1) Charles Oatman in his A.R. Johnson Junior High School yearbook portrait. On Saturday, May 9, the news of the 16-year-old’s torture and brutal death brought long-simmering frustrations about racial injustice to a boiling point. Faced with White officials’ stonewalling and intransigence, militant demonstrators used violence to show their indignation. (credit: Miami Herald)

2) Organized in December 1969, the Committee of Ten confronted White officials about longstanding injustices of police brutality and severe poverty. Committee leaders Leon LaRue (white vest and pants) and Grady Abrams (second to the right of LaRue) played key roles in citizen mobilization on May 10 and 11, and in pressing officials for meaningful change in the weeks and months after the riot. (credit: Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History)

3) The median of Greene Street, in front of the Municipal Building, mid-afternoon, Monday, May 11: Mobilizing to demand answers from White officials about what had been done to Charles Oatman, demonstrators face off against heavily-armed policemen. Inside the building, a delegation was confronting the Sheriff and County Commission Chairman. (credit: Augusta College Yearbook)

4) The plaza in front of the Municipal Building, mid-afternoon, Monday, May 11: The Georgia state flag was a symbol of White defiance—since 1956 it had displayed the Confederate “Stars and Bars.” Demonstrators applaud shortly after Paine College student militants—Oliver Pope, Edward Sapp, a female student whose name we don’t yet know—and SNCC organizer William Latrane set it on fire. (credit: Augusta Herald)

5) 9th St (today’s James Brown Blvd) at its intersection with D’Antignac St, early evening, May 11: “Plain neighborhood people”—working-class African Americans intimately familiar with police brutality and severe poverty—ransack White-owned Hill’s Food Store as an act of protest. (credit: Augusta Chronicle)

 6) Gwinnett St (today’s Laney Walker Blvd) at its intersection with Cecilia St, early evening, May 11: In a targeted act of firebombing, White-owned Snow’s Laundry and Dry Cleaning begins to go up in flames. (credit: Augusta Chronicle)

 7) Despite what later got established in public memory, the destruction of businesses was not indiscriminate. The stores of White- and Chinese-American merchants who were known to do right by their Black customers were not harmed. “Don’t touch him—he’s a Soul Brother,” was the word circulated about such merchants. Here, initial damage to Bowman’s Hardware was stopped when it was revealed that the owner was in fact African American; “Soul Brothers” was painted on plywood and the store was not further damaged. (credit: Augusta Chronicle)

 8) Looking north on 9th St (today’s James Brown Blvd) from its intersection with Gwinnett St (today’s Laney-Walker Blvd), early evening, Monday, May 11: Shotgun-wielding policemen have occupied the riot’s original epicenter as White-owned stores—Williams Beauty Supply and the Harlem Pawn Shop—burn. (credit: Paine College Yearbook)

 9) The northeast corner of the Gwinnett St/9th St intersection, early evening, Monday, May 11: Shotgun-wielding policemen have occupied the riot’s original epicenter and are examining a White motorist’s car that protestors overturned. (credit: Paine College Yearbook)

10) The New Left periodical The Militant gave extensive coverage of the Augusta riot. The cover of its May 26th issue linked the police killings in Augusta with those at Jackson State University in Mississippi on May 15. The image on the left is of Charles Oatman’s funeral on Wednesday, May 13, at True Vine Baptist Church on Milledgeville Rd. 250 mourners attended, and Oatman was buried in a family plot at Flat Rock Baptist Church in rural Jefferson County. (credit: The Militant)

11) National Guardsmen (notice that they are all White) let a motorist through a checkpoint. Governor Lester Maddox mobilized 2000 members of the National Guard and State Patrol to occupy Black neighborhoods and Paine College—a show of force that sought to suppress any further signs of Black rebellion. (credit: Augusta Chronicle)

12) A week after the riot, SCLC organized a 110-mile “March Against Death” from Perry to Atlanta. The march protested the “shoot to kill” mindset gaining traction in the country, and carried six empty caskets to mourn the six victims of Augusta’s police violence. Here, SCLC President Ralph David Abernathy and UAW President Leonard Woodcock lead the march into Atlanta, where it concluded with a rally at Morehouse attended by 10,000 people. (credit: Newsone).

13) On July 11, exactly two months after the riot began, Black Power, Civil Rights, and New Left groups organized against police brutality and for a Black voter registration drive. 350 people, African Americans and some White allies, marched through the downtown and called for the identities of the police officers who killed the six men in the riot’s suppression to be revealed. The march culminated in a rally at May Park. (credit: The Polylogue)

 14a and b) New Left activists linked the National Guard’s killing of four White college students at Kent State University on May 4 with the Augusta police’s killing of six African Americans on May 11-12. On the first anniversary of Kent State, the Student Mobilization Committee held national rallies, mourning the victims at Kent State, Augusta, and Jackson State, and calling for an end to the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. (credits: ?? not yet known)

15) "Don't mourn ... organize! Remember the Augusta six." poster from 1970. (source: New England Free Press / Library of Congress)