Terry Foster: Let's Hope The Conventions Aren't A Repeat Of 1968

By Terry Foster
@TerryFoster971
We need Dr. Martin Luther King today. Or somebody with his power to motivate and with his vision to lead.

We are back into the 1960s where the racial divide turned our country into chaos and made nightly television a night of horrors. I watched the civil rights movement with my family as black people were attacked with police dogs and water hoses and turned up dead in out of the way country back roads and fields.

I would hear the next day as some of the bigger boys and older men screamed how they hated white people and the police.

Today, I can see the same concerns on my children's faces as police are mowed down in the streets and we see that black lives actually do not matter.

We fought each other in the 60s with the backdrop of fears that Communist wanted to attack our soil.

Today we fear Isis. There are a lot of similarities. We fight racial wars while others plot against us.

Three officers were killed and three more injured. In Dallas five officers were killed and nine injured. If you are counting that is eight fatalities and 12 wounded in two weeks. The Black Lives Movement and the new Black Panthers are fueled by police killing blacks and grand jurors letting them go at a 99 percent clip.

So what happens in Cleveland this week as the Republicans host their convention and a week later as the Democrats piled into Philadelphia? Let's hope it is not a repeat of 1968 as the conventions were overshadowed by civil unrest and the assassinations of Dr. King and presidential hopeful Bobby Kennedy.

The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was surrounded by violence, including a clash between protesters and police. The protesters chanted "Police are whores" during a dispute in Grant Park.
There will be protesters again this year. This one is even more dangerous because police are now targets who must not only serve and protect protesters and the rest of the community but must protect themselves.

This fight won't end because our society still wants to play the blame game rather than work on solutions. We continue to navigate our lives through ignorance and fear. It is a dangerous way to live as we've discovered.

It is a hot summer in more ways than one and it will continue to boil until blacks, whites and blues come to understand our problems and fears and work to fix them. We need dialogue, not screaming matches where people spout their own agendas without regard to anybody else.

The troubling thing for me is we have people both domestic and abroad that are plotting every day to hurt our country and brothers and sisters who live in it.

And we are fighting each other?

I thought I would never see the 1960s again.

Rodney King once asked "Can't we just get along?" I want to go deeper. Is it possible for us to become family? Yes, family fights and call each other names. But at the end of the day, we got each other's backs.

That is my Dr. King dream.
(Foster can be reached at Terry.Foster@cbsradio.com.)