40 Years Ago Today, the Police Tried to Kill Me at Columbia University

[Echo In Light]

40 Years Ago Today, the Police Tried to Kill Me at Columbia University
by Blake Fleetwood, April 30, 1968

With billy clubs swinging, bloodying heads, a phalanx of riot police stomped their way through the crowd of faculty supporters standing outside Fayerweather Hall. No one was given a chance to walk away.

The police then proceeded to smash in the main doors of the Hall where students had been camped out for a week — and to systematically drag students down the stone stairs to the lawns out front.

Nobody was violently resisting.

Many of the students were resisting passively, simply by going limp. This infuriated the police, who weren’t buying these Gandhi-like tactics of Ivy League coeds. They beat everybody, young and old, male or female, with lead truncheons until they agreed to stand up. 150 students were injured and treated in nearby hospitals.

When the police reached the corner classroom — filled with graduate students of which I was one — they broke down the large antique doors and, with a crazed look in their eyes, struck wildly at us as we huddled together. It was a military operation clear and simple, and they were out to “shock and awe” the middle class demonstrators.

Continued:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/01/8646/

[Possumpoint]

1. Think About It

Every Law in the United States is enforceable by death at the hands of the police. If you resist the police action in any way the situation can escalate to deadly levels and the police are then found to be justified in their actions.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

2. In 1967, I was part of an anti-war march in NYC, and was at the back of the march with Dr. Spock.

The march was led into a blocked off area by the NYC cops. The cops proceeded to bash the marchers who were in the front. A friend of mine (16 yrs old) was pretty well beaten up and helped by my brother. That friend later became a civil rights attorney.

I was just 16 and from that day forward lost all respect for police.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. Cops are scary

They are tools used by those in power to force things to happen. When I was 7, the DA told my mom they needed to catch my father, who was wanted on several outstanding warrants for fraud. They decided it would be wonderful to use me as bait. My father came to visit me, the sheriff and his deputies surrounded the house and came in, guns drawn, pointed at my father and me. I was terrified. To this day I am terrified of cops.

Oh, and my dad made bail and skipped town an hour after the arrest, and left the state, never to be seen again. No one seemed to think it important in the least to have me even talk to anyone about what happened.

[Echo In Light]

4. Scholar Robert O. Paxton re fascism...

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

[rosesaylavee]

5. What an awful thing!

I am so sorry that happened to you... what an atrocious thing to do to a 7 year old kid.

[Rage for Order]

8. I can't believe your mom did that to you

"No one seemed to think it important in the least to have me even talk to anyone about what happened."

Your mom should've let you speak to a therapist to help you with your emotions regarding this. I wonder why she didn't think it was important that you do so?

[undergroundpanther]

6. I HATE authority

I think this is an example of what is waiting behind this fake curtain of democracy, The state run by evil hearted rich bastards that have slowly usurped our country away from us are all about when their masks fall off and we see what they really are. If we fight to be free for real we will eventually have to either bow down or beat back the state bullies ourselves.Gandhi was murdered non violence is effective up to a point,when the state cannot be shamed Gandhi's tactics are useless.. It is the only way to stop this machine is to throw our bodies, fists raised and thrashing, into it's maddening soulless gears.

[Selatius]

7. This is why a lot of people don't trust the police. They abuse their power over others.

[mistertrickster]

9. Damn right. I was too young to take part, but I saw it on TV, back when TV actually showed

police beating the hell out of people.

Now they just sit at police headquarters and read what they're told . . .

If Thomas Jefferson came back today, he be leading a "tea party" on Halliburton.