The Confrontation
From INIURRAY KEMPTON
WASHINGTON T AST week's March on Washington for Jobs L./and Freedom—an oddly Protestant title for the largest religious pilgrimage of Americans we are ever likely to see—was one of those events which are forgotten the day after they happen and remembered all our lives.
Washington, as Henry James remarked about another subject, is endlessly absorbent and to deal with it is to walk on water. These 150,000 or so Negro pilgrims and their 50,000 white friends were sealed off—you might almost say segregated—so successfully in the vast spaces between the monument to George Washington and the memorial to Abraham Lincoln that it was possible to cross Pennsylvania Avenue, fifty lateral yards away, and hardly know they were there. Everything that could be done—even more in fact than needed to be done—to avoid any embarrassment from their presence was done. Every representative headline the next Morning was heavy with the adjective 'orderly.'
When it was over, Malcolm X, the Black Mus- lim, conceded that it had been a great show. 'Kennedy,' he said, 'should get the Academy Award for direction.' That, like every remark that anyone can make about the Negro ex- perience, is exactly half true.
The March on Washington was, as an instance, the culmination of our experience with the Negro; yet it was peculiarly and unreasonably disappointing. The buses came in a little after dawn carrying banners with devices like 'National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,' Wilmington, N.C.,' and little boys and girls disembarked all in black with nothing white about them except eyes distended by awe. By noon: from the platform, they seemed as far away as if they had not come at all. Who is this devil who comes to us on occasions like this and makes moral snobs of those of is there to cele- brate our triumph over social snobbishness?
Nothing, I am sure could make these children feel far away. And yet one looked at the Mayor of New York, sitting in the audience relieved for a moment from the civil rights protestants who have beeh demonstrating inside and outside of his City Hall, and reflected how valuable this occasion was for taking the minds of our public servants off the race problem. The pilgrims ad- vanced towards the platform in a file absolutely without edges; they were singing 'We Shall Over- come,' their anthem; it used to be 'We Will Over- come'; somewhere, on the way up from their lonely, unknown beginnings, a grammarian had corrected and fitted them for the ears of their countrymen.
These are reflections that have nothing to do with reality. The pilgrimage could not have been this immense if it had not been an acceptance of the Negro revolt into the American establish- ment and thus into the American myth, and a hope that the Negro would stop now. The official Catholics, the official Protestants and the official Jews were all there to welcome him, along with the Congressmen from those states where his vote is consequential. The President had invited him, in part from sympathy, in part from the shrewd calculation that the larger the assemblage the more orderly it was likely to be.
Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, of the Federal Council of Churches, told the audience that the Protestant Church has come to their side at last and, he apologised, 'late we come.' But it remains hard, apologetic as we are, for us white Ameri- cans to lose the habit of condescension.
John Lewis, of the Student Non-Violent Co- ordinating Committee, is only twenty-five; he was a speaker along with Dr. Blake. Lewis's only credentials are from combat; he has been arrested twenty-two times and beaten half as often. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee is a tiny battalion; its members are grey from gaols, exhausted from tension; they have the cynical gallantry of troops of the line. They revere Martin Luther King as their com- mander who has charged the guns with them; still they call him, with cheerful irony, 'De Lawd.' Lewis's prepared speech, a cry from down there at the bottom, was an announcement that the President's Civil Rights Bill was inadequate and not worth the support of combat soldiers and that both the Democrats and the Repub- licans were frauds. When he submitted it, three of the white speakers announced that they could not appear if he said anything this seditious; poor young Lewis softened his words then in deference to the demands of these his elders and betters to whom it does not seem to have occurred that a meeting to celebrate the equality of man might have, as one of its purposes, the recognition that John Lewis had earned with his body the right of an equal to affront convention. But as he departed, every other Negro speaker on the rostrum slapped his back and pumped his hand, while every white one looked fixedly into the middle distance.
There remains, then, a void between the Negro American and the white one. Or rather, there does and there doesn't. Martin Luther King noticed, with gratitude, at one point in his address, those whites who had joined the march; there was little response from the platform. But suddenly as the sound of those words moved across the huge acreage between King and the delegations from the Southern towns, there was the sight of Negroes cheering.
What moves us in the Negro is very old, and comes from a simpler America. Nothing about the occasion came quite alive except as a demon- stration of power and importance until Mahalia Jackson stood up to sing the old spiritual about having been rebuked and scorned. We were all of us then, I think, at that moment Archie Rices; it seemed to one of us at least that, if he had done one thing that good in all of his life he would have been all right. And then King rose and be- gan working as country preachers work, the words for the first time that afternoon spoken not as to listeners but as to participants, the in- timate private conversation of invocation and response. For just those few minutes we were back where all this began and from which it has endured, miraculously intact, older than the words of the establishment which was welcoming them in, but still fresh where those were thread- bare. The Negro comes to us, refreshing us, from a time the rest of us have forgotten; he seems new and complicated only because he represents something so old and so simple.
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