Solidarity & Disarray

The surface similarities were striking. Five hundred buses converged on the muggy capital. A vast crowd--half white, half black--marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. Placards identified them as "Sisters of Watts" and "Concerned Citizens from Slippery Rock"; costumes identified them as Indians and Mexican-Americans, hippies and middle-class citizens of all shades. Young people waded thigh-deep in the Mall's giant reflecting pool, and families sprawled on the grass for picnics of fried chicken, chitlins and all manner of exotic salads. Even the numbing, five-hour drone of songs (four), speeches (19), and prayers (five) recalled another occasion.

For all that, last week's Solidarity Day, the climactic event of the Poor People's Campaign, bore little resemblance to the famous March on Washington in August 1963. Though the turnout was an impressive 55,000, it did not even come close to the 200,000 of the earlier march. More important than size was spirit. The 1963 demonstration was suffused with the hope that the last vestiges of legal segregation would soon disappear. Most indeed did, but that did not prove enough; laws aside, the reality of discrimination and poverty remained. The 1968 rally was motivated by disillusionment and despair. In five years, a mood of aspiration had changed, among many, to one of apocalypse.

A Permit from Sod. "Listen, America," said Sterling Tucker, the march's coordinator, in an emotional address before the giant, brooding figure of Lincoln. "Hear our anguished cries. We are admitting that we are poor. But we are also giving warning. We will not remain poor. We will not remain depressed, repressed or oppressed." Added Whitney Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League: "This may be the last march which is non violent and which brings blacks and whites together. The nation and the Congress must listen to us now before it is too late--before the prophets of violence replace the prophets of peace and justice."

Mrs. Coretta King, dressed in black in memory of her slain husband, sang Come by Here, My Lord, then launched into a 25-minute speech dwelling at length on the war in Viet Nam--"the most cruel and evil war in the history of mankind." The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who has bumbled in his efforts to lead the campaign begun by Mrs. King's husband, talked for 65 minutes. He did not much care, he cried, whether the Government renewed its permit for Resurrection City, the poor people's waterlogged campsite by the Lincoln Memorial. "I received my permit a long time ago," said Abernathy, "from God Almighty," and he vowed that the poor would stay in Washington "until justice rolls out of the halls of Congress and righteousness falls from the Administration."

From all appearances, he is in for a long wait. The campaign can point to some limited successes with the Administration. The Agriculture Department agreed to speed up food relief programs in 256 of the country's poorest counties. The Labor Department hurried a plan to create 100,000 new jobs. The Office of Economic Opportunity found $25 million more for the Head Start school program and emergency food and health care.

A Kind of Victory. Still, it was pretty thin fare for a crusade that set for itself no less a task than the conquest of poverty. No doubt the goals were too ambitious. Between the exaggerated aims set forth in overblown speeches by the campaign's leaders and a hardening attitude on the part of Congress, there was no middle ground, and disappointment was the inevitable result.

Whatever the reason, Martin Luther King's final enterprise seems close to foundering. Resurrection City is an unhappy, unfriendly--and increasingly dangerous--collection of disparate groups of the poor. The National Capitol Parks Police estimate that 100 assaults and other violent incidents have occurred since the shacks were set up in mid-May, and at least 20 visitors have been robbed, beaten or stabbed outside the encampment fence. "There are rapes, robberies and cuttings every day," said Alvin Jackson, who resigned in anger last week as the camp's chief security marshal, "and there is nothing we can do about it."

With the march over, the campers can now either go home or resort to acts of massive civil disobedience, which Abernathy has long threatened. At week's end a demonstration at the Department of Agriculture did dissolve into a sit-in on Independence Avenue and a bottle-throwing fracas with police outside the shanty city. Arrests: 87. Even so, by toning down his demands to include those things that are within reach and by exaggerating his successes--he claims credit for several actions that the Administration would probably have taken anyway--Abernathy has also left open the door to retreat. Thus the marchers can leave with some claim to victory, though, sad to say, it is mostly illusory.

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