Sly, Stones, Rocks & Bottles

Sly, Stones, Rocks & Bottles

There we are at Grant Park — an hour late and no music yet? As we enter the bandshell area, we meet a friend who tells us that the audience has just rushed the stage, and that Sly won’t play until the stage is cleared. Within two minutes, we hear another story — Sly ain’t gonna show. Everyone’s tense: anticipating — something’s gonna happen; something’s GOT to give.

Some people in the audience begin heaving their empty bottles at the people on the^stage, perhaps in the belief that they are responsible for Sly’s absence. The stage-sitters return the fire, and as some of the bottles from the back of the crowd fall short and hit the front people, the exchange becomes momentarily intense, with glass shattering on all sides.

Enter the police. With a ham-handedness born of insensitivity, they march into the crowd, and when their presence provokes wine-bottle volleys, they hurl a tear-gas canister. Hundreds flee to the open field behind the bandshell, to be confronted by a ragged line of scared-looking police. The crowd that waited, impatient in the burning heat, has been mobilized from frustration to anger, and the sight of a police line seems to infuriate them. Every time the line advances, it’s met with a hail of debris. Then, suddenly, 30 people are rocking one of the familiar-ugly squad cars . . it rolls over on its side like a beached whale. All the while, little teams of plainclothes pigs are ripping off individuals who wander too close to their positions on the perimeter, always managing to twist an arm, bounce a head on the ground, and thud a torso on the steel floor of the squadrol. Again and again, police are driven back by the volleys of missiles, until the crowd, inching forward, reaches the upturned car and heaves it over on its back.

At this point it strikes me that, since the first canister, the police have used no teargas — it seems that the wind is blowing the wrong way for maskless pigs to use chemical warfare. Without warning, the police, tired of being sitting ducks (pigs?), charge headlong into the crowd, clubs swinging. The crowd retreats across the field and doesn’t stop until it’s been forced a full block north. There the two sides face off, a reinforced line of grim-faced cops on the south side of Balbo, angry blacks and freaks on the north. This year though, the battle isn’t over; the retreat is merely tactical. Regrouped and rearmed with sticks and rocks from the rose garden, the kids begin the barrage anew. Every few minutes, a cop hobbles away, grimacing in pain. Occasionally, one is knocked flat. Meanwhile, the front line of the streetfighters has taken over Balbo Drive; a passing squadrol is stoned and the street is soon cleared. A private car parked on the north side of the street is set afire, and, in a bold stroke, the vanguard crosses to the south side and overturns an unmarked patrol car directly under the noses of the outnumbered Guardians. Soon, it too is afire.

The energy level of the crowd has changed since the initial confrontation. Spur-of-the-moment rage has given way to controlled fury, and as a result, the attack is brilliantly executed. Every time the police move forward, the crowd scatters and regroups, to begin the artillery barrage from a new direction.

The scatter-and-regroup pattern is broken when the police suddenly retreat down the slope. The mob, sucked into the empty space begins to spill into Balbo Drive, to be met with a totally unexpected burst of gunfire from the police ,38’s. Hundreds flee, jumping fences, hitting the dirt, running and crawling out of range. Several do not rise when the shooting stops. Although the gunfire probably lasts for 30 seconds or so, it seems like eternity, lying on your face in the sudden deathly stillness. As people begin filtering back to care for their wounded, a wire somewhere in the burning police car melts, and the air is shattered by the eerie wail of a ghostly siren. Somehow, there is a feeling that the gunfire and siren are signalling the end of Grant Park/1970, and we leave. Later, walking through the Loop, we see police carrying shotguns and learn that the people who refused to be pushed out of Grant Park took the long way home — breaking Michigan Avenue and State Street windows as they went.

It was an exhilarating day, and it’s going to be hard to forget the sight of 3,00.0 people refusing to be intimidated ’by the same police force that pushed them out of the same park two years earlier. If I’ll have trouble forgetting it, I guess the cops will have an even harder time. They won’t be able to isolate “leaders” from the “mob”, because there were no leaders that day. The tactics were together because people were into surviving and because group action, not rhetoric, creates leadership. They won’t be able to isolate “black militants” and “white revolutionaries” after witnessing a coalition of common action that threatens to break down the artificial barriers of gangs, neighborhoods and race that separate oppressed people and make repression easier.

What happened at Grant Park was that the police stuck their heads into a potentially ugly situation and focussed the anger of a hot, frustrated crowd upon themselves; the violent enforcers, of a rigged system; the symbol of the sort of repression that creates the ugly situations. The city government stages circuses for the poor and oppressed, and then becomes righteously indignant when the people reject it; when they refuse to sit politely and wait for the clowns. If “bread and circuses” failed, is it any wonder that “pigs and circuses” was met with rocks and bottles. Is it any wonder that the people chose as their targets the very same group that patrols their streets with nightsticks and shotguns?

The only downer about Grant Park was that fighting pigs in a vacuum accomplishes nothing. The police should only be a target when they stand between the people and freedom; when they beat and arrest people to preserve the “order” of tyranny; when they block access to the REAL pigs. It’s ironic that July 24th was the day that the “Chicago Plan” for getting black people jobs in the lily-white construction industry was exposed in the straight press as a total sham. Perhaps it would havybeen more appropriate to take those rocks and bottles to City Hall to serve notice that people aren’t going to take any more bullshit, and that the identity of the real oppressors is known.

It was a drag that, until the police materialized, there was a real possibility of violence among the people. Now that we’ve fought on the same side, let’s stay together and fight the real

Eliot Wald