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Title: Police Brutality Author: Emma Goldman Date: November 1906 Language: en Topics: police brutality, Mother Earth, Libertarian Labyrinth Source: Retrieved on 25th April 2021 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/the-sex-question/emma-goldman-police-brutality-1906/ Notes: Published in Mother Earth 1, no. 9 (November, 1906): 2–3.
Liberty by the grace of the police and the might of the club was again
brought home to us in the most brutal and unspeakable manner. A club of
young boys and girls, peaceably assembled Saturday night, October
27^(th), to listen to a discourse as to whether or not Leon Czolgosz was
an Anarchist. At the close of the meeting three of the speakers—Julius
Edelson, M. Moscow, and M. Rubinstein—were arrested and placed under
$1,000 bail each. Tuesday, October 30^(th), a meeting was called to
protest against the arrest of these boys and the suppression of free
speech. Mr. Bolton Hall, H. Kelly, Max Baginski and myself were
announced to speak. The meeting proceeded in absolute order, with Julius
Edelson, who had meanwhile been released on bail through Mr. Bolton
Hall, as the first speaker. He had spoken barely twenty minutes when
several detectives jumped on the platform and placed him under arrest,
while twenty-five police officers began to club the audience out of the
hall. A young girl of eighteen, Pauline Slotnikoff, was pulled off a
chair and brutally dragged across the floor of the hall, tearing her
clothing and bruising her outrageously. Another girl, fourteen years of
age, Rebecca Edelson, was roughly handled and put under arrest, because
she failed to leave the hall as quickly as ordered. The same was done to
three other women—Annie Pastor, Rose Rogin, and Lena Smitt— for no other
reason except that they were unable to reach the bottom of the stairs
fast enough to suit the officers. I was about to leave when one of the
officers struck me in the back, and put me under arrest.
Fortunately, Mr. Bolton Hall and H. Kelly could not be present at the
meeting; they, too, might have been clubbed out of the hall.
Six women and four men were packed like sardines into a patrol-wagon and
hustled off to the station house, where we were kept in vile air and
subjected to vulgar and brutal annoyance by the police until the
following morning; then we were brought before a magistrate and put
under $1,000 bail each for assault. Fancy girls of fourteen and
eighteen, of delicate physique, assaulting twenty-five
two-hundred-and-fifty-pounders!
If we as a nation were not such unspeakable hypocrites, we should long
since have placed a club instead of a torch in the hand of the Goddess
of Liberty—the police mace is not merely the symbol, but the very
essence of our “liberty and order.”