Other young people I know had the same reaction. You can hear the cop's baton hitting my tape recorder as I tried to shield it with my arms.Īs I shielded the tape recorder against the blows, Abu-Jamal's words ran through my head: The solution to oppression is "an awake, aware people." From the first time I opened his book "Live From Death Row," I'd felt like he was speaking directly to me.
You can hear the officer telling me to "Move, move now!" and me frantically asking, "Where? Where do you want me to go?" You can hear me repeating "I'm with the press, I'm with the press" as he demanded my tape recorder. I managed to keep my tape recorder on, and even now, as I replay the tape, my hands shake. I identified myself as a journalist and held up my press pass, but the officer and several others pushed me into the front of the police line, saying "I don't care who the f- you are." I was standing on 14th Street with my tape recorder, describing what I saw and heard around me, when a cop came up and started pushing some local residents down 14th Street. I saw one young woman on a bicycle, who was watching the marchers, get pulled off her bike by the hair and hit several times on the back and shoulders by a cop in riot gear.ĭemonstrators ran down 14th Street chanting, "Let us disperse," but police corralled the protesters by blocking off a small residential street and pushing the demonstrators at the rear with batons.
But I saw very little police presence until more than an hour later as the demonstration crossed Market Street, when more than 100 police and nearly a dozen police cars appeared. As the torch-lit demonstration wove its way through the Mission District, the marchers chanted, " Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!" and "Stop the legal lynching!"įlames leapt against the night sky as two dumpsters were set on fire in front of the Mission police station.
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