Two Uprisings

As the protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis began to mount over the past several days, my inbox and Facebook page began to fill with observations from my contemporaries. Many of them said variations of the same thing:

This is just like 1968.

By that they meant the chaos, the feeling that society was on the edge of something important, but that we were going to have to go through some stuff before we got there. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in April and barely two months later, Robert Kennedy suffered the same fate while in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. The national political conventions that year saw street protests that look pretty familiar now. Especially at the Democratic convention, where police and protesters slugged it out in the streets. (Then, as now, the police were outnumbered, but they made up for that by