And just previous to the riots, an army detachment had crossed over from Virginia to put down the riots. The military could not find the reported corpses strewing the sidewalks. Wisely they waited. They were only a little bit early.
— R. A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions
This has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale.
I was a small child at the time, only 3 or 4 years old. My parents and I went one Sunday to a free concert in Piedmont Park in Atlanta, advertised as an event for families and young people of all ages. There was a new young group performing, The Allman Brothers Band, that my parents were excited to see. I do not remember the music.
Shortly after we arrived, the police started to surround the event. We went to our car and tried to leave the park, but they had blocked all the exits with police cars and commandeered city buses. They weren’t letting anyone leave.
We found a hill at the edge of the park with a small playground on top. My parents and I sat on the swings and watched the events just a hundred yards or so below us. The police formed a riot line and started marching in on the crowd. They fired teargas into the crowd and put on their gas masks. I remember one of the concertgoers picking up a teargas canister and throwing it back at the line of police. That was the provocation they needed. The police surged forward and started beating the hippie concert goers unconscious and dragging them to the paddy wagons and a couple of city buses. They stacked them like cordwood and hauled them away.
I remember officers on horseback with some kind of black flexible club they were using to bash people with. My dad explained they were lengths of garden hose filled with lead shot.
I have no idea how long we were there. We remained pretty much forgotten, and drove home long after everything was over and they’d closed the park for the evening.
Decades later I read that the mayor believed that these longhair kids weren’t smart enough to organize, and the existence of anti-war protest was proof in his mind of Kremlin instigators. He was convinced that this was an existential Communist threat to democracy as he understood it (which today we understand as autocracy). He sent the police in to quell a riot. There was no riot. All the riot squad had to do was start teargassing the crowd–whaddaya know, some people fought back. Voila! they had their riot.
I was terrified of the police for decades after. I can still smell the teargas in my memory.
Here’s a link to a photo I found online. I remember it being far more violent than the article describes.
