The Other 60's
By Glenn Loury

I was a 19-year-old clerk working the midnight shift at a local printing company in Chicago when the Democratic National Convention came to town the famous summer of 1968. On my "lunch break," around three or four in the morning, I would drive down to Grant Park just to marvel at the protests. Not involved in the ruckus, I had the sense of being a tourist at the revolution.

Everything was supposedly being undertaken on behalf of the downtrodden, and I, a working-class black supporting a wife and young daughter, was not hostile to the protesters. In fact, the flower children intrigued me. I think I looked at the protesters as privileged people and was a bit jealous of the way they were able to live without responsibilities.

They were protesting, among other things, the Vietnam War that they’d never had to fight in. By contrast, my brother-in-law—a strong, fearless guy and a hero of mine—had served in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam, and came back from a tour of duty a shell of himself. I still don’t know what happened to him, but I knew he bore the burden of his choice. So had our high school’s star quarterback, a friend who lost a leg in the war. I sensed that the people I knew had paid a price, and these protesters hadn’t.

Even I knew something about suffering the consequences of one’s actions, having squandered a scholarship I’d won to a good college a few years earlier. After dropping out I was on my own, while the protesters were children of the middle class who didn’t seem to know anything about real life, at least not my side of it. Not that we were impoverished, and no one in my immediate family was in jail or on welfare. We were just working-class folk, and the protesters were not.

When these comfortable flower children demonstrated in the name of people like me, they made me feel like an object. I was "the proletariat." When they met me, they would say, "Oh, man, let me talk to you, man, ’cause you know what’s going on on the streets." There was a patronizing sense of, "I know how your people have suffered. We’re going to make this a better world for you."

By 1969, my sense of responsibility to my young wife and two daughters had deepened. I wanted to re-establish my academic bona fides and get into the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus. That way I could keep working and earn a degree at modest cost. My hope was to achieve simple upward mobility, in order to help my family and also to redeem myself in the eyes of my father.

I had the vague thought of eventually going to law school or some such thing. But the first step was clear—finish college. And so with hopes of soon being able to transfer to the university, I enrolled at Chicago’s Southeast Junior College.

It was located on part of a high school campus (where Dick Butkus had played high school football), and truth be told operated a lot like a glorified high school. There was a party atmosphere, though there were also some serious people around. I began taking a full academic load while still working full-time, and my wife took a part-time job to help make ends meet.

I would go to classes during the day and leave at 3:00 in the afternoon for my second-shift job. I’d work from 4:00 to midnight, and then I’d come home, see my wife and maybe my kids in the morning, then head out to classes the next day. I was doing well in my second semester when U.S. forces invaded Cambodia, stirring up protests around the country.

Students at this junior college were mainly working-class kids, roughly half white and half black, from the racially mixed neighborhood. Student activism here was a trickle-down version of what was going on at more famous places like Berkeley and Columbia. The shooting at Kent State occurred right in these weeks. Protests were infectious, and Southeast Junior College students organized a big demonstration.

It’s kind of comic that I can’t now recall the issue they were fighting for. It was never clear what the protesters hoped to accomplish. Students were mainly just protesting to protest.

The junior college was as much a social institution as an academic one for most students, and a running card game of bid whist was always going on. So when it came time to engage in political protests, wave Black Power signs, and so forth, people would just abandon the recreation room where the card games were in bloom to go out in the streets.

My view was, "I don’t have time for this." Mine wasn’t a sharply political attitude, and certainly I was horrified at what had happened at Kent State, but I thought the local protest was ridiculous. It was led by people I didn’t respect. Meanwhile, final exams were coming, and I needed to go about my business.

So I walked past the angry crowd to go to the library to study for the exams that would determine whether I could transfer to a more serious school and earn a bachelor’s degree. And I found that the librarian had barricaded herself inside with furniture in front of the door, because she feared the students were going to trash the building. When I asked her to let me in so I could study, she refused, thinking it might be a trick.

I started to tell her my story. "Look, ma’am, I’m older than these students. I work full-time. I came here to study because I have two kids at home and can’t get any work done there. And when I leave here I have to go to my job for eight hours. This place is my only chance. I have to do well here or else my life is not going to be good."

Finally she relented and cautiously opened up the door to let me in. While I worked, the librarian and I could hear the loudspeakers and protests outside. I worked on through, got in my car, and drove to my job later that afternoon, the same as usual.

One person who was helping me at the time was my calculus teacher. He was a Greek, a retired engineer spending his old age teaching calculus in a glorified high school to kids who didn’t come from much money. There were ten of us in the class, which had a boot camp atmosphere. We were all trying to get ahead, and he was a powerful motivator who urged us on and taught us we could escape whatever ghetto we had come from. With his
assistance I eventually landed a scholarship to Northwestern University, where he had studied.

What struck me as so ironic when I was huddled down with my textbooks was the way the protesters outside were wrecking the only vehicle that could help solve the problem they were complaining about. The demonstration’s ostensible cause was Vietnam, but at our school the main emphasis was on black power. In retrospect, I was on my way to becoming one of the most successful black people to come out of the South Side of Chicago in that generation. But the path led through that library, not out on the protest ground.

Glenn C. Loury is a professor of economics at Boston University.