Protests of 1968

The protests of 1968 were a worldwide wave of demonstrations, strikes and uprisings that peaked in that single year. Led largely by students but often joined by workers, they targeted the Vietnam War, racial injustice, authoritarian rule and rigid social conventions. Movements in the United States, France, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Poland, Yugoslavia, Japan, Pakistan and many other countries influenced one another, and 1968 became shorthand for a generation's revolt.

The post-war baby boom had produced a very large cohort of young people, many of them the first in their families to attend university. They had grown up with television, the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war, and the 1960s brought powerful civil rights, anti-war, feminist and New Left movements. In the communist states of Eastern Europe, earlier risings in East Germany, Hungary and Poland showed that discontent existed on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The Tet Offensive at the start of 1968 fuelled opposition to the Vietnam War in American cities and in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. In March a demonstration in Grosvenor Square, London, left 86 injured. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on 4 April, riots broke out in more than 100 American cities, and in late April students occupied parts of Columbia University. In August the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was accompanied by five days of street protests, ending in police violence shown on television. At the Mexico City Olympics in October, the sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the medal podium and were sent home.

The most dramatic upheaval came in May in France. Student protests against university rules and conservative values spread to the factories, and wildcat strikes involving up to ten million workers paralysed the country. For a few days the government of Charles de Gaulle appeared to be in danger of falling. Students in Italy, West Germany, Sweden and Britain staged occupations and protests of their own.

In Czechoslovakia the reforms of the Prague Spring under Alexander Dubček led to open public debate until the Warsaw Pact invasion in August. On 25 August eight people protested in Moscow's Red Square and were swiftly arrested. In Poland, the banning of a play by Adam Mickiewicz in Warsaw sparked student demonstrations in March; the government closed the universities, arrested more than a thousand students and ran a propaganda campaign branding protesters as Zionists, after which most of Poland's remaining Jews left the country. In Belgrade, students protested from 2 June until Josip Broz Tito acknowledged some of their grievances in a broadcast on 9 June, though little reform followed.

In Mexico, months of student protest against government authoritarianism ended on 2 October at Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City, where police, soldiers and paramilitaries opened fire, killing and wounding an unknown number of people. In Brazil the killing of a student in March helped trigger the March of the One Hundred Thousand against the military dictatorship. In Northern Ireland a banned civil rights march in Derry on 5 October was broken up by the police, a step towards the Troubles. From November, students and workers in Pakistan rose against Ayub Khan, who resigned in March 1969.

Few governments fell in 1968, but the year left deep marks. The modern environmental movement traces part of its origins to that year, the women's liberation movement won international attention with its protest at the Miss America pageant in September, and Black Power gained a global profile. In some countries, such as Turkey, parts of the student movement later turned to armed struggle.

Our 1960 map shows the Cold War world in which these protests unfolded, including the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies.