The 1968 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XIX Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event held in Mexico City, Mexico, from October 12 to the 27th.
Following a summer of increasingly large demonstrations in Mexico City protesting the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, armed forces of Mexico opened fire October 2, 1968 on unarmed civilians, killing an undetermined number, in the hundreds. It occurred in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. The events are considered part of the Mexican Dirty War, when the government used its forces to suppress political opposition. The massacre occurred 10 days before the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
A protest is a public expression of objection, disapproval or dissent towards an idea or course of action, typically a political one. Protests can take many different forms, from individual statements to mass demonstrations. Protesters may organize a protest as a way of publicly making their opinions heard in an attempt to influence public opinion or government policy, or they may undertake direct action in an attempt to directly enact desired changes themselves. Where protests are part of a systematic and peaceful nonviolent campaign to achieve a particular objective, and involve the use of pressure as well as persuasion, they go beyond mere protest and may be better described as cases of civil resistance or nonviolent resistance.
Beginning in May 1968, a period of civil unrest occurred throughout France, lasting some seven weeks and punctuated by demonstrations, general strikes, and the occupation of universities and factories. At the height of events, which have since become known as May 68, the economy of France came to a halt. The protests reached such a point that political leaders feared civil war or revolution; the national government briefly ceased to function after President Charles de Gaulle secretly fled France to Germany at one point. The protests spurred movements worldwide, with songs, imaginative graffiti, posters, and slogans.
Student activism or campus activism is work by students to cause political, environmental, economic, or social change. Although often focused on schools, curriculum, and educational funding, student groups have influenced greater political events.
The German student movement was a protest movement that took place during the late 1960s in West Germany. It was largely a reaction against the perceived authoritarianism and hypocrisy of the West German government and other Western governments, and the poor living conditions of students. A wave of protests—some violent—swept West Germany, fueled by violent over-reaction by the police and encouraged by contemporary protest movements across the world. Following more than a century of conservatism among German students, the German student movement also marked a significant major shift to the left and radicalization of student activism.
Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began with demonstrations in 1964 against the escalating role of the United States in the Vietnam War and grew into a broad social movement over the ensuing several years. This movement informed and helped shape the vigorous and polarizing debate, primarily in the United States, during the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s on how to end the war.
The Polish 1968 political crisis, also known in Poland as March 1968, Students' March, or March events, was a series of major student, intellectual and other protests against the communist regime of the Polish People's Republic. The crisis resulted in the suppression of student strikes by security forces in all major academic centres across the country and the subsequent repression of the Polish dissident movement. It was also accompanied by mass emigration following an antisemitic campaign waged by the minister of internal affairs, General Mieczysław Moczar, with the approval of First Secretary Władysław Gomułka of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). The protests overlapped with the events of the Prague Spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia – raising new hopes of democratic reforms among the intelligentsia. The Czechoslovak unrest culminated in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20 August 1968.
Student riots, college riots, or campus riots are riots precipitated by students, generally from a college, university, or other school. Student riots are often an aspect of student protests.
Natalya Yevgenyevna Gorbanevskaya was a Russian poet, a translator of Polish literature and a civil-rights activist. She was one of the founders and the first editor of A Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1982). On 25 August 1968, with seven others, she took part in the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1970 a Soviet court sentenced Gorbanevskaya to incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. She was released from the Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital in 1972, and emigrated from the USSR in 1975, settling in France. In 2005, she became a citizen of Poland.
In 1968, a series of protests at Columbia University in New York City were one among the various student demonstrations that occurred around the globe in that year. The Columbia protests erupted over the spring of that year after students discovered links between the university and the institutional apparatus supporting the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as their concern over an allegedly segregated gymnasium to be constructed in the nearby Morningside Park. The protests resulted in the student occupation of many university buildings and the eventual violent removal of protesters by the New York City Police Department.
The protests of 1968 comprised a worldwide escalation of social conflicts, predominantly characterized by popular rebellions against military and bureaucratic elites, who responded with an escalation of political repression.
Campus protest or student protest is a form of student activism that takes the form of protest at university campuses. Such protests encompass a wide range of activities that indicate student dissatisfaction with a given political or academics issue and mobilization to communicate this dissatisfaction to the authorities and society in general and hopefully remedy the problem. Protest forms include but are not limited to: sit-ins, occupations of university offices or buildings, strikes etc. More extreme forms include suicide such as the case of Jan Palach's, and Jan Zajíc's protests against the end of the Prague Spring and Kostas Georgakis' protest against the Greek military junta of 1967–1974.
As an act of protest, occupation is a strategy often used by social movements and other forms of collective social action in order to squat and hold public and symbolic spaces, buildings, critical infrastructure such as entrances to train stations, shopping centers, university buildings, squares, and parks. Opposed to a military occupation which attempts to subdue a conquered country, a protest occupation is a means to resist the status quo and advocate a change in public policy. Occupation attempts to use space as an instrument in order to achieve political and economic change, and to construct counter-spaces in which protesters express their desire to participate in the production and re-imagination of urban space. Often, this is connected to the right to the city, which is the right to inhabit and be in the city as well as to redefine the city in ways that challenge the demands of capitalist accumulation. That is to make public spaces more valuable to the citizens in contrast to favoring the interests of corporate and financial capital.
The Mexican Movement of 1968, known as the Movimiento Estudiantil was a social movement. A broad coalition of students from Mexico's leading universities garnered widespread public support for political change in Mexico, particularly since the government had spent large amounts of public funding to build Olympic facilities for the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games.
The Black Student Movement (BSM) is an organization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is the second largest student-run organization and one of the largest cultural organizations on the school's campus. The organization was created on November 7, 1967 to combat problems of black recruit, admissions, and integration on UNC-CH campus. Black Student Movement has created many subgroups and committees such as: Opeyo! Dance Company, Celebration of Black Womanhood (CBW), Emphasizing Brotherhood Across Campus Effectively (EmBrACE), Harmonyx A Capella, UNC Gospel Choir, Ebony Reader's Onyx Theatre (EROT), Black Ink and the Political Action Committee (PAC) to name a few.
The March of the One Hundred Thousand was a manifestation of popular protest against the military dictatorship in Brazil, which occurred on June 26, 1968 in Rio de Janeiro, organized by the student movement and with the participation of artists, intellectuals and other sectors of Brazilian society.
The Occupy movement was an international progressive socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the lack of "real democracy" around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and economic justice and new forms of democracy. The movement had many different scopes, since local groups often had different focuses, but its prime concerns included how large corporations control the world in a way that disproportionately benefited a minority, undermined democracy and caused instability. It formed part of what Manfred Steger called the "global justice movement".
The Northern Ireland civil rights movement dates to the early 1960s, when a number of initiatives emerged which challenged inequality and discrimination in Northern Ireland. The Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) was founded by Conn McCluskey and his wife, Patricia. Conn was a doctor, and Patricia was a social worker who had worked in Glasgow for a period, and who had a background in housing activism. Both were involved in the Homeless Citizens League, an organisation founded after Catholic women occupied disused social housing. The HCL evolved into the CSJ, focusing on lobbying, research and publicising discrimination. The campaign for Derry University was another mid-1960s campaign.
Rhodes Must Fall (#RhodesMustFall) was a protest movement that began on 9 March 2015, originally directed against a statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) that commemorates Cecil Rhodes. The campaign for the statue's removal received global attention and led to a wider movement to "decolonise" education across South Africa. On 9 April 2015, following a UCT Council vote the previous night, the statue was removed.
