Today’s AJC Deja News comes to you from the Tuesday, Aug. 5, 1969, edition of The Atlanta Constitution.
June’s violent protests in Atlanta following the death of George Floyd rekindled the debate over what constitutes excessive use of force by police. And since the June 12 police-involved shooting death of Rayshard Brooks, the city is dealing with the consequences of officers pulling back from more proactive policing “because of what they see as anti-police sentiment on the streets and a lack of support from local politicians.”
“Officers are afraid to do their job,” Atlanta police officer Jason Segura, president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers’ local chapter, told the AJC’s Joshua Sharpe in a July 5 article.
Following a 1969 narcotics raid in the Midtown “hippie district,” Atlanta police were also met with excessive force complaints, though none involving a death, after a mass arrest of an estimated 75 to 100 persons. While San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and New York’s Greenwich Village are the most noted counterculture scenes during the Vietnam Era, “The Strip” along Peachtree Street between 8th and 14th Streets in Midtown was Atlanta’s realm of the outre.
Credit: AJC PRINT ARCHIVES
Credit: AJC PRINT ARCHIVES
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“The (late night) arrests followed what police described as a ‘near-riot’ that erupted after Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents and Atlanta detectives raided the area (of 14th and Peachtree streets) looking for dangerous drugs,” Constitution reporter Keeler McCartney wrote. “A short time earlier, the area was filled with shouting hippies and flying bricks and bottles. Several officers were struck by the missiles before the crowd — shouting ‘No more pigs (police)’ and assorted obscenities — could be cleared from the streets.”
“Barricades of furniture and boxes dragged from nearby buildings were thrown up by the hippies,” McCartney continued, “but they were cleared away quickly.”
Credit: Bud Skinner / AJC File
Credit: Bud Skinner / AJC File
“Yes, there was plenty of violence — police violence,” an unidentified woman speaking from the office of the underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird told the Constitution. “They’ve arrested a great number of people out here, many on undetermined charges and some on public profanity, and they’ve manhandled several people. They’ve thrown people against cars and roughed them up.”
>> LEARN MORE: Whatever happened to The Great Speckled Bird?
In a paragraph presaging the current opinions of some questioning the effectiveness of policing in their neighborhoods, McCartney noted the hippies’ “increasing hostility toward the police in recent months, charging that officers supposedly investigating crimes in the area constitute a greater danger to the public than those accused of the alleged crimes.”
Atlanta police at the scene of the 1969 fracas told a different story.
“Officers said as those arrested were loaded into police wagons, other began to gather on the streets and shout: ‘No more pigs’ and obscenities,” McCartney wrote. “Then they began to yell, ‘You’d better watch out — the revolution is about to start.‘”
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