City of the Poor
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
Wa.shington—lf the City of the Poor is a failure as an appeal to the sensibilities, it is because it is so brilliantly successful an embodiment of its complaint. In the four weeks since the Southern Christian Leadership Conference installed its pilgrims in their huts by the Lincoln Memorial, it has managed to run the whole course of development of an American slum; and what ought to be a reproach offers any excuse that is needed for its dismissal as an affront.
The leaders of the poor seem determined to remain here at least until Congress departs and perhaps even longer; new pipes lie in the mud, electric cables run overhead; there are crudely scrawled signs saying 'Danger High Voltage', there are even pay telephone booths. A visitor thinks that Saigon must be rather like this, a mixture of the primitive and the sophisticated, the mud below, the telephone lines shining above, expensively miserable, in- definitely provisional.
Resurrection City's mornings come as they do in the slums, with a brief bustle of the housekeeping which is the day's only purposeful activity. Then, for a little while, it is almost cheerful; by afternoon, the sense pervades that another day is going by with nothing to show for it; there is only the boredom of the scruffy parks in Newark or the street corners in Harlem. Its quiet inhabitants are in their houses, having no door stoops; its unquiet ones have invented a street corner.
The voluntary gatekeeper of any bad block is always a social casualty. He may meet you with hand extended, asking for sixteen cents. (In the slums, the beggars are always precise to the penny; it is the American penchant for irrelevantly exact measurements for undefinable needs.) Or he may meet you with furious hostility; in the slum, there seems to be nothing between the wheedle and the snarl.
The slum has no interior government, being always directed, if it can be said to have direc- tion, by persons who do not live there. The directors of the Poor People's March do not, in general, live in Resurrection City, being governing absentee healers not much different in effect from the absentee oppressors by whom more permanent slums think themselves governed.
What this government says about the social services available has no more to do with reality than it ever has in the slums. The Coretta Scott King Day Care Centre was not functioning on the day of my visit; the children of Resurrection City play in its mud streets or trail after their mothers. The poor do not attend the day's conference on the problems of poverty any more than they would back home. The clinic, here as there, gives the patients instruc- tions to visit distant hospitals, journeys untaken to places of existence unbelieved.
The poor have come to show their faces to the executive and the Congress; there are daily demonstrations by Indians and Mexican- Americans seeking recognition of ancient treaties and by Negroes asking government for all they have been denied. The sa.c struggles to mount this army of the aroused with in- frequent success; the loudspeaker announces assemblies, but the clumps of men on the street corners or prone in the grass do not move. 'I have announced demonstrations to which no one came but me,' says Hosea Williams, com- mander of these musters. 'I'll just have to go on calling them until they get started.'
The dominant mood, then, is urban and defeated. The managers of the Poor People's March are mainly southern and small town, and accustomed to constituents with some of the necessary sense of being in the world in which they grew up. When you ask a poor southerner to go to his county courthouse to protest, he knows where it is and has some sense of its function; the northern poor could not tell you the location of their own City Hall let alone what mysteries bide behind the brutal facades of the Departments of Labour and Agriculture here. I remember a slum child being asked once to describe the block he lived on and his answering that it was where, if you went off it, 'you got beat up.' The residents of Resurrection City withdraw then to their own block, as timid about leaving it as they are furious in its defence against curious strangers. What fills its air at nightfall is what has happened to a man the day he stops looking for a job.
Yet, assuming its managers have some idea how to wind it up decorously, the whole adventure has been curiously successful and even suggests that the nation is in a condition in which being unable to produce a revelation is no failure so long as you are able to create a nuisance. Washington is, of course, in that state of near-panic which always afflicts it when any conspicuous body of citizens appears en- camped within the gates. President Johnson's administration has yielded to a great many of the campaign's demands, a majority of them so modest as to create some surprise that they would even need to be called to the attention of an administration which, exhausted though it is, does retain a serious concern for its social responsibilities.
The national mobilisation in support of the Poor People's Campaign was unexpectedly impressive, having been planned about as badly as even these things could be but turning out even so to be about half as large as its famous predecessor in 1963. There is an old rule among radical organisers that you don't do the same thing twice and this was doing the same thing twice with such fidelity that Mrs King even read aloud three paragraphs from her husband's famous climax at that prior occasion.
But the American rebellion these days must count its achievements in the mere getting away with it; progress consists of staying afloat. That is what Senator McCarthy keeps managing to do; he was so warmly cheered and Vice- President Humphrey so chillingly booed when they were introduced as to create the suspicion that the march owed its numbers to a large outpouring of McCarthy people, since few of the Negroes in the audience could be thought of as having any particular emotional reaction either to the Vice-President or
to the Senator who is his last obstacle.
The Poor People's Campaign owed its sub- stantial muster then to those honkies who were willing to show their faces in its cause and it must be said that it paid a rather heavy aesthetic price. The opening half of the meeting be- longed to spokesmen of established American liberalism; the second entirely to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is the voice of the rural Negro South. The first part was modern and desiccated; the second ancient and lively, reminding the middle classes of the America we have lost and reminding the quieter urban poor of the country churches from which they have been torn away.
But neither seemed terribly relevant to Resur- rection City itself. When the marchers dispersed and night fell, the' voice on the loudspeaker was blithering about this being Resurrection City where there are no policemen and no landlords, and, in the dark, there was the assurance only of fights and of stealing. The poor were back at home, preying on the poor.
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