In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the Black Panthers as "[T]he greatest threat to the internal security of the country," and launched a program that not only successfully splintered The Black Panthers as a community organization, but prevented the unification of different black nationalist groups. COINTELPRO authorized numerous wire tappings, infiltrations, and tactics that fomented violence between rival groups of the Black Panthers, including the Blackstone Rangers, a black gang in Chicago, and the United Slaves, a nationalist group in Los Angeles, which led to many violent disputes between the groups, such as the January 17, 1969 shootout in UCLA which left several Black Panther members, Party captain Bunchy Carter and Deputy Minister John Huggins, dead.
By the 1970s, COINTELPRO was dismantled after the Senate "Church Committee" investigated the program and the FBI itself for abuses against the civil rights and protections of many American citizens and its tactics to foment violence to create civil unrest. Still COINTELPRO had achieved its objective. As a direct result of the program's tactics, many Black Power or nationalist groups and organizations had splintered or fallen apart in a haze of paranoia, drugs, violence, and disunity, leaving an enormous vacuum in poor black communities that were in sore need of leadership. In this vacuum, emerged gangs, such as Los Angeles's Crips and Bloods, whose battles over guns, drug dealing, and territory would terrorize black communities for the better part of two or three decades after the Black Panther movement disintegrated.
COINTELPRO not only targeted black civil rights groups, but antiwar organizations as well. The war in Vietnam was the major theme of the Democratic primaries and as the year edged toward summer, demonstrations against the war heated up, too, culminating in violent clashes between demonstrators and the police at the Democratic national convention in Chicago. Yet prior to this historic breakdown in the democratic process, violence would strike again, this time taking candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy under its cruel blow.
Though Kennedy lost Oregon during the primaries, he gained enough traction from voters that assured his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president at the convention slated later that August. On June 4, Kennedy won big in the California primary, but his victory was cut short in the early hours of June 5 when an assassin's bullet ripped through his head as he and his entourage cut through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after he delivered a rousing and passionate acceptance speech. Kennedy died a day later, taking with him the dreams of antiwar activists who saw in his candidacy a hope for change and renewal.
Kennedy's assassination left a void in the Democratic primaries that could never be filled. Though Humphrey would become the Democratic nominee, the events of the Democratic convention opened a way for the Nixon candidacy to exploit America's weariness not only toward the war but the civil unrest occurring in the country as well.
Antiwar demonstrators emerged on the International Amphitheater in Chicago, Illinois between August 26-29 to protest Humphrey's nomination. Fearing that a Humphrey win would mean more of the same of Johnson's East Asian foreign policies, activists wanted their voices to be heard and to effect the outcome of the nominating process. Instead, what began as uneventful rallies, demonstrations, and an eight-hour concert featuring Detroit protopunk band MC5, the demonstrations outside the convention devolved into anarchy and violence. Chicago mayor Richard Daley exacerbated the tensions between the local authorities and the demonstrators by denying permits for rallies and marches, while unleashing the local police and National Guard, who, according to a 1968 article in Time magazine: "violated the civil rights of countless innocent citizens and contravened every accepted code of professional police discipline." As demonstrators, Yippies, journalists, and passersby alike were attacked with mace and nightsticks, the national press, which had descended on the city to cover the convention, recorded the violence.
Aware of the role the press and broadcast media played in delivering a political message to the American public through the visceral power of televised images, perfectly demonstrated during the civil rights movement when television cameras captured southern police setting howling dogs and fire hoses upon marching school children, antiwar protesters took advantage of the swell of news cameras in the area and shouted: "The whole world is watching," a catchall phrase that bore witness to the level of gestapo-like tactics employed by Chicago authorities to bring law and order to the city. Political protest groups, such as the Yippies, a theatrical political group founded by Abbie Hoffmann and Jerry Rubin, used absurdist street theater, puppetry, or other gimmicks to create what Situationist Guy de Bord called "the spectacle" as a way of getting televised attention to their causes. Since 1968, protesters have shaped political marches and rallies precisely to gain the attention of the broadcast news. The WTO protests in Seattle, 1999, for instance, is a direct descendant of 1960s style of political demonstrating.
