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EIGHT ABREAST

The other young men and girls in the crowd formed an eight-abreast line behind her, and, before you could sing out, "This little light of mine," there were some 600 youth and grown people and old people marching toward the top of the hill, and the shouted chant of "FREEDOM! FREEDOM!" filled the canyon of Farish street.

As the singing and chanting crowd, with that daring youth guard in its van, approached the line of police, a squad of six motorcycles raced down the hill into the crowd.  But the surging mass of demonstrators never broke their pace, they opened channels for the motorcycles and kept forging ahead.

I could hear the screams of the sirens, and the frantic clang of fire-engine bells.  Canvass covered army transports roared into view.

They were followed by the tinny clatter of the garbage trucks which Jackson's police use as an inventive piece of cruelty to haul demonstrators to the concentration camp-style prison.

With the first ranks of the demonstrators only a half block from the crest of the hill, the police, now reenforced by 200 

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State Troopers, charged down upon them, indiscriminately battering and slashing the front ranks with the butts of their rifle and sub-machine guns.  Along the sidewalks came two columns of police with drawn pistols and flaying clubs.

CATTLE PENS

I saw this concentration camp at Jackson.  The hundreds of Negro youth and while adults, men and women, are kept in the corrugated quonset exhibition pens used to house livestock during state and county fairs.

The sun, beating down on the metal buildings, builds up an oven-like temperature inside.  The only toilet facilities are slit trenches which accommodated the needs of the cattle.  There are two hose pipes, to provide all the water for any purpose, accessible to the prisoners who now number over 900, the youngest being less than eight years old.

Each quonset building is surrounded by barbed "pig-wire."  

One wouldn't know that such barbarities are going on at the Fair Grounds, for at a distance the eye is drawn to a huge carousel-like building with candy stripe painted surface and rolling tre-terraced grounds.

The radio reported that only 27 people were "officially" ar-