As we prepare for the GOP Presidential nominating process in 2024 to unfold, let’s look back on the 1968  Republican National Convention and related civil disturbances in Miami. 

These events have fallen into a bit of obscurity. It’s taken a back seat to the 1968 Chicago protests and violence during the Democratic Convention, but the protests in Miami in 1968 similarly organized, coincided with the Republican National Convention, which was nominating Richard Nixon at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

The convention resulted in a fight with Nixon having the middle against Ronald Reagan on the right (then governor of California), and New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, on the left.

 Nixon was the favorite and he threaded the needle to be nominated.

But while Nixon was fighting off Reagan and Rockefeller, a few miles away in the streets of Miami, there was an organized protest more about Civil Rights than Vietnam, but elements of the latter could be found as well. 

This protest began on August 7, 1968 and involved  all of the leading civil rights organizations: the SCLC, led by Ralph Abernathy, the Congress of Racial Equality, led by Jim Farmer, the SNCC, which by that time was led by Stokey Carmichael. Since SNCC was no longer led by the great John Lewis, but was led by Stokey Carmichael, therefore had a little bit of a violent streak in them.

They had converged on Miami as well to bring attention to the issues of poor housing for African Americans, general racial discrimination. This is mere months after Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot dead in Memphis. 

King was killed while he was talking about the poor economic and working conditions for sanitation workers in Memphis. Importantly, and this is a theme that will run through south Florida history for the next 30 or 40 years from 1968 onward, the competition between African-Americans who had been in South Florida and the immigrant communities, particularly Cuban-Americans.

On TFS, we have talked in the past about the 1980 and 1989 Miami riots. That was the flashpoint in 80 and 89, this competition with Cuban Americans. In fact, it wasn’t your traditional white, middle American or ethnic Irish-Catholic or Italian-Catholic versus African American situation in Miami in the 80s.

It was something very different than what we saw in other US cities.. The first time attention was brought to this was in 1968. So, the RNC is taking place and the protest begins and it’s just a protest. It’s like any other civil rights protest.

But, unfortunately, the protest turned violent, as the protesters got harassed.  This included someone who was campaigning for George Wallace, a segregationist who ran a car into the protest.  Additionally bottles and stones were thrown by counter -protesters, at the civil rights marchers. 

Before long, the police had been called out,  tear gas was being used and people were dying.

Governor Claude Kirk, who was simultaneously  trying to become Nixon’s VP selection was caught squarely in the middle. 

Kirk, Abernathy and Miami Mayor Chuck Hall met on the evening of August 7 to try and work out their differences. While nothing was settled, they agreed to meet again the next morning at 11am. 

But the following day Kirk and Hall did not show up to meet Abernathy and sent underlings instead. 

Meanwhile the violence had gotten so extensive that Kirk called out the Florida National Guard and Miami Police under infamous Chief Walter Headley got increasingly aggressive. 

In the end you had three dead, over 30 injured and hundreds of arrests. 

Meanwhile Nixon was perfecting his “law and order” theme to run in the fall campaign miles away. And instead of picking Kirk as his running mate, he picked Spiro Agnew, one of the most pathetic people to ever grace a major party national ticket. Agnew’s selection was because in Maryland where he was Governor, similar protests were put down not so gently. 

Kirk’s ultimate sin in the eyes of the Nixon team, which was embarking on its southern strategy was to not put down the protests immediately on August 7, and use force at that point. Negotiating with Abernathy, proved to be Kirk’s undoing, incredibly enough.