by Jon Meacham
It was the alienated young, in all their modes of hairstyle and dress, who got to me most: a tall young Negro in a robe, his happy discovery of a style really expressive of himself, a princeliness, ferociousness formerly denied him; or the young in Resurrection City in all their brooding privacy and silence. They stirred buried sources of anxiety I didn’t know I had. I began to feel that this nation was going off the track. I had been reared in the surly listlessness of the Southern Depression, had come of age in the hysteria of World War II, had matured in the Southern civil rights struggle, had witnessed the insurrection of the white South, after the 1954 Supreme Court decision and Dr. King’s counterrevolution. But here in Washington I felt for the first time that the orderly path, those parallel lines between which our struggles had been confined, seemed certain always to be confined, twisting and turning, moving forward and backward, those lines that seemed so certainly, so permanently drawn—really could be ripped apart, torn away, and new ones drawn. Perhaps they would be more stirring lines, but they would lead through the air there in Resurrection City, all of that nameless hostility. Knowing the Southern darkness, the murderous insanity that had created this hostility in its image and now awaited it, lips pursed; considering the sad inevitabilities of revolution; considering some of the psychological specimens I had known of the nucleus of the New Left in the South; considering that being under thirty no more assures a sense of consequences than being Negro or white does, or being poor, I felt a fear of the future like none I had ever known.
The speeches were as dull, as remote from the reality of Resurrection City as the routine program designed them to be. There was the usual gossip among the connoisseurs about the mighty power struggle going on within SCLC, exemplified by Mrs. Coretta King’s taking so much time for her part of the program (her speech was acutely intelligent, her courage and beauty that had shown through all the obscene spectacle of the assassination’s aftermath on display once more). Such talk of power struggles trailed Dr. King through his career, struggles that seem integral to any organized effort of Southerners, white and black, their zest for exaggerating the ordinary maneuverings of clique and faction in any human endeavor being one of their more debilitating traits. By far the best of the speeches was the fiery tirade of Reies Lopes Tijerina, by all accounts a monomaniac, centering on lands swindled from his ancestors: “I stand before the eyes of the world to accuse the United States of America of organized criminal conspiracy against my people. I accuse the United States of cultural genocide against the Spanish-American people. . . . I accuse the U.S.A. of violating all the human rights of the people of the Southwest.” The ellipsis marks one of those lapses into the ludicrous, the noting of which proved irresistible to some of the best of reporters covering the Poor People’s Campaign, stimulated as they were by all the incongruities of American society’s disparate body of castoffs, misfits, not-neededs: Indians whose ancestors practiced slavery denouncing it, Negroes cheering Mexicans in denunciations of the Supreme Court. In the counts of his indictment Lopes Tijerina accused America of slaughtering sixty million buffaloes to divide the Indians into poverty and genocide.
But the dominant presences, haunting the event, hovering over it, were not the suffering poor but the martyred dead. Their theme was played in endless variations by the crowd, the man in a business suit festooned with buttons as big as saucers in memory of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., a family grouping, grandparents to babies, sitting under a tree with their homemade sign propped up that said “This Family Believes in That Dream,” and that displayed magazine photographs of both Kennedys and Dr. King. Ralph Abernathy in his oration at the end of the day evoked the memory of a few of the many lesser-known martyrs: “four little girls in the Sunday School of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, died at the hands of a mad bomber. . . . We met with some success in Selma. But it cost us the lives of Reverend James Reeb, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, and Jimmy Lee Jackson. . . . Medgar Evers was murdered, and hundreds of unknown black men sleep in the bloody soil and waters of the Southland.” Over it all, looking down on it with his mournful, gravedigger’s face, was the first martyr of them all, the seated Lincoln.
Dr. Abernathy’s speech was probably the best he has ever made. But by the time the program wound its weary way to him, it was evening and at least half the crowd had wandered away: many, no doubt, back to their air-conditioned hotels and motels to sanely watch the program wind down on television; the people from Resurrection City were nearly all back in the heat and stench and mud of their turf. Those who had remained were mostly unheeding, sunk in the heat torpor. The program, I realized, had been built on the old model that accommodated Dr. King—building up slowly, lengthily, to his appearance, last on the program, longest to speak. But Dr. King was a celebrity they would wait to see; Dr. King was an orator capable of pulling back the long-since-wandered attention, reviving energy, bringing to climax and fruition all the day’s walking, talking, weary waiting, all the day’s emotion. Dr. Abernathy could not evoke this excitement; he remains a preacher, one of the best in the Negro Southern Baptist tradition of virtuosity, but he is no celebrity. Who even heard what he had to say out there in the weary afternoon heat, his preacher rhythm ringing all kinds of nuances out of his words, like early jazz: “We have been taught by two hundred and five years of bitter experience that we cannot trust the leadership of this nation. We cannot trust the elected representatives of Congress. We cannot trust the administration—whether Democratic or Republican—to fulfill the promise to the disinherited. . . .”
And who in the restless crowd there was listening, even when the moments of thunder came: “I see nothing in my Bible about the riches of the world or this nation belonging to Wilbur Mills or Russell Long; nor do they belong to General Motors, the grape growers in California, the cotton kings in Mississippi, and the oil barons in Texas. But I read in my Bible that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, and there is no need of God’s children going hungry in 1968.”
Who listened to Dr. Abernathy say: “I will not sink so low as to imitate the very worst of white Western civilization violence. The United States Government is the leader of the violent movement in the world. They believe in fire power. . . .”
Maybe the poets of paranoia were listening. Maybe the seated Lincoln, who had his own powerful prophetic style. A nation cannot survive half slave, half free. Nor can an individual. Yet that was precisely our predicament, we out there in the innocent, unaware middle-class crowd, just as much as the most beset citizen of Resurrection City. We talk about economic intimidation of Negroes in the Black Belt. But consider as well the poor young devil, white and privileged, graduated by the skin of his teeth a few years before from a second-rate college, with two babies and a third on the way, a mortgage on the house, and a superfluity of installment-credit appliances and vehicles. Then think of his political position vis-à-vis that of the manager of his office (no need to go up the chain of intimidation to the president of the company). Then speak of economic intimidation, half slave, half free. A middle-aged friend had said, look to the kids, not the Negroes. (C. Wright Mills said it, too.) The main question of our time, my friend had said, is whether the kids are going to decide to free us or enslave us. Either way, the nation could stand—but not as now, full of people divided against themselves.
The Solidarity Day march ended in anticlimax, the familiar mournful music of “We Shall Overcome” floating lifeless over the reflecting pool where a Washington Negro slum kid, fully clothed, swam slowly in the muck. “We are not afraid” floated into Resurrection City, arousing what memories there? What derision? Or perhaps no reaction at all, the most chilling characteristic of its somber mood, the blank stare of depression’s rage. They swayed, hand in middle-class hand, black and white innocents together, singing the swan song of the Movement as I had known it, loved it, Dr. King’s movement that came cutting through the edge of all my conditioned resistance to emotion, to belief, to such a th
ing as hope, and consumed my life for a long time, shaped it, put me down at one specified reference point on the map of the world of my times, and held me there, South-caught. No one had heard Ralph Abernathy. They never really heard Dr. King either, most of the middle class, half slave and half free, even the most sensitive and human of them who had comprised the Movement’s crowds over the years, like the one dwindling away now from the Lincoln Memorial. And those who had heard him, his people, the basis of all he said and the way he said it—they were over there in Resurrection City.
I had watched a group of six or so young blacks standing in the street in front of the Lincoln Memorial during Dr. Abernathy’s sermon. They were typical of their generation—slim, full of nervous energy, a sense of freedom of motion that was well beyond the American norm, with all the eccentricity of adornment that is their conformity. They were having a great time of it, cheering the speech, intoning with perfect timing the amen’s, the “Yes, tell it, brother” responses which weld the crowd in a Negro church into one personality, one being—greater than the sum of the individuals, perhaps; certainly different from it. These kids were not listening to the honest, harsh, just words of the speech, its tedious linear development of meaning, but were responding to the familiar rhythms of the preacher’s style, and their responses were mocking, jeering—as much of themselves and the best of their vaunted black heritage as of poor old preacher Abernathy. A friend came along and pointed one of them out as the young gentleman known as Sweet Willie, who was leader of that gang which in Memphis disrupted the last attempt of Dr. King to work his miracle of nonviolence. My friend called him over and presented me to him (in the way of these things, a recommendation of me for future reference, wherever our paths might cross). I shook his hand, looked into his unfriendly, glancing-away eyes. To a segregationist white Southerner, shaking hands with a nigger has been the most anathematic gesture of all, and I sensed in the listless hand I shook there as Abernathy spoke, as Lincoln looked down, the same loathfulness of contact. The Urban Coalition, the latest of the Establishment’s teams to wrestle with race relations, has taken unto its breast such fellow power politicians as Sweet Willie; so have the centers of American innocence like the liberal church and sincere liberal politics; somehow I found myself not charmed with him.
The sensed violence (which was only the more volatile and less evil aspect of the mood of Resurrection City) broke loose that night, after a storm had rung down the curtain on the Solidarity Day march. I read about it in The Washington Post: six “youths” with tent poles confronting six cops, the youths talking about getting whiteys, honkies; the cops pushing them back; a crowd coming from Resurrection City, throwing bottles; fifty more cops rushing in; a tense confrontation, as we say, finally ending without, as we say, serious mishap. The story also noted “seventeen reported assaults” within Resurrection City that night, but contained no details because the Resurrection City residents acting as “security police” would not let reporters in, or tell them anything. The story also noted that some security police were drunk during the previous day’s march, and pushed around tourists as well as Resurrection City residents. Subsequently, the Post carried a story quoting a security policeman who alleged that violence, theft, and rape had been commonplace throughout the existence of Resurrection City and who was now quitting because of the lack of law enforcement there. The story would be subsequently cited the following week by the authorities bent on getting Resurrection City gone forever. The SCLC people would point out that whatever pathology was on display in Resurrection City was typical of all the hidden environments of poverty they were protesting. The speaker who, early in the campaign, had said that Resurrection City was better than the ghettos if there were no murders nor death from overdose of drugs there was much quoted.
But this would seem a trifle disingenuous; after all, Resurrection City had not been planned by Dr. King as a showcase of the criminality of the poor. There had been talk of a “model city.” Haunting the failure of responsibility in regard to the security police situation and general welfare (the showers that never materialized, the less adequate than promised diet, for example) was the memory of the old faith, held most militantly by SNCC, that all the evils of this world could be cured if the poor people could only be put in charge. If you know the wisdom, the resources of strength, courage, and doggedness in the poor people of the rural South with whom the old SNCC worked (it being more clear in the South than elsewhere that poverty is not the fault of the poor, not a signal of failure, but the result of systematic repression, and the inability of the economic system to provide adequate jobs and wages), you can understand that old SNCC romanticism of the poor. I remember defending it to a friend in New York and having him, as we drove the intricate complexity of the expressways there, wave his hands about at all the arranged system of signals and signs, and say in exasperation, “Do you think Mrs. Hamer could run all this?” And of course I could wave my hands and holler, “Who needs all this?” But the point is, the main point perhaps of Resurrection City, is that we do need all of the social organization, social responsibility, humane planning, intelligent administration we can get. The one point on which the Right and the Left agree is that the social system is breaking down, like an old locomotive being driven at faster and faster speeds. We most likely will see it run off the tracks. But we won’t likely see the system abolished. From what I have seen of the thinking that would make the revolution, we would end up with the same old malfunctioning society in new hands. Give Sweet Willie his choice of blowing up the Pentagon or becoming the head general in charge of it. His swagger stick and systems analysis would be the envy of the military world.
I went back to Resurrection City the next day, in the hope that seeing it on the morning after might reveal more of its truth, make it somehow seem less unhealthy. But the violence of the early morning hours, while I slept, was apparently the only thing that was left to happen there. In the morning’s muggy sun and mud, that same silent torpor was upon it. Once more, I walked its length and back again: the same few unfriendly encounters, and the same unwillingness, inability, on my part to invade the privacy of the people. At the front gate, a number of the families, looking like Southerners, were gathered with their paperbag baggage: the stout Negro women, thinly strong Negro men, solemn-eyed Negro children of the rural South, apparently going home. Had they come only for the march? Or had they been there all along, and finally had had enough of Resurrection City last night? Or had they decided, like me, that the march proclaimed the end of what had once been the one bright hope in their lives? I looked into the fatigued, introspective eyes of one of those women, wanting to ask—but not able to.
A young guy demanded a cigarette, and then started in on his need for money. I heard my name shouted and then apparently his, and a laughing Southern voice saying, “What a pair to find here together.” It was Lawrence Guyot from Mississippi, the head of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He had also been part of the Mississippi challenge at Atlantic City in 1964, which had been an earlier ending, the killing of the hope in SNCC, the final convincing evidence to them that you couldn’t work within the system, between those lines of orderly progress, reform, and that you couldn’t trust white people—from the most powerful man of them all on down. The other man, it seemed, was from Greenwood, Mississippi, where the bravest of all the voter registration campaigns had been double-crossed by the Kennedy Justice Department, where Jimmy Travis had been shot in the neck with an automatic rifle, where for the first time national attention had been paid to the desperate, child-starving poverty of the rural South—followed by a brief, fitful spurt of free food and clothing. That was in 1963. Some of the toughest SNCC workers had wept at seeing the people coming with rags tied on their feet in lieu of shoes, grateful for whatever had been given; the workers were also grieved to see the entirely to be expected results of privation that showed in some of the poor, the trickery, the taking any way they could some of them, more than their share
of the Thanksgiving basket, missionary largesse sent down from rich America. Conditions were no less desperate in 1963 than in 1968 or the years between in the rural South. Now the nation’s attention was attracted again. But the old SNCC was gone; they had killed all that good in it, that young, hard-boiled, tough good which, nurtured on the unexpected, stupendous success of the sit-ins, had for a time behind it the belief that anything—no limits, no caution—could be achieved, or at least tried. The good in the poor people could prevail. What organization now, what leader, could be said to elicit and speak for that good? Now, the violence that is built into the victim of injustice and neglect, the greediness that had so grieved SNCC, seems more likely to be the poor people’s contribution to the new order. Guyot soon went his way, a good guy, full of talk about plans for the delegate challenge—this time in Chicago.
All morning the loudspeakers had been heralding a demonstration. It was to have started around lunchtime; I had resigned myself to another no-lunch day when it still had not started a good two hours later. People had formed their line; they were waiting for the word to go. In charge was Hosea Williams, a brave SCLC activist from Savannah, Georgia, as well as a self-promoter of prodigious energy, a man with a knack for antagonizing people needlessly, the kind of man you want in a revolution to lead troops but somehow not get back in time to help form the new government. Finally he gave the order for the line of about fifty people to start marching through Resurrection City, from the front gate toward the back one, and off we set, the old familiar formation: we reporters, notebooks in hand, off to the side; they marching, singing the good old songs—“Ain’t goin’ let nobody turn me ’round,” “If you miss me in the back of the bus and you can’t find me nowhere, Come on up to the front of the bus, and I’ll be driving up there,” “Come by here, my Lord, Come by here, oh, Lord, Come by here. . . .” It was to these very songs, in coincidental fact, that I had responded most in that personal religious experience which had been my introduction to Dr. King’s movement, a long time ago. It seemed a mockery to hear those songs now, dodging along through the mud, seeing the blank looks that the vast majority of Resurrection City’s residents gave the demonstrators and their song, summing up so many betrayals of good words, good people, so many disappointments, disillusionments.