Cindy Sheehan was there. And she tried to help.

On September 10 in a hallway of the House of Representatives, right outside the Petraeus hearings, the Rev. Lennox Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus, was waiting in line to get in.

The Capitol Police wouldn’t let him. And they wrestled him to the ground.

They tore some ligaments in his ankle, and he had to be taken to the hospital. He was held overnight in custody, and then charged with assaulting a police offer and disorderly conduct.

The Rev. Yearwood, who is one of the organizers of the September 15 march in Washington, talked with Democracy Now!

“I knew how important it was to hear the general’s report for myself,” he said. “I knew that when officers lie, soldiers die. So I was going, in essence, to make government more transparent. It was also critical for me as a person of color to be in the room to report back to my community.”

The Rev. Yearwood told Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez that he was surprised by the police assault.

“Somebody grabbed me on my shoulder,” he said. “And I kind of turned. Amy, by the time I turned I was on the ground. And I actually just felt myself going headfirst into the concrete.”

A little while later in the interview, he relayed his thoughts at that moment. “When I was lying there, I have to admit, I actually, as a person of color, lost hope for a second. I was sitting there, ‘Why am I doing this? I’m just here to try to make the injustice visible. I’m not hurting anybody. I’m not hitting anybody. I’m just here.’ I was in line. I just want to go in. And instead, I’m being beaten in the halls of Congress.”

Cindy Sheehan was also arrested, along with her sister, for trying to draw attention to what was happening to the Rev. Yearwood.

“I was at the very end of the line with my sister, Dede, and we heard a commotion, and someone yelled, ‘Don’t hurt him, he’s a minister,’ so we ran up and wanted to know what happened,” she told me. “Some cop said, really arrogantly and insolently, ‘I guess he fell,’ so we started shouting, ‘Arrest Bush, Not Rev,’ and we were handcuffed for 13 hours!”

Sheehan denounced the actions of the Capitol Police against Yearwood, calling it “brutality,” and saying it was “shocking and totally unnecessary.” She added: “This incident should send a shock wave of outrage throughout our country and get people out in the streets to protest the end of America as we know it. We live in a supposed democracy which is degenerating into a fascist-totalitarian state with only a relatively few people noticing and even fewer speaking out against it and being willing to risk arrest.”

The Capitol Police did not return phone calls for comment.

Sheehan also was dismayed that none of the other protesters in line came to Yearwood’s defense.

“No one joined us in our chant, and not one other person came forward to try and help the Rev,” she said in a column she e-mailed to friends.

“What is wrong with our country and what is wrong with our movement?”