Apartheid. USA 1988

January 24, 1987:

Cummings, Georgia is a small town of 2 000 of all white inhabitants in Forsyth County outside Atlanta, Georgia. Today, the village was flooded by an estimated 10 000 civil rights marchers. Georgia put on ‘the greatest show of force the state had ever marshalled’. Cummings was overwhelmed with a force of some 2 300 sternfaced guardsmen and police officers restraining a pool of hundreds, if not thousands of white, mainly young, rural men and women, repeatedly shouting, ‘Niggers go home!’ Cummings approached gridlock as for hours Confederate (Southern) banners, caps and other emblems waved and bobbed in the crowd of Klan sympathizers and men in Ku Klux Klan uniforms mingled in military camouflage fatigues. Fourteen persons were arrested for possession of unspecified weapons as well as bows and arrows, fireworks, and for

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making a telephone bomb threat. ‘We hate niggers,’ someone in the crowd along the hilly roadside would shout, standing beneath a Confederate flag. ‘We love you,’ someone in the long column of black and white faces below would shout back. When the marchers shouted, ‘KKK has got to go, hey hey, ho ho,’ from the hilly roadside came the response, ‘KKK is here to stay.’^32.

In San Francisco, just after midnight, during the school holidays, three police officers responded to a silent alarm indicating that someone had entered a local high school. A few minutes later a 15-year-old high school student lay dying in a darkened hallway, shot by one of the officers, who had seen the youth pointing a gun at him. What the teenager was armed with turned out to be a pellet-gun that was also a highly realistic reproduction of a. 357 Magnum Colt Python pistol. While it is illegal to sell or possess a pelletgun in San Francisco, such guns, as well as toy guns, have been used in crimes for years. Now, a new generation of non-lethal guns that closely resemble real pistols and submachine-guns is causing alarm among law-enforcement officials.^33.

32. The New York Times, from a report by Dudley Clendinen

33. The New York Times, from a report by Katherine Bishop