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

Sunday in the Park

Sunday September 20, 1969

All the classical elements were present in Piedmont Park Sunday: the cops—some juiced up at the prospect of jabbing a hippie cunt, some restrained by-the-bookers, some clearly hesitant, avoiding action as best they could. The people: the ideologues, digging the harvest of this super-naked repression; the innocents ("give peace a chance") in battle for the first time and therefore as ideologically hamstrung as the "militants"; the pure music freaks who split before the first teargas canister told us what was coming down; the liberals who looked on in voyeuristic horror (and who later confirmed what we knew then-a police riot); and those who could neither throw things at the cops nor agree not to, who saw a community getting its shit together and could not leave until the police did. And the capitalist press, scurrying about in quest of the "balanced view" they come up with when (and only when) the police go berserk. But this time, it was US and not our brothers Amerika saw on the Sunday night news.

Our liberal friends will assail the individual overt acts of "police brutality": the unnecessary beatings, the spontaneous attacks upon people, the revolver fired into the crowd. That's fine, but what we face involves not just the violence freaks who make up a slight minority of the Atlanta P. D (and the cops showed more restraint for a longer period than 1 saw in Berkeley last May), but the system-generated and -reinforced predisposition with which every white cop walks among us. We are, in some vague, ill-defined way, not human beings. Their commitment to protect the citizens of Atlanta evaporates when the police patrol our community. They create violations of unconstitutional laws ("occupying a dive," "loitering"), ferret out our violations of legislated Puritanism (dope). The easiest way to create a "fascist" state is to pass a plethora of laws which are then selectively enforced. Mr. Business Suit waits for a bus; a freak loiters. Dope is illegal; so is padding defense contracts. - Identifying for your friends an undercover police agent is not illegal; but that is the bust which the community resisted to the extent of 23 arrests, dozens of tear gas bombs, several injuries, and the guerrilla action that happened Sunday.

The V-sign "third force" ("Forgive them for they know not what they do"), one of whom offered to testify "against the people who threw rocks at the policeman," would have us keep our park "privileges" through asskissing; they have not understood that the city "gave" us the park for our music because we are powerful enough to convince them that it is in their interest to do so.

A park cannot be liberated by permit, cannot be "free" just because freaks come together to dig some fine music. Sunday was about what comes down when, in the course of being who and what we are (NOTE: not in the course of tearing down the Amerikan Empire), we transgress the constricted lifestyle that is acceptable in and to this rotten country.

George Nikas, in the great tradition of Paul Revere, advertised the coming of the nark. The rock thus overturned, what crawled out busted George for "interfering with an officer." And a community that knows bullshit when it sees it said so. Loudly. And the battle was joined.

Translate. Picture your father being arrested for any thing; imagine the guys in his office putting up the massive, together. group resistance that we generated Sunday. 1 cannot. We are different people, a qualitatively distinct species, and we deny our distance from our parents at the peril of every thing we believe in, stand for.. dig, and (most important) arc. Bust one of us, we said Sunday, and you deal with all of us. This is the lesson for the gentle ones who flashed V's and begged the crowd to "stop."

Sunday's resistance was not "revolutionary antics," The work of "agitators." Sunday was a defense of the kind of life we have chosen to live. That life includes music; it includes dope; but more significant, and of revolutionary impact, is our self-perception as a people acting in unity. That is new, that is what makes us who we are. To then fall back to a love-and-peace stance which quickly becomes a hate-the-bottle-throwers posture is to fragment the solidarity that saw politicos and culture freaks standing side by side.

Tactically, rocking the cops is for me of dubious battle; but those rocks, bottles, and empty tear gas canisters responded to an invasion of our tribal celebration. The police brought to bear on us their first priority: the bust. We responded with a different priority: solidarity. There are only two sides in the framework. On one side stand the musicians, the trippers, the rock throwers—"- on the other stand the cops, and the dividing line is not gentleness..

Joni Mitchell sings, "I can be cruel, but let me be gentle with you." Gentleness is a factor in our uniqueness, but when we are not allowed to be gentle, we can be cruel, we must be cruel, or we will not survive. Amerika's zoo, stop # 14 on a Grayline tour-these the city fathers may allow us to be, as long as when their push comes to our shove, we gently retreat across the playing fields of Piedmont, out of the park, and re-atomize into the individualized, competitive trick bag that keeps people from getting together in gentleness.

Sunday made us "Panthers"; like them we fight now, not for a cause, but for our own survival. And the time comes to speak of "genocide." On the day of our battle, the narks got 1,000 pounds of grass in Riverside, California. In "A Litany for the American People," read at People's Park, Tom Parkinson put into the mouth of "The Governing Forces of the United States" these words:

We will impose unjust laws and chaotic order on all the citizens we hate.. .all males with peculiar sexual mores, all with hair on their faces, all with long hair growing out of their heads, all artists and poets and musicians and honest scientists, all women who are proud and happy with their naturally beautiful hair and bodies and have lovely sexual ideas, and we will cut and shave and tear out their hair and condemn them to endless oppression and allow only one style of life... and we will put in prison anyone who smokes the mild benign weed called marijuana.

to which he has "The People of the United States" respond, "COUNT ME OUT, COUNT ME OUT, COUNT ME OUT."

The deal is this: if we insist on smoking grass, digging our music, thinking our thoughts, making love the way we choose, then Amerika offers us only prison and firebombing. To avoid a hassle, cut your hair, lay off grass, buy your music from "the containment industry," accept the sexual standards of this society, and shut up.

Choose. And after you choose, dig that resistance to genocide grows only in solidarity, the refusal to be tricked into rejecting others for whom the same choice means throwing rocks at cops. And at this point, wily Ben Franklin's advice comes once more to mind: we will hang, he reminds us—together or separately.

-greg gregory

In photo - Bill Fibben and George Nikas’ feathered headdress.

(second narc’s head covers Celestial Omnibus parked behind.)

…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. 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." 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ivan Alien 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. 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

Back to our park on Sunday …