“Stop being juveniles,” a Lindsay aide, Donald Evans, admonished a construction worker. “What do you mean, being a juvenile?” he replied, punching Mr. Evans on the chin.
On May 8, 1970, New York mayor John Lindsay order that all flags on city buildings lowered to half staff, in memory of the students who’d died in the Kent State shootings four days earlier.
Construction workers at the World Trade Center building site got wind of the plan. When anti-war protester assembled at the George Washington statue on Wall Street that day — complete with Viet Cong flags — suits and hard hats joined forces against the hippies, in one of the weirdest 70s events you’ve never heard of: the Hard Hat Riot.
I commemorate Hard Hat Day ever year, as my feeble attempt to re-awaken awareness of this once-infamous event.
Last year, I received this wonderful email on May 8:
Read More...Your post on Hard Hat Riot Day, and your pondering about the validity of the remark, “There was an epidemic of hippie lynchings in New Mexico in 1970 and 1971,” brought back memories of all those wonderfully, leftist-inspired paranoid days that began in the late 1960s, and especially after the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I actually made it to the latter event as I just finished my summer school college finals, and was lucky enough to get tear-gassed on South Michigan Avenue by the Chicago PD. But I got to hear Peter, Paul and Mary live along with the ever-sad Phil Ochs, and to walk with Dick Gregory. But that’s another story of another America.
