“The Great Hippie Hunt”
Time magazine observed in October of 1969 that Atlanta’s power elite had declared
war on hippies.
The election started for Mayor of Atlanta and candidates tried to outdo each other on describing what they planned to do to the hippies. Suddenly city service people were very interested in the hippie areas and whether residents needed their house condemned for small code violations – developers wanted land!
Police gathered in advance Sunday September 20, 1969 to provoke a confrontation. Then they surrounded and attacked the crowd – hippies, children, old people, average citizens of Atlanta enjoying the music on a September morn in Piedmont Park. Yet “Law and Order” candidates arrived with film crews to use the riot as a background for railing about the hippie menace!
I was there when George, with his wonderful feather hat, called out for all to know there was a narc among us. The narc being grossly outnumbered and fearing for his safety, called for back-up…when the buses loaded with cops began to arrive me and my brother split. We had an apartment directly across the street from the park on the hill on Piedmont. We lit up a doobie and watched from the porch. I had already had my a share of head knocking s from APD and not up to another/
I was there. I was very, very young–just 4 years old. My parents and I went to enjoy the music. I don’t remember much before the riot started. What I do remember was my parents driving around looking for a park exit, and finding every exit cordoned off. The police had commandeered city busses, and pulled them across the park entrances to block them.
We wound up stopping in front of a playground on a hilltop at the very edge of the park. We sat on a swingset and watched the cloud of teargas at the base of the hill. I remember seeing one person pick up a smoking teargas canister and hurl it back into the line of police. The police responded by rushing the crowd and hitting people with what my parents told me were lengths of garden hose filled with lead shot. They would knock people unconscious and then drag them out to toss them in the backs of busses waiting nearby.
To this day, 54 years later, I can still smell the teargas.