Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

Century City Anti War Protest

The Century City Plaza Hotel was home to a major anti-war protest held on June 23,1967. Like much of the resistance at the time, the protest was depicted by the media in a biased way–praising the police and dehumanizing the protestors. The protest took place outside of the hotel while President Lyndon B Johnson hosted a fundraiser and was set to deliver a speech that would give him a political boost with anti-war Democrats. Outside the hotel a crowd of 80 antiwar groups gathered totaling about 10,000 protestors who received a parade permit allowing them to march past the hotel and onto Santa Monica Boulevard. However when protestors got to the front of the hotel, many of them stopped and sat down, halting the march. The police ordered the protestors to disperse or they would be arrested. When they didn't, a violent confrontation erupted. 
The police forcibly dispersed the crowd attempting to push them back and using their nightsticks when met with resistance. The justification for the “dispersal” was that President Johnson would have been in danger if the protestors rushed into the hotel. The idea that the protestors failed to disperse is also not as simple as the media portrayed. The officers had largely narrowed the line of march just past the hotel which caused a back up and a lack of space for the protestors to move. The protest had also attracted spectators who clogged up the sidewalk and path of the protestors .
The police attacked demonstrators for more than an hour after the dispersal order. Reports from witnesses and participants describe how they saw cops hit a young woman with a baby in her arms, knocking her to the ground and kicking her while she was on her back. Attorney Sherwin Shayne who was present that day recalls an officer knocking two boys down; which subsequently caused Shayne to fall, as he fell an officer clubbed the left side of his head and in his abdomen. The officer then took Shayne to three different locations and booked him at each. Some officers even chased demonstrators further than a mile from the protest site. 
What began as a peaceful protest in Century City became a bloody and aggressive confrontation by LAPD leaving many people injured, traumatized, and 51 arrested. Following the Century City protest Lyndon B. Johnson did not campaign in public aside from military bases. The event also marked a turning point in Los Angeles as well, as white liberals had now experienced the police brutality that the Black population of LA had been plagued with for decades.



Sources:
Davis Mike and Jon Wiener. Set the Night on Fire : L.A. in the Sixties. Verso 2020.
Masters, Nathan. “3 Protests from L.A. History That Got the Public’s Attention.” PBS SoCal, 21 June 2022, www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/3-protests-from-l-a-history-that-got-the-publics-attention. 
 

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