Aug. 8, 1964 - A rally in New York City’s Duffy Square against the military role of the U.S. in Vietnam was broken up this afternoon by mounted policemen and patrolmen using nightsticks.
A crowd of about 60 had gathered in front of the statue of Father Duffy, between Broadway and Seventh Ave. at 47th St., to hear speeches denouncing the Johnson Administration’s policies. The police ordered the demonstrators to disperse. They refused.
Then, as hundreds of visitors and other bystanders watched, two mounted policemen moved into the crowd. One unidentified young man was stepped on by a horse but evidently was unhurt.
A dozen foot patrolmen followed the horses, swinging their clubs to disperse the demonstrators, who cried: “Fascist cops! Fascist cops!”
The police commandeered taxis to help carry off those who were arrested.
Seventeen persons, three of them women, were held on disorderly conduct charges.
The sponsors of the rally, members of a group called the May 2nd Movement, apparently knew it would violate a two-year-old Police Department ban on demonstrations in the midtown area, for they started the meeting by announcing it would be a peaceful assembly and not a demonstration.
The crowd waved signs that said such things as “Stop Johnson’s War Against the Vietnamese People” and “World’s Fair Visitors — Help Us Stop the War in Vietnam.” The speakers used bullhorns.
When the horses were called into service from the Seventh Avenue side, most of the crowd withdrew — but some demonstrators tried to stand in place.
A young woman in a tan shift went at a patrolman with both fists. A young man in a green T-shirt made himself as stiff as a board and was loaded into a police car.
Another young man, shouting “Fascist cops,” was carried off by two policemen, while two other policemen followed, jabbing at his kidneys with the ends of their nightsticks.
The demonstrators later regrouped on W. 47th St. in front of the 16th Precinct station house, where the prisoners were taken. They marched in a circle on the sidewalk opposite the station house, keeping up a din with shouts that combined a variety of causes: “Protest Police Brutality — Here and in Vietnam” and “Sent Troops to Mississippi — Not to Vietnam.”
Onlookers in tenement windows, many of them Cuban exiles, jeered at the marchers. One woman emptied a bucket of water on them.
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