Title: Behind the Protests Against the Vietnam War in 1968 | Time
Headings: Behind the Anti-War Protests That Swept America in 1968
Behind the Anti-War Protests That Swept America in 1968
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Content: The antiwar movement became more grounded in political analysis than in the starry-eyed assurance of earlier protesters, Anthony DeCurtis tells LIFE. “ It was about capitalism and about something that needed to be overthrown,” he says, “and not by consciousness.” Protests spread, and schools served as major centers of agitation. This was encouraged by the Johnson administration’s decision to abolish draft deferments for most graduate students, a move that affected some 650,000 men. Muhammad Ali, who had been banned from boxing because he refused the draft, toured campuses, giving hundreds of speeches. At Harvard Law School, professor Alan Dershowitz taught a class on legal ways to resist the draft. Students there, as well as at Radcliffe and Boston University, took part in a four-day hunger strike against the war. And at Columbia, 3,500 students and 1,000 faculty members boycotted classes in protest. SDS members led by undergraduate Mark Rudd voiced their opposition to the school’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis and weapons research for the military, while also fighting the school over the construction of a new gym that they complained offered discriminatory access to Harlem neighborhood residents. They also took over school buildings and occupied the president’s office.