AJC Sept. 29, 1969 pg. 14A

Hundreds Hear Bands

Peace Wonderful

In Piedmont Park

By PHIL GARNER

Still edgy from a free-for-all with city police a week earlier, Atlanta's street people re-invaded "their park" here Sunday for seven peaceable hours of raucous rock music.

The event attracted about 500 long - haired youngsters and several hundred more conventional spectators to Piedmont Park's main pavilion. It was distinguished by the absence of uniformed city policemen and by a studied effort by hippie leaders to avoid provocative incidents.

The youngsters, many of whom marched the day before on Atlanta police headquarters to protest their supposed harassment by police, had insisted on staging the free concert although city officials had asked them to delay it a week.

"THE PARK is the last thing we've got left," said one of the promoters of the concert. "We had to come back today to show that we could do it."

The pavilion from which six rock hands played, surrounded by towering stacks of amplifiers, earlier was reserved for a family reunion. But the clan canceled its meeting when it heard the hippies would be in the park. A permit to use the pavilion was issued to concert organizers shortly afterward. "We're sorry the family felt that way about it," said city parks Supt. Jack Delis, "but the parks are for everybody."

The full, 11-man force of brown-uniformed parks policemen was pulled into the park. The policemen avoided the immediate area of the pavilion, however, and devoted-most of their time to directing heavy streams of traffic drawn by the rock music. Two blue-uniformed crime prevention officers were the sole visible representatives of the Atlanta Police Department. Protesting hippies earlier had demanded that policemen stay away from the park during the Sunday concerts.

"THEY SAID it would be all right if we came into our own park today," a smiling parks policeman said. The two crime prevention officers, well-known to most of the youngsters, sat on the tailgate of a marked station wagon about 100 yards from the pavilion, listened to the music and talked to passing concertgoers.

”Everybody should drag his own bag,” said one officer. “Just so they don’t drag it across somebody else’s toes.”

A few plainclothed narcotics agents reportedly circulated in the crowd but no arrests were made. The arrest by a city narcotics policeman of a youngster who exposed him to the crowd had touched off the disturbances in the park the week before.

Staff Photos by Chuck Vollertsen