by Jon Meacham
We know in the South (from the beginning of our lives) that it is insanity we fight when we oppose racism, when we exercise our civil liberties. You handle insanity as delicately, cautiously as you can, not out of political moderation or humane feeling, but out of self-preservation. This was at the essence of the strategy (as distinct from the philosophy) of Dr. King’s nonviolent movement. To have that self-preserving caution, that pitting of the sane against the insane, suddenly blown up by outbursts of an answering insanity from the ghettos must have been to know anguish and despair of an exquisite kind. Back in 1965, Bayard Rustin had stated with Southern clarity the case against black violence when he remarked of the new breed of black militants: “They think [Malcolm X] can frighten white people into doing the right thing. To believe this, of course, you must be convinced, even if unconsciously, that at the core of the white man’s heart lies a buried affection for Negroes—a proposition one may be permitted to doubt.” Not the least of the reasons Dr. King found himself in Memphis in the fateful spring of 1968 was the pressure on him to show, as in a staging ground for the Washington campaign, that nonviolent demonstrations could still be achieved, could resist the agents and impulses of the riot insanity. And of course the insanity did arise, preparing the ground for that more effective lethal white variant of it that ended his life.
Naturally enough, in the process of all the vicissitudes of recent years, Dr. King’s headquarters staff had shown signs of demoralization. Unlike the old SNCC and CORE, Dr. King’s organization had always had a tendency toward soft middle-class living. I remember my innocent shock (the same connoisseur’s shock of being panhandled by a SNCC kid) at overhearing a big SCLC leader in 1963 in Albany, Georgia, where the demands on the people for sacrifice and suffering were great, speak of dreading to go into the heat, the noise of the nightly mass meetings which the people loved so much, this being his form of sacrifice and suffering. There were other men of power on the SCLC staff of whom there was universal agreement among us bystanders that SCLC, Dr. King, and the Movement would long have been better off without. There was never any hint that Dr. King would get rid of such men. Ralph Abernathy was to show a similar disinclination: some said it was because Mr. Abernathy felt more comfortable around such men, lesser men than himself, than around the lean, aggressive younger activists who came back to SCLC for the Poor People’s Campaign. I don’t think this motive was ever part of Dr. King’s tolerance for them. I think that in a way so genuine it was innate with him, he believed in the good, the positive in all men to a degree that made of little significance to him those gradations in demonstrated goodness—or more to the point here, ability—by which the rest of us judge individuals. His leadership was to draw the best from each man, not seek better and better men. This is the ne plus ultra, of course, of radical leadership, a concept ancient enough, but in our time of surplus human beings, an entirely alien one.
After his death, reports came from the spontaneous drawing together in grief of his staff, from their staff meetings, a retreat they held, that there was to be a renaissance of the old movement spirit, a renewed unity and dedication. Everything one now heard in Washington about the staff seemed to deny this, or to indicate a deterioration of the new spirit. The most public criticism was that of the unwillingness of the staff to live in the squalor of Resurrection City. There were gleeful reports of a bill of at least fifteen thousand dollars run up by the staff at the motel where most of them stayed. More devastating to the effect of the campaign was the confusion of command, the absence of leadership and authority which developed in Washington, manifest in the failures to get demonstrations going, to satisfy the hunger for purposefulness in the poor people. The style of the Southern movement had always included a fine little bit of chauvinism, a deliberate baiting of the Northern fetish for efficiency. In all its major campaigns, SCLC had indulged this indifference to routines and planning to dangerous degrees. Apparently in Washington it got out of hand. Previously it had been the defect of a greater virtue—a spontaneity that provided energy, morale. Now it seemed the expression of collapsed morale from whatever wide variety of causes among the individuals on the staff.
Thus, the connoisseur of the Movement might make his pronouncements and judgments, like a literary critic or sportswriter. The press is expert at this; the Poor People’s Campaign has been subjected to it everywhere, from The Village Voice to Business Week. What do any of us know of the real forces at work on any group, any organization, any collection of people, even on that most intimate grouping of all, our own families? What happens to the men who make such a movement? I speak of hopelessness. What do we know of the dimensions of hopelessness (or hope) in a man at the head of a demonstration line in the Black Belt South marching into the face of his worst childhood fears? I remember Dr. King’s inarticulateness in Albany during one of the first arrests there: the words, the inspiration, the incredible bravery coming that time not from him but from one of those he led, seeking the best in them—an unlettered country preacher falling on his knees in the street, praying in the breath-gasping, ungrammatical idiom of his religious tradition, inchoate, wild-sounding prayer, pulling the demonstrators to his own exalted state.
I do not presume to judge, then, or even to insist that these surface things I have told even begin to explain what happened to the Poor People’s Campaign. It is fair and accurate to report, though, that on the eve of the Solidarity Day march, no one was hopeful, no one was predicting, from the performance of SCLC in the simple mechanics of organizing for such an event, much of a crowd. It will be the whimper, my friend had said. It happened, though, that I had had occasion the previous week to be reading a random assortment of out-of-town papers, and I had been struck with how nearly all of them—in the South, New England, Pittsburgh, such places—had their little stories saying a thousand from here, a busload from there, were getting themselves ready to go to the march. Apparently much of this was spontaneous, with no great organizational effort behind it—a minister here, a Negro leader there, getting it up. So I had a hunch that the crowd would be better than anyone had a right to hope; and through the hot morning, watching the people gathering around the Washington Monument, seeing them steadily coming, like so many picnickers, I felt some little sense of satisfaction, and, seeing such a quietly ordered and decent-looking crowd, I found myself, in an old reflex of the Movement’s magic, beginning to hope. We had counted crowds so many times, the numbers in a church, the size of the demonstration, as though to find some mystical magical number, as though to quantify the miracle occurring before our eyes was somehow to solidify it, certainly Americanize it. The essence of Dr. King’s movement—perhaps like that of his people, the Negro South—derived more from the East than the West: spiritual, indeed mystical, involving the absorbing of the individual in the will and consciousness of the many, just as his demonstrations made use of methods and mechanisms not much drawn on anymore in the West—singing, chanting, religious exaltation. I can still see Claude Sitton of The New York Times running up and down the line of the demonstrations in St. Augustine, Florida, sweating in the balmy, tropical night heat, counting the number that was willing, incredibly, night after night, to march to the town square and get beaten with clubs and steel pipe and bicycle chains, and then be arrested for their pains. It was important to get the exact number. During the morning in Washington people kept saying, “How would you estimate the crowd?” “Would you say fifty thousand?” We had sat up late the night before, talking, dolefully talking, as we had so many nights since the assassinations, and the hangover I had was like so many since then, indeed one big one since then, a hangover of impotent grief and anger that would not sweat away in that godawful morning of Washington humidity. So I tended to be short with my stock answer, that I don’t think it’s possible to estimate a crowd, that if you can’t count them (count their legs and divide by two, we used to say), then you just don’t know, and it becomes a guessing game, an issue of contention between those who are for the cro
wd and those against it. Sure enough, the next day, Ralph Abernathy called a press conference to quarrel with The Washington Post’s estimate of fifty thousand.
Less was said about the quality of the crowd. There was, as always at these things, the most recent one having been Dr. King’s funeral, the sense of being at a reunion, or convention, the seeing and greeting and talking with members of a community who came from all over, mostly up and down the Eastern seaboard—people with ties to the Movement, with mutual memories. Occasionally, one of them would say of the day’s crowd that—yes, it was different, different from that great, joyous throng in 1963 in Washington, for example. Some would say that it was better—younger, more serious. Others would say it seemed lifeless, hopeless, going through the motions. I couldn’t tell. My notes at one point say flatly, “not young predominantly, not poor—the same kind of middle-class, well-intentioned, naïve crowd that has always turned out for these things—maybe even more whites than there used to be.”
The crowd flowed slowly around the Washington Monument. At the base, one of those inevitable “entertainment” sessions went on, with maybe half the crowd gathered around it. Pete Seeger sang, the good Southern idiom of “The Crawdad Song” (“You git a line, I’ll git a pole . . . We’ll go down to that crawdad hole . . .”) ringing out over the more than ordinarily inhuman loudspeaker system. There is a verse to “The Crawdad Song” that Seeger understandably refrained from using: “Yonder comes a nigger with a sack on his back; yonder comes a nigger with a sack on his back . . . Got more crawdads than he can pack . . .” There is a spirit in which that verse can be sung which would not be offensive to Negroes, Southern Negroes, a spirit of white and black sharing subtleties of humor, the anomaly of a nigger ever having more of anything than he can pack, the humbleness of that creature, the crawdad diminutive cousin of the lobster, capable in the tradition of turnip greens, pigs’ snouts, of being cooked into exquisite fare, as in crayfish bisque. We have not seen the time, even that joyous time of the March on Washington in 1963, when such an explanation could be broached to such a crowd. We shall not likely see it, ever. To try it even in print is to risk offending good people and court the contumely of various kinds of fools, including Black Power ones. And yet—who wants to live in a land where you can’t try to say the unsayable?
In the headquarters tent, around noon, I watched Ralph Abernathy being greeted, hugged, posed for pictures, being treated like a potentate by various old friends of his, and new ones. He looked tired, as Dr. King used to look during these climaxes of his adventures in innovative political action. Ralph Abernathy is a likable man, more so on the level of how-de-do, haven’t seen you in a long time, than Dr. King ever was. I always admired his preaching. He gets a tone of the sardonic and at the same time of Elizabethan, Gargantuan outrage into his voice that is eloquent; it sang for a while in his speech later in the day. His children and Dr. King’s have been among the tiny token of desegregation at the grammar school where my children go; he and I sat together one PTA meeting and listened to his daughter and my son and two of Dr. King’s youngsters in a choral group on the stage singing “Dixie.” We looked at each other, shook our heads, laughed. I watched him and Dr. King once in Albany, going to all the Negro dives and poolrooms to plead that there be no repetition of the previous night’s disruption of a demonstration by throwing bricks at police. That was in 1962, and in those innocent, pre-Northern riots, pre–Black Power times, the plea prevailed; in these encounters, we reporters, connoisseurs, agreed, Abernathy, of the two men of God down among the sinners, had the surest common touch, was the most effective. It was said that much of the ineffectiveness and the doldrums in Resurrection City stemmed from a flaw in the command system which demanded that he make every decision, however minor, although he was nearly always unavailable, caught as now in talk by handwringers and hangers-on. Be that as it may, the march was, true to form, to cliché, going to be late.
When, finally, the Reverend Jesse Jackson got the march officially under way, fully half the marchers had already ambled the short distance of its course across the green and alongside the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial. With marvelous ability to ignore this plain reality, Jackson was officiously instructing who should be where in the march—the Resurrection City residents first, the Mule Team people (their mule team in some bureaucratic snag left across the river in a Washington suburb) second, etc.
I noticed, ambling along the march route, that many of the Resurrection City residents were sitting it out in the familiarity of the shade of their huts, some of them standing along the fence, looking at, even talking to the marchers. There was a clear division: the march was in one tradition (that of the old, lately lamented coalition of white liberals, labor and religious figures, and Negro sacrifices, the former unable to deliver such crucial items as votes but ever able to bargain, the latter depended upon to deliver whatever was demanded—votes, lives); Resurrection City was in another tradition, one that was done with coalition. “We Marched at Selma, 1965, Washington, 1968,” said what may have been the saddest of all the hand-lettered signs on the plywood of the A-frame huts. A button to complement it was worn by a middle-aged, middle-class lady, innocent of innocents: “Think Poor.”
The dust, the crowding, the heat were worse than even in the morning’s hangover dread I had imagined. Finally I sat down in some shade, apart from all of it; there were maybe a hundred of us along there. They played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I stood up. I always have, though never since the age of twelve, I reckon, with any meaning in it. Maybe six others in our shade did too.
About this time two buses marked “Congressional Delegation” pulled up, and I watched the occupants descend from their air-conditioning right into the worst of the heat and crowdedness. To a man, they stood a moment, staring down at what they (and there were precious few of them) had come here to be part of. I watched their faces—these politicians’ faces, whore-trained to simulate any desired emotion—one after the other falter and fall for an instant into honest expressions, mostly of dismay, a few of panic, fear. And then I watched Senator McCarthy arrive. He had given us the first faint, fitful start of real hope since the assassinations with the news that morning of the New York primary returns. The Secret Service men and the soldiers were scurrying before and after him, their heads swinging unnaturally fast in sweeps of observation, scanning like electronic instruments for killers. McCarthy’s face as he scurried along was all twisted, maybe squinting in the glare—but maybe showing his distaste for this ritual of his arrival, along with all the rest of ritual which he has so eloquently disdained.
When Humphrey arrived a little later, they booed him. It was one of the few good moments. Another was when a large group, more than a hundred, did their marching through the length of the reflecting pool, waving their signs, clapping, singing the old Movement songs, “Sing A-men . . . Amen . . . Amen. Amen. Amen.” They were refreshed, alive—having fun. The filthy water sparkled in their hair.
I ran into John Lewis, who was the old SNCC’s brave, gentle leader. Of all the young activists who were inspired by Dr. King (SNCC sprang full-grown from the belly of an SCLC conference), Lewis was probably the closest to him in spirit and in a still unfaltering ability to accept each person as he is, on his own terms. More than one automatically ironic reporter was to note that the famous words that were stricken from John Lewis’ speech at the 1963 march would have been pale beside the inflammatory idiom of this day’s speeches. One reporter somehow got into print in a paper that should have known better the comment that John Lewis had become in the years since that 1963 speech entirely respectable, a man who now wore an Ivy League suit. He always had. I remember seeing him, still dazed, still in pain, wearing such a suit a few days after the most spectacular of his countless brave acts: he and Hosea Williams leading the march that tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, and was beaten back and trampled by Alabama troopers and other savages on horseback. John Lewis had been with Robert
Kennedy, had talked with him just before they killed him. His grief, as it had been over Dr. King, was terrible to see. I had somewhere in one of those long days of all our grief snarled out, “Why in the hell doesn’t somebody put a bullet through the brain of one of theirs, the worst of theirs,” and John turned on me, as harsh as I ever heard him speak, and said, “Hush that kind of talk. We’re sick—sick with violence.” This most hopeful of all the men I have known in the Southern movement spoke of going to this march but not expecting much. I had seen him during the morning. He confided that he had noticed a lot of bureaucrat types in the crowd, the kind who come to anything only as a command performance. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” John Lewis said wistfully, “to see the President show up.”
A sign, “Jobs Or Income For All,” had been abandoned, stuck on its flimsy stick in the middle of a mud puddle. I made notes: a big Negro man with a hand that dwarfs his sign stick: “America Why Not Now?” A stooped middle-class white woman, kerchief on her gray head, a bearded kid behind her, a gray-haired priest, a solemn Negro man, hand on hip, head bent, listening to Roy Wilkins, four girls sitting in grass, the day’s dust coating their mini-skirts, an elderly nun, a middle-class Negro woman with glasses on a chain around her neck, a white mother and son eating sandwiches, a news cameraman asleep. A banner proclaiming that Ripon Republicans Join Poor People’s Struggle is held by three young men, somehow looking fresh in their business suits, like a television commercial. A Negro man from out of the Washington wilderness paces slowly with his sandwich board: “I am the true prophet. This land is going to be bombed with nuclear. This is the end for the nations of Christianity. This is the meaning of doom’s day.”
