In exclusive monthly installations, Tim will showcase images from his vast archive and share his experiences with Photojournalism Now's readers.
Special Feature:
Tim Page Archive - Protest New York City 1967
"New York City is always a weird blast when you first alight there. So big, so tall, so intense - madness is some form of organised mayhem. The inhabitants almost a separate race with a distinct argot, beyond intriguing, beguiling, seductive. For a photographer it was entrancing and that was after a long summer in France and Paris - a pay back for two years in the ‘Nam. It was the fall of ’67 and the war had seriously escalated causing the first waves of the anti-war movement.
It started mid-town outside the Hilton where Dean Rusk, Secretary of State was in residence for his daughter's marriage to a black dude; double contentious. The anti-war folk blockaded the NYPD cavalry that blocked access to the foyer. So easy to cover, it was three blocks from TIME/LIFE where they had thrust a brick of Tri-X at me and a “go get”.
It remained peaceful until fledgling mobs broke off to stop traffic and climb on cars. The police gloves came off and the cavalry started breaking up the demonstrators. Billy clubs and police vans followed, folk went home, the message well broadcast as virtually all the networks and papers were within blocks of the action.
Daybreak found the whole contingent back on the streets, this time downtown around the armed forces induction centre on Canal Street. There was a turnout of thousands, mostly older folk. Concerned mothers, old veterans, business types. The younger part of the crowd contained the same radical elements that went feral the previous night. For an hour or so there was a running skirmish in lower Manhattan as the majority peacefully blockaded the draft centre preventing its opening and the next lot of cannon fodder from joining the armed forces.
The power of the anti-war movement escalated parallel to that of the conflict, a movement that the North Vietnamese and Liberation Front played to: the swell against the war now took in blacks, gays, hippies as well as having the sympathies of more than half the populace. It would be a key factor in Johnson not running again, Robert Kennedy’s assassination and Nixon’s demise. Public opinion plus other global protests contributed heavily to the cessation of that misguided adventure in neo-colonialism." Words and pictures by Tim Page
The power of the anti-war movement escalated parallel to that of the conflict, a movement that the North Vietnamese and Liberation Front played to: the swell against the war now took in blacks, gays, hippies as well as having the sympathies of more than half the populace. It would be a key factor in Johnson not running again, Robert Kennedy’s assassination and Nixon’s demise. Public opinion plus other global protests contributed heavily to the cessation of that misguided adventure in neo-colonialism." Words and pictures by Tim Page
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