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: When 1,000 New York policemen descended on Columbia’s campus to clear out the protesters, that response resulted in many injuries and 700 arrests. Agitation spread to hundreds of schools. A Milwaukee Journal survey found that 75 percent of students supported organized protest as a “legitimate means of expressing student grievances.” And some abandoned the Gandhian principles of nonviolence championed by Martin Luther King Jr. There were three arson attacks at Southern Illinois University by those opposing the war. Students at many universities also opposed recruitment by firms profiting from the war and protested their universities’ investments in companies such as Dow Chemical, which made napalm, a jelly gasoline that was used in Vietnam in firebombs and flamethrowers. Some of those opposed to the war raided draft offices. Father Daniel Berrigan and eight other members of the Catholic Church entered the Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland, and seized hundreds of draft files. Outside, they doused the cards with their own homemade napalm. A group that became know as the Milwaukee 14 broke into that city’s Selective Service office and took 4,000 class 1-A draft cards, dragging them out in sacks and burning them in a park across the street. LIFE Books
Read more in LIFE’s new special edition, 1968: