by Jon Meacham
The march through the mud of Resurrection City added no more than fifteen people to the little line. Hosea called them into a huddle in the grass just outside the rear gate. Then he strode over ostentatiously to the press contingent (consisting of me, a lanky young man from The Washington Post, and a very black young man from some African publication) and yelled, “Y’all go on over away from us so we can discuss things.” I stuck my hand out to him, said howdy. “Yeah,” he said in a tone suggesting he wished I hadn’t stuck my hand out to him. “Y’all go on over yonder.”
I thought this would be where they called the march off, but no, it started off again, Hosea heading back into Resurrection City, and a tall young man who looked remarkably like Stokely Carmichael (but no kin—somebody finally asked him) in charge. We went through the field that had been yesterday’s staging area for the march, up the hill toward the Washington Monument. They kept singing those good old songs, cops bumping alongside on motorcycles, motors roaring. We passed three Negro teen-agers with Afro haircuts, sitting under a tree; one had a saxophone, and blew riffs at the demonstration. “Get a gun, brother,” yelled one of the demonstrators, last of the legions of Dr. King’s nonviolent army.
“Michael, row the boat ashore,” they sang, approaching the Washington Monument. I got my first inkling, then, of something else that might be considered a prime cause of what ailed Resurrection City. There were rows of tourists sitting on little benches all around the base of the monument, and the brave song of the little marching band wavered as they approached those tourists, sitting in their slick-magazine informal wear—melting-pot American families, American primitives, all kinds—and before the marchers had got past all those cold eyes, the song had died completely. The only sound was the flapping of all those American flags ringing the monument, so gallantly streaming. It was not like marching down to the courthouse, through the familiarity of the town square in the South, every inch of the way known, every nuance of the angry, hostile, sneering response of those ol’ crackers just as familiar. In the South, we have shared the physical world, every town and city being two towns, black Atlanta, white Atlanta, the business section common property, and the rivers and the woods used separately but jointly, with all that intricacy of rules of separation over which so much of the energy of the Southern civil rights movement was consumed. Up here, godamighty, in the ghetto cities of the North, they don’t even do that, don’t share the land: this pile of monument concrete, these big, rich-as-a-bank-looking buildings.
The Department of Agriculture proved to be the target of this demonstration, the lair of that most evildoing of all the middle-class innocents, Orville W. Freeman, standing accused on national television of starving little newborn babies to death in the interest of showing his boss one of those two-million-dollar bookkeeping gains so dear to the boss’s not at all innocent heart. The entrance at which the march stopped had marble columns (the big house of the plantation), and behind these, taller than a man, gates of close iron rods; then the building itself, tall, marble, intimidating. The cops were in clusters (I counted twenty-two at one point) across the street in the park (orderly and forbidding-looking, these parks, not like the woods, not like parks back home), and there were about a dozen men in business suits standing and watching the demonstrators in front of the building, no more than four of these newsmen, the others looking like cops, like FBI, like authority. One uniformed cop kept walking up close to the demonstrators, standing in a long line thinly stretched across the front of that wide building; he poked a Polaroid camera at one or another of them, and then stepped back quickly to peel off his print, as you might take a picture of an alligator as close-up as you could. A young Negro man who had made the march on crutches broke out in a sudden tirade, perhaps in defiance of the bigness, the business suits, the strangeness surrounding him. He hollered, something about America being the richest nation in the world, veins standing out on his forehead, and then his voice died out, like the song back at the monument, and, self-consciously, he hollered out: “I’m tryin’ to tell it like it is, Brother.”
There was a little flurry of surprise, and style, when a gleaming truck rolled up, and, within a few minutes, a beautiful buffet lunch was laid out on a long table. The demonstrators quietly formed a line, and with no show of exuberance over this fine little fillip, with that same subdued mood of their singing, they filled their plates and sat down to eat around the entranceway of the place. Workers within looked down from high windows on the scene, blank, white faces. No one would say who had provided the food, paid for it. The truck was from a Negro-owned catering service; its three attendants were Negro, one of them a squat, big-shouldered man wearing a sweat shirt with “Black Liberation” lettered on it, and an inked-on design of stars and a crescent. While they ate, he stared with hating eyes, like white Southerners when they can catch your eye, at all the whites bustling around in their business suits. I long ago had learned how to avoid such eyes. My stomach was gnawing in its own faint, middle-class knowledge of hunger. In the old days, the press would have been offered food, would have had to make one of those delicate little decisions of whether partaking would impair the image, the myth of their objectivity (getting both sides of questions about which there can be no debate, like the right of Negroes to register to vote). Now none was offered.
The demonstrators were about half white, half Negro, all ages, the whites including a mother with her baby, and a stringy, tough-looking lady who looked like she was from the hill country. Their differences were eclipsed by the familiar larger separation of the two realities, the two worlds of such a situation: the demonstrators in theirs, a crisis scene of long-built emotion, one that was soon to culminate in a high, fearful, brave moment of life, maybe the highest of a lifetime; and the rest of us in ours, just a little out of the ordinary routine, doing the job, getting along, making a day, one in ten thousand of them. While we were waiting for the demonstrators to finish their lunch, a photographer spoke to one of the cops about how, thank God, in just two hours he would be out on a boat fishing, then about getting his daughter married the coming weekend. In the South during the Movement’s past, these moments before the confrontation would have tremendous dramatic tension, for there was always a real sense of the drum-stir, the chain-rattle, the death-touch of totalitarianism, the shivering awareness that in this world, the limitlessness of human cruelty can be unleashed in licensed, uniformed, drilled numbers on the helpless, the hapless, the normal, decent run of no-better-and-no-worse-than-they-should-be humanity. Violence would victimize them all, the demonstrators but also the bureaucrats, the cops, the tourist come up with his green cap on to take a picture of this whole thing, his wife harping at him to get on up closer, ask that man to move out of the way. And this destruction of decency would be done at the will not of a monster, a De Sade, but at the behest of merely the type of life-hating, twisted, mean little son-of-a-bitch that we have all known, some stingy little storekeeper, some smirking little clerk. You can almost taste that meanness in your mouth, horrible and human, in the South, the George Wallaces squeezing their abominable ways up out of it every generation, the real horror of our heritage down there. But here in official, marble Washington, the potential horror had a further dimension, something purely mechanical and alien, a monstrosity of machines and mathematics that had moved on beyond any humanly evil origins, beyond human control—the efficient, functional technique that was starving Southern children, burning Vietnamese ones, and moving inevitably on to its own final and total solution.
After lunch, one of the bustling little business-suit men came forward and took charge. He was a baldheaded gent who had stared with some puzzlement previously at my press badge, which said I represented New South, a publication not likely known in his circles. I had put him down at the time as a bureaucrat (a cop would have asked about the badge, or not been so obviously staring). He turned out to be Joseph M. Robertson, assistant secretary for administration. The leaders of the march told him they wan
ted an audience with Secretary Freeman. He said to give him fifteen minutes, and with ten of them still to go, he bustled back and said to the leaders that he was sorry but he had to report that the secretary would not see the demonstrators. Mr. Freeman would be happy to confer with Mr. Abernathy at any time but not . . . he didn’t say “rabble” but the inference was plain.
The leaders, some of the demonstrators, the press, the cops, we were all gathered around him for the announcement. “But these are the people,” the young man who resembled Stokely said. “The people . . .” Robertson shook his head, the gesture signifying how entirely futile it was to argue with him; it was out of his hands. So the leader ended with: “I’ll tell the people there’s nothing you can do. This is just a small minority of the people in this country who are starving.” He threw the words at the bald, bland-faced Robertson, and I harkened to that, to the insult and accusation in his voice. Maybe it would move the man.
The confrontation was reminding me of a time when I had helped two men try to get a boat for Daufuskie Island, South Carolina. It was in a spring of the long ago in Washington, the very same time that the poor were first showing some of the less benign side of what hunger and hurt does to people, that time of the convention of the poor staged by the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty. Could it have been only two years ago, way back there in 1966? Two citizens of Daufuskie Island had come to the convention to try out a scheme they had. Their island lies just above Hilton Head, which is a notable new resort whose development in the 1950’s resulted forthwith in that action of state and federal authority in mutual accord and purposefulness necessary to the construction of a causeway to connect it to the mainland and all its tourist money. I cherish the memory of Hilton Head and its splendid, entirely untouched beach, and the assemblage of tourists every day around the luxury motel swimming pool, their finely, fashionably tanned backs to the beach.
Well, Daufuskie had not yet been bought up for development and exploitation. Most of its inhabitants are Negro; some of the few whites there, like most of the Negroes, trace their ancestry on the island back to the days of slavery. The two citizens who came to Washington shared this distinction: the ancestors of the white one of them (a rough-hewn gentleman with a game leg, beyond middle-age, articulate in his coastal brogue) had owned the ancestors of the black one of them (a grave, elderly black farmer, articulate with his eyes and the wrinkling of his brows but seldom-spoken). Their island had no causeway, inhabited as it was just by poor people, and no other means beyond motor boats of getting to and back from the mainland. Daufuskie’s two citizens in Washington wanted no part of a causeway; what they wanted was a boat, a big boat, big enough to haul crops and cars and the other heavy cargo necessary to develop farming on Daufuskie. The United States Government, they understood, had a lot of boats, just the kind they needed, sitting around unused in harbors. So, since they were up here in Washington anyhow for the convention, they thought they would just ask their government if they couldn’t have one of those boats. They thought they would ask the President.
I got drawn into the boat thing by a friend of mine who had a penchant for this kind of situation, a feeling for the people we call poor, like the two Daufuskie Islanders, who fit none of the imagery of the word. In an ebullient mood, we bundled into a taxi and set off to see the President. All four of us were in the way of Southerners richly delighted with the scheme, capable of laughing at it and at the same time of believing in the possibility of confounding mighty Washington and all its ambiguous marble bigness and complexity by this specific, simple-minded need of a boat. Someday the rest of the nation will realize that it has been by this keen sense of the specific—the refusal ever to get embroiled in generalities, in dangerous abstraction, principle, ideals—that the Southerner has ever out-tricked them, out-traded them: losing the war but winning the peace; spreading the taint of systematized racism through the nation; corrupting, capturing, ruining the Congress; making fools of all adversaries.
The taxi driver was not amused, hearing us. They will put you’uns in jail, he warned. Better not try to go in his office. Find a phone booth and call him up. He deposited us at one, shaking his head. We spent the morning around the phone booth, the white man of the Daufuskie team doing all the calling, telling his story with its insulting threat over and over to startled receptionists on down a line (the President, it seemed, was gone to South America, darn the luck, he reported early on), not getting angry but being plenty forceful, emphasizing his words occasionally by banging on the metal tray of the phone booth with his stubby fist, saying loudly enough for us to hear once, “Well, don’t you see, we want to be part of the United States, we’re drifting off, we may wind up in Cuba.” The other member of the team stood straight as a pole, patient and solemn through it all, glancing occasionally at the sun, measuring all the time this was taking. I stood alongside him, thinking of a couple of former newspaper colleagues of mine who were now fancy Presidential correspondents, wondering what they would think to find me here, standing, waiting with the Daufuskie fellows, after a boat. Finally, the talker emerged, grinning. “The Vice President’s gonna see us.” He had an appointment; there was just time for a gleeful, hopeful lunch.
Humphrey’s outer office told much of what the world was later to learn from his actions about the essential gimcrackery of his soul. I recollect a replica of a wagon train; a lot of pharmaceutical paraphernalia; a number of those certificates and diplomas by which Americans convince themselves that they know more than they know they know, that they have achieved more than they know they have; and an Indian motto, appropriately engraved, something to the effect that you shouldn’t criticize a fellow until you’ve walked in his moccasins. (How many times, one wonders, did Hubert Humphrey in those four years console himself with this wisdom?)
We presented the spectacle that we were, and our little story, to a receptionist who recovered her aplomb quickly, and said she was sorry to inform us that the Vice President actually couldn’t see us but that an aide of his would—a very important one, she implied. We went on into his office, some of our impertinency having been chipped away by that same combination of big-building, big-people, big-nation awesomeness whose effect on the demonstrators I was later in my life to note. The Negro farmer of the Daufuskie team showed the effect most openly, the fingers of his big, strong farmer’s hands clinched together, the knuckles taut knots, and his forehead wrinkled into an eloquent tight knot of concentration and, yes, awe.
The aide looked at us and listened to us with something of the air of a man suffering from the phobia that haunts a friend of mine, that his daily hangover has come at last to be of such severe proportions that it has snapped his mind, unhinged him at last from reality. At one point he said, “A boat?” with exquisite expressiveness, and at another, “Now let me get this straight, you say you need a boat?” The white Daufuskie Islander did most of the talking, telling the story straight through, about how the young people were leaving, a paradise for them lost, how the people who stayed were suffering, all for the lack of a boat, of how it didn’t used to matter about not having a boat because most of the livings on the island were made by oyster fishing, but now there was only farming to do, and hence the need of the boat to haul the crops ashore, because the United States Government—and here was our punch line, our threat, our insult, and the old islander pushed it hard at the aide—had forbidden oyster fishing anymore because the water around the island is so polluted that the oysters will kill you if you eat them. It was a time when the administration of which Mr. Humphrey’s office was so elevatedly a part was still claiming vehemently that it wished to do things about such domestic problems as pollution, and the story about the oysters had its effect on the aide, his eyes walling even more than when we walked in. He plunged into the kind of crisp summing-up questions and ordering of the facts of the case that is a ritual with his kind. At one point, all engrossed in the thing, he asked, “How many now are there of you on the island?” And being told, h
e asked, “And how many of these have incomes below the poverty level?” And being told, “Ever’ one of ’em, ever’ last one of us,” he exclaimed, “Good. Good.”
He sent us finally to a man in the Office of Economic Opportunity, a man he called with a great display of how important it was, how much it meant for him to call the man, not just send us over there. Seeing us out the door with his eyes still walling, he made a little joke about “have to be careful how you pronounce the name of that island of yours, heh heh,” which did not sit well with the two Daufuskie Islanders at all, impressed as they were, jubilant as they were. Letting out some of their steam, they pegged along, the game-legged one setting the pace, through seemingly endless tunnels that whistled with unearthly subterranean winds. “This is where they send everybody who dares to come up here asking for a boat,” said my friend who had got me into all this.