Word: teare
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cops, however, weren't. Squad cars patrolled the whole area. As soon as a group of more than 50 people gathered at any street corner the cops gathered to meet them. First three or four motorcycles would arrive. Then the tear gas would be hurled. Then the cycles would sweep down the sidewalk. The object was to scatter the crowd and disperse them. If the kids had stayed together and marched either toward the White House, seven blocks away, or into the nearby ghetto Washington might have gone up in smoke...
...Down Constitution Avenue, near the Justice Department, people were chanting and shouting. "Venting their frustration with Justice," as one Washington paper put it. How strange it would look if the building blew up. I said to a friend. At that moment tear gas bombs began to explode. Thick clouds of smoke rose, and thousands of people moved away. My group tried to get to the VW. ten blocks away, without being gassed. But the gas got there about the same time...
...moved the chilled crowd to the final rampages of a few Weatherman-types through the streets of downtown Washington. Even the cops were used to the script this time. It was easy to engage them in friendly conversation and they rarely got mad even as they methodically tossed the tear-gas canisters into crowds of chanting youths...
Certainly, very few of the crowd would probably be willing to take the consequences of being true revolutionaries in America now-bullets rather than tear gas. But they showed more radical political sophistication in this situation than in similar recent actions. The issues on which they based the confrontation-the war and freedom for political prisoners-were weightier than issues such as a people's park or even an open political convention in Chicago last year...
...crowd of militants was not easily scared by the police. They only moved off as far as was necessary when the tear gas was fired. The vast majority didn't panic and run, even after an all-out gas barrage around 5:30. They retreated and regathered only to have the police repeat the gassings several times...