by Jon Meacham
The line had started moving out, cops all over the place directing it, with gaps every twenty people or so. I asked the young Negro where they were going. “We are going to have dinner with Wilbur Mills,” he said, his accent Northern. The Welfare Rights people had just gotten to town for the march the next day, and were taking the opportunity to embarrass the member of the House of Representatives they held most to blame for their many, I am certain, just grievances. Mills lived, he said, about a mile away. I was to meet some friends who might be able to fill me in on Resurrection City; since I was going in the same direction, I fell in behind a segment of the march, my notebook hidden.
It was a good-natured crowd moving along the sidewalk, and the residents of the area (a lot of them, I was to learn, Washington’s hippies and students) seemed to welcome the diversion of the demonstration and to support the marchers. But after we got about a block, the cops intervened and began to hold things up. I stood around awhile, and got to thinking it would be this way at every intersection, and felt impatient, then felt how futile it was to try to embarrass a man like Mills who would measure any such effort down to the most minute calibers of power, and conclude quickly that here was no threat, no power, that could affect him. (“Congress Wake Up To What’s Going On,” said a big sign.) So I left the march, not having really joined it, and went over to the next block and watched it from each parallel intersection. An old crazy-hair lady stood alongside it at one intersection, hands on hips, not liking it at all. One of the friends I was to meet was watching it outside the restaurant, and we stood together as it went by, a segment singing weakly, “Ain’t goin’ let nobody turn me ’round,” one young man throwing his whole soul into the song, his thin shoulders squared, head thrown back, his pinched face suggesting the fanatical college student drawn inevitably to the Movement, but his close-clipped, home-style haircut belying this, suggesting that he was a bona-fide welfare recipient. “Ain’t goin’ let nobody turn me ’round,” and it occurred to me that nobody much but the crazy-hair old lady seemed to want to, she now moving on by us, muttering, stopping to pick up a bit of paper littered there by some bad citizen, then dropping it angrily, as she would like to drop the demonstration, in a garbage can. Later, I read in the paper that some of these demonstrators were arrested, in some technical contretemps with the cops over where it was improper for them to be.
There had been a familiar feeling about that walking out of the hotel into a demonstration. It was like arriving in Selma or Albany during Dr. King’s direct-action campaigns, the plunging from the gray world of everyday into a world where everyday wrongs had been disinterred, brought forth for confrontation, the demonstrations a focus for seeing what is ordinarily not seen, for making tension and conflict the norm of every day (often every hour), as in a battle. Washington has known some of this, I thought, with the Poor People’s Campaign. But then I learned that the march I had stumbled on was a rarity, not the minor skirmish I had supposed.
Much of the malaise afflicting Resurrection City, I was also to learn, stemmed from the lack of action for people who had come for a crusade of direct action. It was not the much-publicized mud, which was no different from niggertown alley mud, fragranced with garbage and excretion whenever rain comes in the South; no worse than ghetto filth. Nor was it the social pathology said to be stalking the encampment at night—sped by wine, drugs, and other torments. Nor was it even the cruel and heartbreaking irony of the discovery in the muddy misery of the place that their own “brothers” named to the role of security police, given clubs and power over them, became suddenly the beasts that all white cops were known to be. No, none of these. We know even from the pale empathy of print that the culture of poverty contains all of this and worse, and has its mechanisms—not only brutalization, the blunting of sensibility—whereby people deal with it, even as the culture of affluence contains its own versions of viciousness and has its martini mechanisms for coping. It was the lack of action that had sent so many away, back to familiar mud, and hunger and crime and idleness. The capacity of Resurrection City was three thousand. At the peak of occupancy around May 20, about a month after Dr. King’s murder, there were 2,650 residents, and many more had been turned away. By the time of the Solidarity Day march, there were no more than eight hundred people left. Some had gone home; others had drifted off to the Washington ghetto; nearly all remaining were Negro, with maybe twenty or twenty-five whites, mostly from West Virginia, some from Chicago, still dwelling among them. Indians and Mexican-Americans, out of bureaucratic ineffectiveness, out of dismay at conditions, and out of hostility from the Negroes, never had lived in any number in Resurrection City, but had encamped in nearby schools and churches. Of 125 Indians who came, no more than fifteen or twenty were still there for Solidarity Day; of four hundred Mexican-Americans, two hundred were left.
Idleness, maybe we will come to know from the Poor People’s Campaign, is, along with hunger, the bane of the poor. Robert Coles has written of an organizing instinct in the human mind which tries to impose a routine on the days of idleness, of nothing to do, of purposelessness among the starving people of the rural South. Murray Kempton, standing about with reporters (in our isolation) at Resurrection City, spoke of that sense of disorder that comes upon the ghetto, upon individual souls in the ghetto as afternoon starts, as the hope of the morning dies and the realization sinks in that here is another day wasted, another day that will come to nothing; this is the time that the wine-drinking starts, the pathology begins to stir. How much of what had moved the poor to far-off, unfriendly Washington, to Resurrection City, I now asked myself, was merely the hope of something to do, a surcease from futility? (They go, said my good friend who had helped recruit them in rural Alabama, because they know that things at the campaign can’t be any worse than back home. We both had thought it was only food that they hungered for.)
Occasionally during those long weeks a demonstration would be announced on the rarely idle loudspeaker system of the “City,” and people would bestir themselves, begin to build a life of a day on the announcement, getting ready, girding themselves. Then there would be delays and falterings, and usually the thing would be called off. But more often, there would not even be the announcement of a demonstration. The people were getting enough to eat (although the fine plans for three hot meals a day never were realized; not always, even, was supper hot). From an adequate diet there was unaccustomed energy. But the energy was not used, was frustrated.
The few “good” demonstrations that had occurred stood out in the memory of those involved; they hinted at what might have been. There had been the time, about two weeks before Solidarity Day, when everyone was together. The march was on the Justice Department to protest the unconstitutional arrest of Mexican-American youngsters in a Los Angeles school walkout. Mexican-Americans were at the head of the march, behind them, whites, and then blacks. There was a driving rain. The singing, the solidarity defied the rain, and for the moment defied Washington—shook a mighty fist at all its alien grandeur and haughtiness.
So the little march that I saw on the eve of Solidarity Day was a big thing, and I suppose I should have known this merely from having seen the physical setting of Resurrection City, the reification of all the South’s niggertowns, the Northern city ghettos. I had earlier in the day walked down one side of it, up the other. They had finally laid a trail of planks and plywood through the mud, leading by the huts of habitation, the larger huts of headquarters and officialdom, and the gathering places, like Martin Luther King Plaza—a wooden platform from which Dr. Ralph Abernathy made his pronouncements. I notice that I headed my notes “Tent City,” a nostalgic slip, harking back to the desperate little enterprise of 1966, in Lowndes County, Alabama, where Negroes evicted from the land for attempting to register to vote took refuge in tents and sought in vain to call attention to their plight. There were other unsuccessful Southern antecedents. Strike City, in Tribbett, Mississippi, was a tent encampment for the farm laborers who in 1965, in
a grandly hopeless gesture against the law of supply and demand, attempted to bargain collectively with the planters. And then there was the Tent City, also in 1966, set up in Washington itself, a little band of the dispossessed and hungry people who had tried to take over an abandoned air force base in Greenville, Mississippi, and had been efficiently carried out of it, old folks and little children, by the United States military.
Our time is expanded, broadened out, filled almost to the bursting point with event; that was all two and three years ago as time has been measured since antiquity—linearly—but how many years of antiquity’s slim pacing of event? It seems like a decade, even a century ago. When that Washington Tent City was encamped on Lafayette Square, the newly formed Citizens Crusade Against Poverty was holding a poor people’s convention—incongruously, indeed surrealistically—within the luxurious confines of the International Inn. In one of the first public displays of the unruliness and just plain undeservingness of the poor (there was considerable comment in the liberal press), the delegates there, led by some of the toughest of Mississippi’s grass-roots Negro leaders—which is to say some of the most misused and lied-to people in the world—set upon such speakers as Walter Reuther with boos and catcalls and an alarming disregard for parliamentary procedure. How long ago, how far back in our innocence; we were sorry the President and the nation and its Congress didn’t respond to those various tent cities. But we had other things going; the Poverty Program seemed so hopeful, founded in the notion that the poor, with proper direction and encouragement, could democratically rid themselves of the taints and defects that prevented them from sharing in the affluent society. There was little thought then that it was the society itself that was tainted and defective.
Tents are honest temporary shelters. Somehow, plywood built into the shape and size of tents has no honesty, no integrity. A man is not demeaned by having to bend over to get into a tent; he does so for the sake of being able to strike the thing in the morning and go on his way. But permanent plywood tents press down on the soul, bend heads and shoulders toward indignity. Middle-class mindlessness designed and built those abominations and set them down on lawn grass with the same insensitivity that housed a crusade against poverty in a plastic and glass-bubble modern motel, and with the same deadly unrealism that expected democratic procedures, used against the poor a million times, to sustain them, to hold up under them.
Resurrection City itself felt like an African village seen in the movies—that sense of imperfect planning conveyed by the huts, of an unknown communal culture, perhaps more sociable than ours, with black babies waddling barefoot in the mud. There also was a feel of the South, the porch somebody had incongruously stuck out in front of one of the huts, three men seated on it, chairs tilted back to the plywood wall. And there was a sense of the circus—controlled chaos, the big top soon to rise—the same as there was on the Selma-to-Montgomery march produced by the essential Americanism of Dr. King and the metaphors of protest he had projected.
Little groups were gathered in discussion, one felt endless discussion: tableaux of black young men, a white in their group; or two whites sitting on their haunches; or an old garrulous Southern Negro woman talking at once to everyone and no one. There was hostility toward the stranger—the white, the besuited, unbearded with press tag affixed, notebook out in the open—but mostly I was struck by the aloofness of these people, the demand that their privacy in this place be respected. There had been the time when, as a reporter, I would have, without second thought, moved among such people, talked with them. In part I would have done so simply because I was interested in them, glad of the chance to meet them, to hear what they had to say, to share a common view. That part had been genuine and good; but there had also been another, not very pretty part: the unspoken, maybe even, for some of them, unrecognized enactment of a mutually demeaning ritual: of my eliciting, their showing, the pathos, the tragedy, the ugliness of their situation, and the humor and braveness and beauty of their response: this to be put down in my notebook, to be filled out, built up, bodied forth in quotes, the alive words of suffering people for the American consumers of words, of authenticity, of real human material. No more. Or at least not here. The people had apparently been exposed too much in Washington to the truth of how little America cares about their humanity. So they do not speak to the straight stranger, nor look at him, even in the intimacy of the one waiting while the other negotiates a single plank through a mud puddle. Or they show contempt by demanding a cigarette or money.
I remember my shock, the first upsetting of my conditioned expectations of the Movement Negroes of the South, and most of all, of SNCC, when in the summer of 1964, Freedom Summer, I went into the SNCC-run office of COFO in Jackson, Mississippi, and had a Negro youth ask me for money. That was not the way the Movement had been run heretofore; there was too much mutual respect for that sort of thing, despite my expense account and good living made out of writing about the Movement, despite their poverty and their beyond-belief braveness. I had not learned then to be aware of the implications of our relative positions, their incongruity in the real meanings of that movement to which we were both devoted; and he had not learned that begging might have utility beyond the momentary need for money, that begging by such as him from such as me could be an exquisite insult. For a time the activists of the Movement accepted those white Southerners (and there were damn few of them) who were able to support direct action. In this context, some of us, reporters and others, developed a sort of proprietary feeling about the Movement; we liked to advise and criticize it, using as a standard those best and most beautiful moments of it that we had seen. Sometimes we could be relevant and constructive; but sometimes our attitude degenerated into that of the connoisseur—carping and superficial. In any case, the Movement’s penetration to ever deeper and more painful truth about American society has ended this rule. We have come a ways since, that long-ago kid at COFO and myself.
Wordlessly, I handed out cigarettes to three young black men before one of the huts, and we all four lit up, and I tried to think of some way not to get just a quote. I could not. They read my press tag. (I had decided to wear it out of dread of some mean, stupid scene with the security police.) One of the young men said, “Tell the truth about us when you write.” I had heard that so many times from the whites in the South; there was no longer any shock at hearing it, too, from Negroes, and with probably more justification, but again renouncing the old politeness, the old mutual respect that had been so pleasant. “He can write anything he wants to,” another of them said, turning, disgusted, cynical, bending his head down to go into his hut. “It’s a free country.”
An old Negro man, from the South, from the country, unlearned in or maybe too wise for blanket hostility, the gratuitous, meaningless insult, asked politely for a cigarette, and then went on to say that he was praying for rain on Solidarity Day “so all them visitors can get baptized in our mud.” He laughed, and I laughed. Maybe he was paying for his cigarette in the old unconscious ways with a quote. Maybe he wasn’t. But it was like old times.
There was a faint sense in Resurrection City of a struggle of wills, of the constructive and, let us say, softer side of humanity against the harsh and destructive. A dribble painting executed with skill on a hut’s outer wall was carefully signed. The God’s Eye Bakery was dispensing hot brown bread and apple butter to all comers, straight strangers even, with a joy in the goodness of it. At the Child Care Center, a large, three-room plywood construction with a blessedly squared-off roof, not cramping down on the children, there was a sense of purpose, of busy people. Crayon and fingerpaint art was all over the walls; children were moving about in the random way of preschoolers; a sign on the wall said to take a free toothbrush. A boy of about five in a corner cried all the woe of his time in life, and one of a number of pretty, mud-stained white girls went quickly to him, knelt to him, comforted him, ended sitting on the floor and engaging him in some game. Two middle-aged, middle-class local
Negro women were in charge, both with experience in professional day-care work. They talked of their thirty-five charges, including some infants, in that gentle way—not condescending, nor pitying, but more nearly awed—that their middle-aged, middle-class counterparts in the Child Development Group of Mississippi speak of theirs: these selfsame bright-eyed little kids flowering forth their potential, their beauty, freed for a time from torpor and listless quarrelsomeness by the advent in their lives of one hot meal a day.
Back outside, an old white man with dancing eyes began to talk of the greatness of America, that it could produce such a thing as Resurrection City. Another of his kind interrupted a conversation of a beautiful young woman with straight black hair, high cheekbones, and tan skin, a Negro professional civil rights worker who had been assigned to work with the Indians. She had been telling how every time an Indian got singled out for any role of leadership he was immediately discredited with the others, and she was saying, as the old man hove up, “I’m just a token Indian.” “No, no,” he reassured her. “You’re an Indian—” as though nothing could be worse than what she really was. He went on his way, had an afterthought, returned to tell it. “If it weren’t for the Indians, we wouldn’t have this country, would we? We stole it from them.”
Shortly before they killed Dr. King, I heard that he had been made hopeful once more by the success in recruiting the other races for the Poor People’s Campaign; he regarded it as evidence that his dream of welding all the poor together could be achieved. There had been little enough during the past few years to encourage him. His organization (if the scattering of outposts and individual preachers across the South could be called an organization) and funds had shrunk. His Chicago adventures had been near disasters (the old tactic of exposing at its most vicious the normally hidden brutality of segregation had worked as dramatically in Chicago as it had in the South, but there was little willingness in the nation even to acknowledge the brutality it was shown, let alone act upon the Northern ghetto problems). His influence in the White House was long since gone, the condemnation of the Vietnam war having ended all contact. He had been badly used by Stokely Carmichael et al. during the Meredith March of 1966, his presence having drawn the press and thus given the leaders of the Black Power schism a national platform as well as a stalking horse for their new doctrine. Finally, Dr. King and his movement undoubtedly had been hurt by the riots in the Northern ghettos. Almost nowhere in the South had there been anything like them.
