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Black demonstrators in Atlanta, GA, protesting a police brutality incident, are broken up by police officers armed with clubs.
1974 (Jun 26)
Atlanta police officers armed with clubs broke up a march of about 250 Blacks and arrested fourteen people, including the demonstration's leader, Hosea Williams, president of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Seven people, including three police officers, were injured in the disturbance. The violent conflict, the first in Atlanta since the riots of the 1960s, came as the marchers sought to protest the killing by police of a seventeen-year-old Black youth the previous weekend and to continue their demand that the city's police chief, John Inman, be removed from office. The Blacks arrested were charged with parading without permits. The controversial police chief defended the force used against the marchers, but the city's Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, described it as excessive. The latest incident occurred as the Georgia Supreme Court was considering whether the city of Atlanta could legally fire Inman, who was viewed by many of the city's whites as a staunch defender of law and order, but by many Blacks as a racist.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.