Nineteen sixty-eight was a year of youthful protest, political unrest, and violence across the globe. The year of massive antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy saw equal or greater turmoil around the world. Half of Italy’s universities were occupied; a massive student strike in France turned into a violent confrontation with police; prodemocracy students in Mexico City led huge protests that drew police gunfire; and protests and street battles with police took place in Prague, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, and London.

René Bourrigaud, French Student

My most vivid memory of May ’68? The new-found ability for everyone to speak — to speak of anything with anyone. In that month of talking during May you learnt more than in the whole of your five years of studying.

Source: Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 9.

The “Two Thousand Words” Manifesto, June 27, 1968, Prague, Czechoslovakia

Throughout the spring and summer of 1968, the government of Czechoslovakia, under new communist leadership, pursued reforms pushed by students and other protesters. In August, the Soviet Union invaded and put an end to the new openness.

This spring a great opportunity was given to us once again, as it was at the end of the war [World War II]. Again we have the chance to take into our own hands our common cause, which for working purposes we will call socialism, and give it a form more appropriate to our once-good reputation and to the fairly good opinion we used to have of ourselves.

Source: Jaromír Navrátil, The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 181.

Interview with Participants in 1968 Protests in Mexico City

During the summer of 1968, hundreds of thousands of students protested against Mexico’s authoritarian national government and brutal police repression.

Sergio Aguayo: It was, in a symbolic way, the clash of a new Mexico and an old Mexico.

Antonio Azuela: You have a middle class with eyes closed and a group of students saying, this was not a democracy. And this is not working.

Marcela Fernandez de Violante: And so we were together hundred and hundreds and hundreds. We had these big, big meetings at the campus crowded, crowded. And people singing, Que Vivan los Estudiantes … ta-ri-ra-ra-ra-ra.

Marcela Fernandez de Violante: We were very young, very naive. But for the first time, you had this notion that this country was going to be changed by the power of our convictions.

Miguel Breseda: You would get in a bus and give a speech and inform the people. Because newspaper wouldn’t publish anything. And people would give you money, they would congratulate you and they would say, “We are with you young people. …”

Source: Produced by Radio Diaries (radiodiaries.org) and originally broadcast on NPR’s All Things Considered. To hear the entire documentary, visit radiodiaries.org. Used by permission of Radio Diaries.