The whole world is watching

For other uses, see The Whole World Is Watching (disambiguation).
Chicago police drag an anti-Vietnam war protester across Michigan Avenue on August 28, 1968, during the Democratic National Convention as the crowd chants "The whole world is watching".

"The whole world is watching" was a phrase chanted by anti-Vietnam War demonstrators as they were beaten and arrested by police outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

The event occurred and was broadcast nationally from taped footage on the night of Wednesday, August 28, the third day of the convention. Demonstrators took up the chant as police were beating and pulling many of them into police vans, "each with a superfluous whack of a nightstick,"[1] after the demonstrators, being barricaded in the park by the police, began to come into Michigan Avenue in front of the hotel.

The prescient and apparently spontaneous chant quickly became famous. The following year, it served as the title of a television movie about student activism.

  1. ^ Perlstein, Rick (2008). Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Simon and Schuster. p. 324. ISBN 978-0-7432-4302-5.