The South: Death in Two Cities

Reverberations of the gunfire that killed four students at Kent State still hung in the air last week. In quick succession in two Southern cities, eight blacks were killed by policemen. Two were students in Jackson, Miss. Six died in the streets of Augusta, Ga., amid an orgy of burning and looting. Blacks were quick to note that these deaths failed to draw the headlines or rouse the nation's conscience on the scale of the Kent State killings, and most were bitter. One explanation is that there is a limit to a nation's ability to sustain outrage. And in Augusta, the issue was clouded: looters need not be shot, but they are not innocent. But it must also be admitted that somehow violence against blacks, especially in the South, has a familiar ring. There is a reproachful measure of justice in the anger felt by black Americans, who still find themselves even second-class martyrs, subsidiary victims. The following stories describe the events in the two cities.

Jackson: Kent State II

It was just a little over a week after Kent State and the same volatile ingredients were once again present. A tense college campus. A mob of angry, jeering students provoking a line of nervous armed peace officers. Rumors of snipers. The crash of rocks and bottles. And suddenly some signal triggering an atavistic convulsion brought on an unexpected eruption of gunfire. Finally, the youthful bodies, bleeding on the smooth campus lawn. The scene this time was Mississippi's predominantly black Jackson State College.

Generally Restive. Jackson State, a coed school of 4,557 about a mile from the state capital, had been generally restive over fears that black graduates would soon be at the mercy of white draft boards. Rock-throwing violence had flared Wednesday night, and 500 National Guardsmen were standing by off the campus.

The following evening a fire truck responding to a trash fire on the campus was stoned. One unsubstantiated report said that a sniper had shot at the truck. Around midnight, police received complaints that a crowd of blacks at the campus was stoning passing cars. When 75 city and state highway policemen marched up in front of the modern glass-and-brick Alexander Hall, a women's dormitory, they were met by a crowd of 100 jeering men throwing rocks and bottles.

Police said that someone shot at them from the dormitory. Jack Hobbs, a television newsman for WJTV, said: "I heard what sounded like a shot. In a split second something zinged past my ear and ricocheted off a fence behind me." But Hobbs, facing the dormitory, nevertheless said he could not be sure that the shot came from there. Students deny that anyone among them fired, contending that police opened fire without warning.

An unidentified officer yelled "Ladies and gentlemen!" and as if on cue, the police let loose at the crowd with shotguns, pistols and rifles. They raked the building and the squirming students on the ground. One student said that those in front of the dormitory "were trying to get inside. Blood was everywhere." Another, Red Wilson Jr., who was hit in the leg, recalled: "I was standing in front of the dorm. All I could think of was to start running and I got hit. Nobody had a chance." The firing continued for 35 seconds; about 150 shots were fired. Then someone yelled "Cease fire!" and the shooting stopped.

When it was over, two students lay dead: Phillip L. Gibbs, 21, a Jackson State student and the father of an infant son, and James Earl Green, a high school student and track star. Twelve other students were wounded.

Sniper Fire. Police at first stoutly maintained that they had evidence of sniper fire, but later refused all comment. Whether they had evidence or not, the officers went far beyond simple crowd control or self-defense. Even though rocks and bottles were thrown at the officers, this provided no sound reason for the wholesale raking of a crowd with gunfire. The police apparently had come armed only for shooting and had no less lethal equipment. No tear gas was used; there was no warning given to the crowd. Their shotguns were loaded with deadly 00 buckshot rather than antiriot birdshot. They also showed little hesitation to use their weapons; the five-story building was spattered indiscriminately with gunfire from top to bottom. Every window on that end of the dorm was shattered. No effort had been made to fire warning shots or shoot over the crowd's heads.

Black College President John Peoples Jr. shut down the school for the remainder of the term, angrily declaring that "this will not go unavenged." Jackson's white mayor Russell Davis appointed a biracial commission to look into the incident. The Justice Department dispatched federal investigators to Jackson, and Attorney General John Mitchell said he would go there personally. At week's end the tense campus had been vacated by state police and was being patrolled by city police and the National Guard. Stung by criticism of trigger-happy Guard action at Kent State, patrolling Guard officers in Jackson announced that none of their weapons were loaded.

Augusta: Race Riot No. 1

It was a classic confrontation of blacks v. cops, vintage Watts and Newark. At its height, bands of angry blacks roamed the ghetto streets, smashing, burning and looting. Flames from some 50 fires cast an orange glow in the night sky, while the crackle of gunfire, the screams of police and fire sirens tore the air. During the night, six blacks died from gunshot wounds; all of them had been hit in the back. Scores more were injured, three critically, and hundreds were arrested. The first race riot of the '70s had come to Augusta, Ga.

In its wake, the city of 70,000 lay divided by fear and hatred. Rumors circulated through the ghetto that five of the dead had been shot repeatedly and at close range by police using private weapons to avoid identification. Police Chief Broadus Bequest's refusal to meet next day with either black leaders or members of the press to refute the charges against the police only added to the speculation and rumor. At week's end a dusk-to-dawn curfew was still in effect, and 1,000 National Guardsmen, their nameplates covered with tape, patrolled the ghetto area, bayonets fixed and dry ammunition at the ready.

The catalyst for the riot was an approved march on Augusta's city hall last Monday to protest the killing of 16-year-old Charles Oatman in the county jail. Oatman had been beaten to death in his cell two days before, and the authorities had charged two of his black cellmates with murder. But there was hardly a black in Augusta who did not hold the police responsible for allowing the killing to take place. Once the crowd of 300 reached the marble-faced county building in downtown Augusta, the demonstrators began to turn ugly. First they ripped the Georgia state flag from its standard and burned it. Then they marched the two blocks to Broad Street, the city's main shopping district, and began surging in and out of stores, jostling counters and picking up merchandise. By the time they reached Augusta's 130-block ghetto, where most of the city's 34,000 blacks live in crowded one-and two-story unpainted frame houses, their numbers had increased to 700, and the disturbance was completely out of control.

Riot Guns. The police, taken unawares and unprepared, took their response from a page of the riot manual of the early '60s. First they underreacted, allowing the march to become a mob and the mob to become milling looters. When firebombing began, they arrived in force with riot guns and tear gas. Sniper fire was reported--though not a single officer or even a police vehicle can show a scratch--and the official shooting was on.

Charles Reid, a member of a special mayor's committee for easing tensions in the ghetto, reported seeing one suspected looter shot repeatedly in the back by a black policeman and his white partner. By midevening, Chief Bequest was asking for outside help to bolster his 130-man force, and Governor Lester Maddox responded by sending in 100 state troopers and 200 members of the Georgia National Guard; another 1,000 Guardsmen arrived the following day. By morning, most of the violence was over.

The Augusta riot was not, of course, the result of the miserable prison conditions that led to the death of Charles Oatman, although a local committee had asked for a Justice Department investigation of the police and the jail sys tem last December. As the blacks see it, it was the ultimate explosion of long-smoldering injustices and repressions. "I stood right here in this courthouse three months ago and told them it was coming, and they said it couldn't happen here," said Leon Larue, a local black leader.

Never Here. The home of the prestigious Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters golf tournament, Augusta appears on the surface, at least, a comfortable, if not rich community. But behind the fac,ade exists an impoverished and thoroughly discouraged inner core of poor blacks. More than two-thirds of the city's ghetto dwellers live on incomes of less than $3,000 a year, while a quarter of the black adults are rated as functional illiterates (less than five years' schooling). Blacks insist that their greatest problem is a lack of good job opportunities. Though four blacks sit on the 16-man city council, there are but five in white-collar municipal jobs. The situation in private industry is little better: educated blacks feel they are unable to get jobs and salaries commensurate with their abilities.

Augusta's whites are generally complacent and self-satisfied about race relations. "We've always had harmonious relations between the races," says Mayor Millard A. Beckum, who after the riots talked of "protecting the good image, the good name and good people of Augusta." Says Sydney Felt, a retired New York merchant: "I never thought this could happen here."

Maddox at War. Governor Maddox, on the other hand, seemed not the least bit surprised that the riot took place during his tenancy in the statehouse. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to dash around the state making inflammatory speeches reminiscent of his ax-handle-wielding days. Early in the week he called the riot a "Communist conspiracy," but later attributed it to the Black Panthers as well. He told a cheering rally of 800 law-enforcement officers in Fort Valley, Ga., that he would fire any patrolman he saw who did not "floor" any abusive demonstrator. Said Maddox: "We're in a war at home. So when you're on the field of battle and someone shoots you down, on the way down--if you get a chance --you kill him, don't you?"

As long as the Guard units remain in place, there probably will not be any further major outbreaks in Augusta. Now must begin the difficult task of putting the broken city back together. In partial compliance with black demands, Mayor Beckum has freed 200 of the 390 who were arrested during the riot and agreed to meet with black leaders to explore means of creating additional avenues of black participation in city government. Black leaders, for their part, presented the city with a Georgia state flag to replace the one burned on Monday. Late in the week, autopsies revealed that all six dead men had been shot in the back by 00 shotgun pellets rather than pistol fire, and the Justice Department began an investigation into whether any of the men's civil rights had been violated.

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