The Other ’68 Riot
- Anonymous
- August 07, 1968
- Miami, Fl
- To depict police escorting a man injured during a riot
- It is an original source of information about the topic
- Yes, biggest news corporations rely on AP, even though the identity of photographer is unknown.
- How much less publicity did the Miami Riot get in 1968 compared to the Chicago Riot?
I would try to obtain recordings of news broadcast of that time. I would compare how much attention was given to the race riot in Miami, where African-American community protested the poverty and racism at home Vs. the Chicago Riot that was initiated by the white majority protesting war in Vietnam. One of the 3 TV networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, must still have records that I could use. They might be willing to share them for educational purposes; not for the profit-seeking purposes. I would also need to do extensive research about each riot and identify who were the protesters/rioters, what were they protesting, what kind of damage did the rioting cause in each respective city, did people get hurt, and whether the protests were answered. News articles by major publications from that time might help me answers these questions. Another important piece of information to research is the platform of the Republican and Democratic Conventions, as well as the reactions of all the politicians who witnessed the riots happening during the Conventions.
I believe that the poster is on the right research path and he answer all of the questions for the assignment.
That is one powerful picture. Good question also, the Democratic convention gave Chicago riot much more publicity, but that does not make the riots in Miami any less significant.
Anton:
Your title suggests there were only two riots in 1968. There were in fact many more than that. You should be explicit and precise: you’re talking about the other “convention” riot.
There’s quite a significant literature (see the work of George Rude, and the notion of history “from the bottom up”) on riots, how we are to read them, to understand their causes, and how much we can learn from them. The questions you ask in your final paragraph get at a lot of these points. What other kinds of sources beyond the news (which have their own biases and constructions of the audience) might you examine to anser those questions? How might you explain a riot “from the bottom up”?
You have a hypothesis about the reasons that this riot has faded in memory; how might you test that hypothesis? What alternative explanations might there be?
Good job-