Word: augusta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...Augusta: Race Riot...
...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...
...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...
...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...