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In its wake, the city of 70,000 lay divided by fear and hatred. Rumors circulated through the ghetto that five of the dead had been shot repeatedly and at close range by police using private weapons to avoid identification. Police Chief Broadus Bequest's refusal to meet next day with either black leaders or members of the press to refute the charges against the police only added to the speculation and rumor. At week's end a dusk-to-dawn curfew was still in effect, and 1,000 National Guardsmen, their nameplates covered with tape, patrolled the ghetto area, bayonets fixed and dry ammunition at the ready.
The catalyst for the riot was an approved march on Augusta's city hall last Monday to protest the killing of 16-year-old Charles Oatman in the county jail. Oatman had been beaten to death in his cell two days before, and the authorities had charged two of his black cellmates with murder. But there was hardly a black in Augusta who did not hold the police responsible for allowing the killing to take place. Once the crowd of 300 reached the marble-faced county building in downtown Augusta, the demonstrators began to turn ugly. First they ripped the Georgia state flag from its standard and burned it. Then they marched the two blocks to Broad Street, the city's main shopping district, and began surging in and out of stores, jostling counters and picking up merchandise. By the time they reached Augusta's 130-block ghetto, where most of the city's 34,000 blacks live in crowded one-and two-story unpainted frame houses, their numbers had increased to 700, and the disturbance was completely out of control.
Riot Guns. The police, taken unawares and unprepared, took their response from a page of the riot manual of the early '60s. First they underreacted, allowing the march to become a mob and the mob to become milling looters. When firebombing began, they arrived in force with riot guns and tear gas. Sniper fire was reported—though not a single officer or even a police vehicle can show a scratch—and the official shooting was on.
Charles Reid, a member of a special mayor's committee for easing tensions in the ghetto, reported seeing one suspected looter shot repeatedly in the back by a black policeman and his white partner. By midevening, Chief Bequest was asking for outside help to bolster his 130-man force, and Governor Lester Maddox responded by sending in 100 state troopers and 200 members of the Georgia National Guard; another 1,000 Guardsmen arrived the following day. By morning, most of the violence was over.
The Augusta riot was not, of course, the result of the miserable prison conditions that led to the death of Charles Oatman, although a local committee had asked for a Justice Department investigation of the police and the jail sys tem last December. As the blacks see it, it was the ultimate explosion of long-smoldering injustices and repressions. "I stood right here in this courthouse three months ago and told them it was coming, and they said it couldn't happen here," said Leon Larue, a local black leader.