Georgia Riots

In 1968 my parent's divorce became final and we moved to Augusta, Georgia. Mom landed a great job with the cosmetics company Revlon. She was Revlon's representative to the various military PX's across the southeast. She located us just outside the main gate of Fort Gordon Army base, as Augusta was near both sets of grandparents and geographically central to her sales region. The job was entry level but with great promise, a promise that mom realized by going very high within Revlon. By the time she left the company she lived in a company paid for apartment on Park Avenue, New York and traveled all over the world. But her beginning was spartan. Though the company did provide a car, we lived in rented trailer, in a poor trailer park mostly inhabited by military families. Though we were poor, we were happy. At least I was. Twelve years old and I was the man of the house, something mom made sure I understood. I would need to take on a lot of responsibility, something I was more than ready to do.

By the time 1969 had rolled around we had settled into a pattern that worked for a single parent family where that parent traveled constantly. Mom hired a series of live in sitters, none of which lasted long. Though she tried very hard to ensure we always had an adult with us when she traveled, it didn't always work. I can remember many times that I was left alone for several days at a time to take care of my brothers. Mom was conscious of the burden this put on my young shoulders and she was great about making sure I had both kid time and adult time with her.

During the summer of 1969 she found a decent sitter so she took me with her on several of her business trips for Revlon. One such trip really sticks out in my mind and is worthy of note. This trip encompassed a few days at the big Army base in Columbia, South Carolina. Mom had selected a hotel downtown and ordered me to have room service lunch and not to leave the room, then went to work.

Not one to miss the opportunity to explore, I left the room shortly after she did and set out looking for adventure. Though the capital of South Carolina, Columbia was a fairly small town. It was certainly a safe place for a twelve year old to walk around. So it was not as extraordinary for me to do as it sounds today. Mom had left me some money so I had lunch while out and about town, then about mid-day I spotted the state capital building. I'm not sure what drew me to the capital building, but drawn I was. When I got there I noticed there was a large crowd, like something big was going on. The doors were open and other than the number of people in my way there was no hindrance to my going in. I worked my way through the crowd into the main room of the capital. I found a good place to stand near the center podium and was just beginning to wonder what all the excitement was about when a man stepped forward and in a deep voice said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States." Before that moment I didn't know the Vice President's name. I would have rather the speaker been President Richard M. Nixon, whose name I did know. Still, I was excited to be there as Spiro T. Agnew, the 39th Vice President of the United States, took the podium and began to speak. I don't remember a word he said, but I do recall the feeling that I was standing in the presence of a great man and that I was witnessing history being made. It was a heady experience for me.

History would later show me a poor judge of character. Less than four years after I witnessed the Vice Presidents speech in the South Carolina state house, Spiro T. Agnew resigned from his exalted office in shame as charges surfaced of his accepting bribes while Governor of the State of Maryland. Agnew did make history though. The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1967 because there was no provision to fill a vacancy of a Vice President who left office before the end of the term. With Agnew's resignation, President Nixon appointed Gerald R. Ford to be the Vice President. So of historical note, Spiro Agnew's resignation did cause Richard Nixon to be the first and only President to use the provisions of the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

One of the more significant events of my young life occurred. in 1969, when I was in sixth grade. You'll need some background to appreciate the story: We still lived in Augusta, Georgia, in the trailer park not far from Fort Gordon's Gate 5. The school I attended in the fall for sixth grade was called Tobacco Road Elementary. Tobacco Road was well known due to a popular song about the Georgia state prison located on this road. My school was a few miles from this prison. At the time Curtis was in a lower grade at the same school and Lance was enrolled in a day care center. We had a sitter who stayed with us named Shirley, while mom was out of town. I don't believe I have every met a person with a lower IQ than Shirley. This says quite a bit about how stupid Shirley was, since in my full life I have met a large number of low IQ people. Mom knew Shirley's limitations, so she made it clear that I had to keep an eye on her as well as my brothers. Shirley lived with her mother in Augusta and would stay there until mid-afternoon when she would drive (no idea how she passed the states written test for her license) across town to where we lived, pick Lance up from day care and make dinner. Curtis and I rode the same school bus home from school. Enough kids attended Tobacco Road Elementary from the trailer park that we had our own bus. We had one bus stop in the center of the trailer park where we were picked up and dropped off. Convenient for the bus driver, but a long walk for me.

The next thing you need to understand is that the trailer park was there for the U.S. Army personal. It was privately owned, but nearly all of the residents were Army families. In 1969 the United States Army was completely focused on Vietnam. All my friend's had dad's either currently in Vietnam or recently returned from Vietnam, and in many cases, waiting to go back for another tour. In 1969 Vietnam was a dangerous place. The previous year the Viet Cong had launched their massive Tet Offensive, an action that brought the war to areas the U.S. Military thought they controlled.

Before Vietnam the horrors of war were hidden in the tortured,minds of surviving soldiers. Men who rarely talked about their experiences, and when they did, lacked the words to paint a picture of what they had endured. As the first television war, Vietnam changed public perception of war. It began an era where wars were fought with embedded reporters with 8 mm cameras. This became America's war, one which we all watched nightly on the news. Like every American, I understood well that the war in Vietnam was an ugly and dangerous place in which American men lost their lives. I also understood that just because a soldier came home with all his body parts it did not mean he was not injured. A friend of mine in the trailer park had talked regularly about how much his dad had changed on his return from the war. This came to a head one night when his dad beat his mom severely. To protect his mom, my twelve year old friend shot and killed his dad. I didn't need the famous war protest of 1969 nor the glumly nightly news to understand how ugly the Vietnam War was. Though just a kid, I lived with the war's ugly scars left on warriors and their family.

One of the oddities of our life in the trailer park is that we kids never talked about the war. Parroting their parents a kid might say his dad was in country,to mean he was in Vietnam, but we never said the word. Nor did we talk about the war in any form. To those kids who had the most to loose, the Vietnam War was best not talked about.

The other thing you need to understand is racism of 1969. Though I was a son of the South, I didn't understand racism until the events I am about to describe. Somehow I was sheltered from what was clearly widespread and endemic racism. April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated by white racist James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. King was undeniably the face of racial equality.The face of change. To the white racist, King represented a serious threat to the status quo because he was able to convincingly articulate the issues in a rational and reasonable way. Blacks rightfully saw Martin Luther King as a leader to change the world they lived in, a world in which they were wrongfully discriminated against because of the color of their skin. Depending on your perspective, Martin Luther King was either a demon or a savior. Immediately after King's death there was some violence, but mostly it was shock. By the time the anniversary of his death arrived in April of 1969, the shock had warn off and matured into a hard-edged anger. And hatred.

So now my story:

Now it's April 1969, late morning and I am struggling to stay awake through a typical boring class.  I am so bored that I am staring out the window when I notice a line of school buses pulling up to the curb, lining up like they would normally do at the end of the school day, which was four hours off.  By the time a dozen or more buses had lined up outside the gym, a teacher burst into class.  He explained that school was over early today and that the buses were here to take us home now.  You would have expected such news to be greeted with a cheer, but there was something in the man's body language that every kid there picked up on.  Rather than cheer, we all looked at each other nervously.  We knew something was wrong when he explained that we were to all go straight home, regardless of what we normally did, today there would be no playing or going to friends after school.  We were ordered to go straight home.  He then whispered something to the teacher and rushed on to the next class.

Our teacher lead us out to the line of buses.  The first sign of panic I noticed was that the sweet grandmother who drove our bus was screaming at everyone to get in quickly.  She was always sweet and I'd never heard her raise her voice.  But what really struck me as odd was the shot gun laying by her seat.  Definitely something new.  After everyone was loaded a teacher got on for the ride, also something that had never happened before.  As the bus started moving there wasn't a whisper said among the kids.  My young brother pulled on my shirt.  He was looking at me with a worried expression.  I had no idea what was going on so shrugged my shoulders and looked forward as the teacher began repeating our earlier instructions.  Go straight home.  If our parents aren't home, find a neighbor who is and stay there.  Under no conditions were we to go to our own home unless our parents were there.  Find an adult we trusted and stay with them.

Moving down Tobacco road as fast as the big yellow bus would go, the driver called to the teacher, who went to the front and looked out the front window.  There was a long line of cars and trucks approaching from the opposite direction.  As we passed each other I noticed that every car and the back of every pickup truck was full of men.  Everyone of them held either a rifle or shotgun.  They were all white.  Guns weren't an unusual sight, nor were white men.  But a long line of armed white men rushing to get somewhere gave me a chill.  There had been several escapes from the Tobacco Road State Prison, but they were driving away from the prison, so that wasn't the problem.  This was long before Islamic terrorism was an issue in America.  The boggy man we all knew were the Russians and the Vietnamese.  I knew the Vietnamese war was on the other side of the world and they all seemed kind of backwards, so I figured the Russians had invaded.  Like Red Dawn, only many years before the movie.

For the first time the bus drove through the entire sprawling trailer park, stopping only when a kid shouted stop.  My brother and I got off in front of our home, as did the kid who lived next to us.  I used my key to get in and locked the door immediately and turned on the TV.  This was decades before cable TV and twenty-four hour news channels, so I was surprised to see a news program in progress.  What I saw was a mob of angry protesters, which wasn't unusual.  It was the 60's, so there were always protests on TV.  Mostly it was college kids, anti-war protesters, which I did understand, or racial protesters, which I didn't really understand.  It was the caption below the vast mob of protesters that frightened me: "Riots in Augusta Georgia turn deadly".  Then I recognized the road the protesters were marching down as the four lane road that ran right by our trailer park.  One hundred fifty feet from where I sat.

I ran to mom's room and grabbed her hidden pistol.  It was a small .25 automatic, but seemed like a serious weapon to a twelve year old.  Remembering the sound of mom dropping the hammer on an empty chamber when she tried to kill her ex-boyfriend, I pulled the slide back and loaded a round into the chamber, just like mom had taught me.   Curtis was watching with concern, which made me think of our young brother.  Four year old Lance's day care center was about a mile away, it's parking lot connected to the road the rioter's were coming up.  By this point I had noticed on the screen that there were burning buildings behind the massive mob, making Lance's safety an immediate concern.  I stuffed the pistol in my back pocket and told Curtis to lock the door behind me as I took off for the day care center.  By the time I reached the building I was exhausted and cursing whoever had stolen my bike a month earlier.

Shirley normally picked Lance up so they were reluctant to surrender him to a twelve year-old, but in the confusion of excited parents looking for their children, I simply took my brother's hand and walked off.  When no one stopped us I had him climb on my back and ran most of the way home.  When we reached the trailer park I spotted a few of my friend's dads standing near their cars, as well as men I didn't recognize doing the same thing.  The men were clearly soldiers, all dressed in their green Army uniform.  They were all standing around their cars, talking and smoking cigarettes.  Even joking and laughing.  Remembering the bus driver's shotgun, I looked for guns among them, but didn't see any weapons.  The impression I had was that they were guarding their cars.

Back inside our trailer I checked the TV again.  Augusta was on fire.  I hadn't watched the news the previous evening because Shirley didn't like the news, so it wasn't until this point that I learned that the previous night two white Augusta police officer had shot and killed an unarmed black youth, igniting an already flammable situation.  There were reports of riots all over the city, but the largest mob was the one marching down my street.  Augusta had become the flash-point for a nation outraged over the senseless murder of Doctor Martin Luther King, with my brothers and I close to the largest blaze.

It was also reported that the Augusta airport had closed to all incoming flights due to a large influx of Black Panther militants that had been flying in to join the activates.  The move was a little late as they had arrived in large numbers, but did prevent my mother from coming home, as she was scheduled to that night.

Despite all that I had heard, what scared me the most was a live interview of the Governor of the State of Georgia.  At the time I didn't realize that Governor Lester Maddox was considered a racist by most, and an undisputed galvanizing figure.  To me he was the governor of my state, a man in a position of authority.  A man to trust.  Governor Maddox outlined what was happening in August in what I would later learn was typical hyperbole, but to my young ears it sounded like the end of the world was beginning in my neighborhood.   I don't remember his exact words, I am sure they are memorialized in history as the worst of the racist South, but he said something to the effect of, "If any N-word step foot on your property, you have my permission, as Governor of the State of Georgia to shoot and kill them."

I made my brothers go to their room and lock the door.  I then tuned the sofa over so I could use it as a shield and pointed the little twenty-five automatic at the trailer's front door.  It wasn't long before I didn't need the TV to know the location of the rioters.  I could hear them through the open windows.  I heard them get close, heard them as they went past, then heard them as they went further away.  Through all of this I had the little gun pointed at the door with the safety off and my finger on the trigger.  I'm not sure how much time passed but it had got quiet outside when there was a knock on the door.  I didn't think about it, nor did I hesitate: I fired into the door.

From outside I heard a man laugh and call my name.  It was the neighbor, who said he was checking on us.  I didn't know him well, but I did recognize his voice so I opened the door.  Apparently I had the gun pointed at him because he gently pushed my gun away and reminded me not to point guns at friends.  He touched the little hole in the door and added that I shouldn't shoot my friends either.  At his urging I put the safety on the gun and put it in my pocket.  This is when I noticed his gun.  I'd never seen one in real life before, only on TV, from the news coverage of Vietnam.  A military rifle.  An impressive weapon.  As were the belts across his chest full of hand grenades.  When I stepped outside I saw more soldiers, all heavily armed, standing around talking.  Even in my inexperience I could tell that these men were comfortable holding their weapons, like they were a part of them.  Most of them wore a sergeants' stripe.  Even then I knew they were all combat veterans.  As I write this today I am sure they were all seasoned soldiers of the Vietnam War.  They didn't fire a shot that day.  I later heard that they had not said a single word to the rioters.  But none of the rioters turned into any of the five entrances for the trailer park that they passed, nor had a single building within view of the soldiers been burned or looted.

The neighbor repaired the bullet hole with putty, paint and a promise not to tell my mom, but he wouldn't tell me what was going on.  He did assure me that my brothers and I were safe.  We had absolutely nothing to worry about.  We spent the night alone, but a soldier's wife cooked us dinner and checked on us several times.  Over the next week I was able to put the story together from the other kids in the trailer park.  When the riots started soldiers who lived in the trailer park asked for weapons to protect their families.  Someone realized the trailer park was home to many soldiers who were "in country" and that their families were in danger and unprotected.  Squads of men volunteered to protect those military families, and the armory opened its doors and handed out weapons.  Not a word of this was ever printed in the papers.  I still don't know if this Constitutionally prohibited act was approved by the base commander or was something the sergeants worked out among themselves.  Whatever it was, the United State Army looked after their own on that horrible day.

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