Set to host Democrat National Convention again, Chicago aims to stop comparison to ’68
Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago understands the comparison to 1968. Once again, the city is gearing up to host a latesummer Democratic National Convention amid a backdrop of fury and antiwar campus protests from the party’s younger, leftist flank.
But that is where the parallel ends for Johnson.
“We’re a different city. I’m a different mayor. And our police department is in a much different place than it was in 1968,” he said in an interview last week.
Johnson, a 48-year-old Democrat who has served one year in office, stressed that this was not the same Chicago as the one that erupted into chaos during the 1968 convention. Then, police officers attacked protesters with billy clubs, dragging them out of Grant Park in a show of bloody force. This time, the Chicago Police Department is undergoing extensive training and preparation, officials said, including de-escalation techniques, as they do before other protests and large events.
And Johnson, who was elected mayor after a career as a social studies teacher, labor organizer and county commissioner, drew a distinction between himself and Mayor Richard J. Daley, the powerful leader who ran Chicago during the 1968 convention and whose own police department stoked tensions and violence.
“We’ve been through these type of challenges before,” Johnson said. “But the difference is who’s in charge right now,” he said, adding that he had been part of “countless peaceful demonstrations” throughout his life.
The August convention, which a few protesters have argued for canceling altogether, presents a particular political balancing act for Johnson, who was elected with support from Chicago’s most liberal segment. He must satisfy his heavily progressive base, including voters who sympathize with the goals of anti-war demonstrators, and also a broad contingent of Chicagoans who want to keep the city safe and free of major disruptions.
Already, the pro-Palestinian protests that have emerged on university campuses across the country, including in Chicago, seemed to be revealing glimpses of the mayor’s approach. On Tuesday morning, as University of Chicago police officers in helmets and shields dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment that had been stationed on the university quad for more than a week, Johnson’s office issued a statement signaling the mayor’s discomfort with the university’s actions, saying that his office had communicated “serious safety and operational concerns” about the plan.
A university spokesperson added that the Chicago Police Department had declined a request to help remove the encampment.
And the mayor’s confidence that Chicago will host a “peaceful, vibrant, energetic” convention for four days in August contrasts with the tensions already building beyond college campuses: Organizations protesting Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip have regularly marched through downtown Chicago in recent months and vowed to do so in larger numbers in August.
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois filed a federal lawsuit against the city on behalf of a protest group, arguing that Chicago officials were infringing on activists’ First Amendment rights by denying permits to march close to the convention, which will take place Aug. 19-22. Groups have been offered Grant Park, near Lake Michigan, as a protest venue, but they have objected that it is too far from the United Center, one of the convention sites, about three miles away.
The campus demonstrations and clashes have only intensified concerns that discord in the Democratic Party will carry over to the convention, which will draw President Joe Biden, members of Congress,
governors and thousands of party delegates, in addition to journalists from all over the world.
Byron Sigcho-Lopez, a City Council member in Chicago who is an outspoken member of the Progressive Caucus, said he believed the convention should not be held in Chicago, considering the growing frustration over Biden’s handling of the conflict in the Middle East since Hamas attacked Israel on
Oct. 7. The council is officially nonpartisan but overwhelmingly Democratic, with some independents.
“I think it will be tremendously challenging,” he said, adding that he supported the pro-Palestinian protesters but that he was particularly concerned about violence from counterprotesters with extremist roots. “They intend to create chaos in our city and create violence in our city.”
Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, said his group had planned to join protests outside the DNC even before the war in Gaza began last fall. But as fighting continues overseas, Palestinian issues have become the focus of planned demonstrations in Chicago, rather than one cause among many.
“The scope of this thing changed in October,” said Abudayyeh, who lives in the Chicago area, which has one of the country’s largest populations of Palestinian Americans.
Daniel O’Shea, a former high-ranking official for the Chicago Police Department, said that law enforcement would be watching for signs of agitators who join a protest with the intent to disrupt it or break the law.
“That’s the hard part,” he said, noting that those people might try to conceal their identities or carry backpacks with objects to attack police officers.
Security for the convention is coordinated by the U.S. Secret Service, which has been preparing with federal, state and local agencies for more than a year.