MY FIRST RIOT
There were hundreds of underground newspapers in the U.S. published on military bases, in major cities- yet none were quite like The Great Speckled Bird. Mixing politics with the counterculture, Mike Wallace had called the paper "the Wall Street Journal of the underground press" and it had been noticed out of the 100's of papers being printed. http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/3403/1/50
The reason? People growing up in the 60's in the south were still living with racism and segregation. The first time I went to Stone Mountain, which years later I would discover was owned by a family in the KKK, I saw a picnic of Klansmen and their families- right next to a Black Baptist picnic. No Klansman was actually wearing their robes, no one was yelling at each other, but the Klan presence was still strong. There were still towns in Georgia run by the Klan, and everyone knew they ran Fulton County. The first time I heard a teacher in class use the "n" word I was in shock. I had grown up in Japan, found myself in the deep south and could not believe what I heard people and students saying.
I never, never heard the "n" word from any hippie.
That's what made the scene in Atlanta different from San Francisco. The Klan didn't run that city.
It was pretty easy to spot Klansmen. Some had jewelry that had KKK on the band. Some drove cars with AKIA bumperstickers ( A KLANSMAN I AM is what AKIA stood for). There was an underground paper for them too, THE THUNDERBOLT which called for a boycott when The Little Rascals shorts were shown on TV (because the classes were integrated in the films) and a boycott of a bread company that had decided to hire blacks.
You could not ignore the alliance of Democrats and Klansmen. You could not ignore Lester Maddox.
Maddox ran the Pickrick Restaurant on Northside Drive serving up to 400 white customers a day. By the fireplace he kept a pick handle which he would actually use to smash a black ministers windshield with who had made the mistake of trying to enter his restaurant. Then he pulled a gun on the minister
and was arrested on gun charges. An all white jury would quickly acquit him. His behavior overshadowed any Constitutional battle he might have been waging, he was seen as a violent racist. Which made him a hero to cops, workers and fellow Democrats. He cashed in on this by selling pick handles and signing them for customers, until he was forced to close his restaurant. Or rather, he closed it to keep from integrating.
He ran as a Democrat against Jimmy Carter for Governor and crushed him. A high school drop out, Maddox was a hero to whites in the south who feared blacks "taking over". During the primary when his landslide seemed apparent, Martin Luther King said he "was ashamed to be a Georgian".
Trust me, nothing like this was going on in San Francisco.
When Martin Luther King's funeral took place in 1968 Maddox refused to attend and was caught by news cameras trying to raise lowered flags, quickly backing off. Sitting in the state capitol building surrounded by his all white police department, he waited for the riots that never came.
This was the atmosphere in Georgia when kids, and we were all kids, decided to withdraw into our own community.
Piedmont Park would become central to all of us, and the weekend free concerts would eventually draw thousands. Tipped off to the bands playing by the Bird, the two biggest draws were The Hampton Grease Band and The Allman Brothers.
Bruce Hampton led guitarists Glenn Phillips and Harold Kelling into uncharted territory at every show. Mixing Captain Beefheart, Brecht and Frank Zappa stylings with country, rock and jazz there was simply nothing that sounded like them. They were popular in Atlanta, but baffled hippies elsewhere.
In 1969 I sat stoned listening to them in the park when a policeman walked a kid through the crowd, holding a gun to his head. People at first were stunned to see this, and sat in shock. As another cop approached, the gun wielding cop yelled, "Careful, this man is on pot" and the shock- turned to anger.
People began to stand up, and follow the armed cop. Maybe they wanted to make sure the kid wasn't shot down, but they quietly followed them and others began to join this odd procession. As the dangerous pot smoker was put in the police car, the crowd surrounded the car, and chants of "Let him go" began. Someone threw a pine cone, and more police began to show up.
People began rocking the car as the first tear gas canister was thrown. Then another. And another.
Hampton Grease band began to improvise. They began to play to the sounds of the riot as tear gas drifted across the crowd and stage.
Time stands still during a riot, a surreal atmosphere develops. Some cops began randomly selecting people from the crowd and clubbing them, tear gas floated across the hill and bandstand- and the band played on. Someone would walk by bleeding, a hippie would tackle a cop, my eyes would burn and all the while I would wonder, what would happen next?
The riot began to end, who had won? The band. Which had endured tear gas and had been jamming the entire time.
I would be in other riots in those days, but never would I be in another one that had a soundtrack!
