The Great Speckled Bird Vol 2 #29 9/29/69 pgs. 2-5

…in our park A gray September afternoon in Piedmont Park, a fall drizzle filtering down onto the people gathered around the pavilion for the music of the Radar and the Brick Wall. The chilling rain gives a vigor to people’s movements and several circles of dancers come and go trying to recapture the intensity of communal fun/ peace from last week’s explosion of sound/feeling/motion. This September concert was merely the most re- cent of such free concerts which date back to the Bird birthday party in April and which occurred regularly on greater and lesser scale all summer, the most memorable being the free Grateful Dead concert when people moved as ONE, and even a policeman was rallied to as a savior of peace.

The tone of this afternoon was solid, people knowing each other, together and calm. We of The Bird were in the Park taking affidavits about police harassment, attempting through the law to insure that young people could move around peacefully in the parks and on the streets without fear of arrest. Then it started.

The Brick Wall-now under charges of drug abuse on the vaguest of information—had just started to play. The word was: Narks—secret police—were lurking in the Park. Several people, protecting their brothers, had already pointed out two men as narks.

George Nikas being arrested.

Suddenly a man in regular clothes came up and grabbed Gorg Nikas, a well-known street person, and brusquely started pushing him out of the Park. About the same time that Nikas shouted, “Show me your badge,” someone rushed from the crowd and tried to pull Nikas away. Immediately, the man pulled a small revolver, grabbed Nikas back, shoved the gun in Nikas back and shouted, “Get back or I’ll blow his fucking brains out.” [He was standing on my dog’s leg and I yelled at him and looked up into a rising gun barrel.]

People began to follow at some distance, a lawyer following within five feet. Nikas demanded again as he was shoved along to see the badge and the crowd picked up the demand, chanting, “Show your badge, show your badge.” Then, when no identification was forthcoming, “Let him go, let him go.” When Nikas ran into a light pole, the procession stopped short and a crowd of about twenty gathered around, chanting, “Let him go.” The gun was then brandished at the crowd. Within a minute Nikas pulled away and ran, the man following with his gun for only a few steps before he turned and ran in the opposite direction.

Things cooled, the Brick Wall played on, and people gravitated back to the pavilion, a solid anger remaining. Steve Cole took the mike to announce, “Somebody’s been busted in our Park, but the boy has gotten away. Cool it. There are narks in the crowd wearing guns and they’re crazy.” The music returned. About ten minutes later police cars started arriving. The man who had grabbed Nikas came striding into the Park escorted by two helmeted policemen and two uniformed policemen went directly to Bill Fibben, a Bird photographer who had shot the whole Nikas hassle.

As Fibben was being hustled out of the pavilion area, the crowd began a spontaneous chant, “Pigs, pigs, pigs.” The police then grabbed the nearest person, David Slier, and took him along with Fibben to the cars parked near the concession. [Luckily Bill had emptied his film and handed it off before the cops came back.]

We stood and fought back: The Parks belong to the People.

A crowd of two to three hundred quickly surrounded the police cars, and a car was brought to block a forward exit. Nikas was handcuffed in the back seat of one of  the cars and Fibben and Slier were in the other. The experience was finally sinking deep now, grinding against everything that had been built/experienced in the Park, rasping the nerve ends that had been so beautifully laid bare by building a communal event in the Park, the crowd longhair, shorthair, politico, straight -crystallized, exploded, and together one hundred fists shot up in the air. The chant rang, PIGS OUT OF THE PARK. LET THEM GO, LET OUR BROTHERS GO.

Police chase down Little Billy for a billie club to the back of the head.

Clubbed in the head and carried by his hair.

For twenty minutes the chorus continued sporadically and the cars remained surrounded. Steve Cole. announcer for the rock concert, approached a captain and pleaded with him to let him help quiet the crowd. The officer continued to unwrap gas canisters, turned his back and replied, “Yeah, you go ahead and break up the crowd.” Thirty seconds later  the first teargas  in- and people scattered. Though the prisoners were finally removed, the police remained, too stupid to understand they had won a victory even by getting the prisoners out of the Park. What they understood was this: The Park belongs to the Police, not the People. And they were there to prove that.

Paddy wagons scaled the drive coming north of the lake below the tennis court hill while squads of policemen began to make forays out into the Park. From the top of the hill a sporadic barrage of small rocks and cans came down onto the wagons and was returned by tear gas canisters which in turn were hurled back. Two policemen then swept along the top of the hill clearing people off with the aid of the tear gas and meeting no resistance.

For a moment activity subsided and it seemed that tailings were over. People still were running around through the thin tear gas veil that hung over the Park. The band had stopped playing, routed, I learned later, by tear gas. Then tear gas began to explode again in the area of the stone grotto steps and I saw policemen frantically throwing the canisters in all directions and people running away. From up on the ball field I could hear random chants, “Pigs out of the Park,” and as I came up onto the field I saw the police lined up in phalanx across the ball field steps to the pavilion, guarding the steps like they were the door to C&S’s vaults. From that position the police continually threw tear gas and ran out into the crowd to arrest and sometimes club people. The scattered crowd came back and forth, re- ceding with the tear gas and police attacks, and returning to the chorus, “Pigs out of the Park.” A scuffle broke out between a cop and a girl (the women often being more militant than the men). The girl ran and the officer pulled a long-barrelled silver pistol, aimed and fired. Evidently no one was hit.

For thirty minutes the police charged out and the people returned. Several times a group tried to quiet the chant and protest. V-signs went up from many and some one stood on a stone pillar to rap. “These men are on your side. They are flesh and blood like you and me. Stop and join them in peace.” And several times the reply came: “Toms,” “Pigs out of the Park.” “We want one thing: We want the police to leave the Park so we can have our music back.” PEACE does not mean SURRENDER.

Not until a lawyer had arrived and talked the police into withdrawing some of their “mad dog cops” did the people subside. Some wanted to make our purpose clear, a few wanted to quit and leave the cops in the Park, and most wanted to stay and hear music.

The demands were raised. Free our brothers and drop charges. No more secret agents and armed police in the Park. Police out of the Park and our music back. Twice the people responded to those demands with acclamation, raised fists, and “right-on.” It was decided to return to the pavilion, take the music back, collect bail, and take statements. For the moment, the demands to drop the charges and free the prisoners were forgotten. The police had actually won another minor victory. Below in the pavilion, as people took up bail money and typed statements, a full school bus of cops, riot ready, waited for any challenge to their control of Piedmont Park.

 Mayor 

Ivan Allen arrived to provide the media with a convenient political symbol of paternal riot-quelling. Things were already quiet and the efforts to get the bands going were underway. White-haired bureaucrat, father of a city image built on big business and a modicum of welfare, he said little, stared into eyes, feeling betrayed as always that his children cannot accept his system of bureaucratic paternal authority. When we tried to tell him our side of what had happened, he replied only: “Put it in writing.”

The music returned. Back at the Birdhouse, a state of community struggle emerged, people giving statements, asking what could be done, contributing generously for bonds.

In the dark and in the drizzle the music went on to ten-thirty. [It felt like the arrival of a superhero when Hosea Williams led in a contingent of large Black men to protect The Bird House.] Hosea Williams of SCLC came to lend support. “What you have to understand is that this same thing has been happening to black people for a long time—and partly for the same reason: because they don’t want to conform to the ways of this sick, racist society. We got to put a stop to this, whatever the cost. They might put us in jail, they might even kill us-but unless a man has something he’s willing to die for, he doesn’t have much reason to live anyway. The reason they’re brutalizing you is simple: you want to live your own life, your own way.” Cheers and a few right-on’s.

At stake in this struggle is whether, in the process of trying to mold a new society in the womb of the old, we can maintain our vision of peace, of community, of love and family, and at the same time militantly defend our vision against repression. There are those who would counsel peace, meaning on this incident, total surrender in the face of repression. There are those who would counsel total struggle and who will lose their vision. There are those powers-that-be who now counsel, “Cool it,” obey all our ways or leave. It is clear to me that we must defend our vision as it emerges in concrete forms. The communal music/experience in Piedmont Park is that vision.

-Jim Gwin