After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, thousands of U.S. troops stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, were sent to Chicago for riot control duty.
In mid-August 1968, another large group of soldiers stationed at Fort Hood was scheduled to return to Chicago in late August to control potential rioters at the Democratic National Convention.
At midnight on Friday, August 23, sixty African American troops staged a nonviolent sit-in on base to protest their deployment to Chicago.
Several of the demonstrators said they had grown up in low-income neighborhoods and suggested that they could empathize with the folks in those areas who might feel riots were necessary.
[4] The protesting soldiers became known as the "Fort Hood 43"; their refusal to deploy to Chicago for riot-control duties was one of the largest acts of dissent in United States military history.