Pop-Up Reflections On The Poor People's Rally And March In
Washington, D.C. on June 23, 2018
By Si Lannon
[This initial report, commentary is expected to be the
first of several reports this year as the Poor People's Campaign unwinds.
Additional reports through December 2018 will be added to the end of this entry
as needed. Greg Green]
Some stories get written on the fly in our business, the
publishing business and it does not matter if it is on-line or the hardest of
hard copy. The damn thing falls into somebody’s lap and sometimes it is yours-by
default. Here is genesis on my coverage of the Poor People's Campaign rally and
march down in Washington, D.C. on June 23rd. I had originally been
sent down to Washington by Greg Green our current site manager to do a story
about the Cezanne Portrait exhibit at
the National Gallery of Art (with a side trip to the small Saint Francis of
Assisi exhibit and another of the work on display of Saul Steinberg both of
which will be dealt with if I ever get around to actually writing about again
after the curtain falls.
Bart Webber has already recently told in this publication
the other part of this story, the other part of how I was waylaid even before I
was able to write word one about the Cezanne story. Told about how, as is my wont,
since I was in town anyway that I would check out to see what was happening at
the National Portrait Gallery which is open later than the National Gallery and
I figured to do the Cezanne project the next day, a Saturday. The story that
developed by Bart out of that experience concerned seeing a remembrance painting
of Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic Time
magazine cover of Bobby Kennedy in the spring of 1968 which flipped me out when
I spied it on the first floor. Got me to thinking about the late Peter Paul
Markin who was crazy for Bobby and spent the spring of that year working his
ass off for him. My reflections about Markin (always Scribe in the old days) which
that night I conveyed to Bart Webber and Sam Lowell, two old friends of his as
well and who work at this publication, got turned into that article about the
million “might have beens” if Bobby had not been murdered and Markin had not subsequently
wound up in hellhole Vietnam which did him no good, no good at all and led to
an unsettling early grave. You would not believe the speed Bart was able to put
that one together once it got through the grapevine about my “discovery” and others
clamored to get their points in about much missed Scribe. It was almost as if
some portent, some omen, some invisible hand was at play since nobody here had written
word one of original work about the 50th anniversary the effect of
Bobby’s murder and had relied on previous sketches to commemorate the event
since everybody was busy with some other project.
Here is where it all ties together, where sainted Bobby and
wanna-be saint Scribe are reunited in spirit anyway. That Saturday I was
heading to the National Gallery early to beat the crowds. I usually take the
Metro since from the hotel where I was staying it was infinitely easier to do
so than taking a car, so the natural stop on that line, the Blue line, is the
Smithsonian on the National Mall. As I exited the station heading the few
blocks to the museum from there I noticed a huge white tent across from the
Hirschhorn Museum and further down toward 7th Street a stage
complete with a couple of large screens flanking a stage and people milling
around. I stopped at the tent to inquire about the event although on any given
day you will see tents, usually white, strewn on the Mall for some event or
other. It turned out that this was the headquarters for the Poor People’s
Campaign during the week of actions they had planned in D.C. and was to
culminate later that morning and afternoon in a rally there and a march to the
Capitol several blocks away.
Once I understood what was going on, understood that this
might be something to check out further, I made the connection. Make another
stab at figuring out the invisible hand at work this weekend. This year was
also the 50th anniversary of the ill-fated original Poor People’s
Campaign led by Martin Luther King before he was assassinated in April of that year
and which was carried on in his memory through the summer of 1968. The central
physical focus of the original efforts was the establishment of an encampment
dubbed Resurrection City which had been highlighted by a large demonstration on
June 23rd of that year. Robert Kennedy had before his own
assassination put his endorsement of the campaign as part of his political
strategy to spark issues around race, poverty and above all the raging, futile
war being waged in Southeast Asia then and which was sucking up resources which
could have been used to help alleviate the poverty of those times, something still
with us all these years later. ( I use Southeast Asia here although at the time
we mostly thought it was Vietnam little did we know until later and only by
other sources like Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon
Papers expose that Laos, Cambodia and who knows where else were bombed to
perdition as well).I believe that Bobby had also visited the site and I know that
his funeral train passed through the city. I thought about the situation and
called Greg Green to ask if he wanted me to also cover this event along with
the Cezanne assignment. Greg said by all means yes. Actually what Greg said was
that if I had wanted to keep my nice art assignments I had better damn well
(his expression) cover the event. Greg being a half generation younger that most
older writers who go back to the hard copy editions of this publication did not
have the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Poor Peoples Campaign
on his radar so he was as they say “covering his ass” (my expression).
The following are some reflections taken away from that
experience.
Like in a lot of other things that happen without
explanation I don’t believe in resurrection meaning in the context of the Poor
People's Campaign, hereafter PPC, trying to jumpstart something like the war on
poverty which is what this is all about based on something that happened 50
years ago and that was unsuccessful then seemed anachronistic. Seemed doom to
failure as it had previously in the muddy
summer of 1968 once Doctor King’s hand was not there to guide the thing and use
his huge authority not only in the black and among other minorities but among
white liberals who to this day see him as the guy who could have led his people
out of bondage-and assuaged their guilt
for falling down in the struggle after his demise. His authority unlike his successors,
and from what I could see on stage this June day, could have pushed things
forward. Even then there was no guarantee given the political climate that
anything would happen. I confess after looking around, talking to some activists,
a few who I recognized from other contexts, other political campaigns I have
covered, hearing the endless speeches and trying to decipher what the road
forward would look like since everybody emphasized, correctly emphasized that
this would only be the start of a long uphill struggle, went into coverage of
this event with something of a jaded eye. Whatever I agree with in principle, whatever I believe must be done about the vast social and
economic inequalities in this country, and internationally.
Nothing said or heard that day has led me to believe that
my original assessment was wrong, although this is one time I hope I am. The
portents, that invisible hand I seem to have grown committed to using as a
metaphor for these strange and worrisome times don’t head that way though. Here
is a quick rundown of what the PPC had been up to the previous forty days as
they called it, maybe reflecting some forty days in the wilderness although I
could not get any rank and file activists to buy into that scenario, in what
they have called their “call for a national moral revival.” Such a theme is
always tricky and always capable of misintereptation, mainly since it is
usually other-worldly Christian evangelicals and bare-bones religious folk who
call, usually from the right political perspective or from outside politics,
for moral revival. Usually eschewing the worldly poverty problems around them and
waiting upon the Lord, and you know who that Lord is.
What the PPC, headed by Revered Barber from North
Carolina and others who had been planning this project for several years,
wanted to do was highlight the poverty situation and offer remedies. Organize
the poor to organize themselves the way one youth activist put it. Saying as
well, and I took this as an omen as well, that if it is not done from the
bottom up as opposed to most efforts which are lead by middle class
professional people on some salvation of their souls mission then once again
the thing would be coopted and doomed to failure. Good point.
In order to drum up support locally and nationally the
PPC had the previous five weeks centered their actions, including acts of civil
disobedience, on the state capitals each week presenting a different broad
issue like homelessness or the war economy and the way those affect the poor,
those down at the bottom of the barrel in society. After those five weeks of
gathering from what I could tell, and what was noticeable in the crowd I saw at
the Mall, a middle class professional cadre with a sprinkling of union activists
to further the work, to get to the poor so they can organize themselves they
would gather in Washington to see what they had wrought. From my observations of
who was in the crowd that day, unlike what I remember and have seen photographs
of the original encampment, with a few exceptions this was not the poor masses coming
to act as avenging angels against their oppressors. Which made, makes me wonder
about that portentous statement that young enthused activist made to me in all
candor and which was seconded by a couple of other young people around him who
nodded their heads in agreement.
If Sam Lowell or Seth Garth, maybe even Bart Webber
although he is not given to straying away from straight reportage, were writing
this they would say this was a situation where you “rounded up the usual
suspects,” saw people who had been around these issues going back to the 1960s.
Frank Jackman would have call it preaching to the choir” if you want another
way to say it. These people were good in their time, hell, a bunch of us worked
with them when the world was new and were still all sparkling eyes and dewy too,
but we have a generational “passing the torch” problem between today’s youth
and the generation after ours who came of age under the aegis of Ronald Reagan.
The old ways of organizing, the very heavy reliance after all this time and all
the times we have been showed nothing but ashes and brimstone of voting as the
main organizational tool for change, does not bode well for this PPC program.
And not so strangely given the moral imperative behind
the movement the crowd was treated to such preaching in a literal sense both by
the speakers who has some religious or quasi-religious take on the situation
and by the “feel” of the event, the feeling that it was a revival meeting of
some sort with people being exhorted to join up, to get out there in the mud
and organize, to get “religion” as the late Markin used to say once he came
back from Vietnam about the issues of war and peace.
The several thousand in attendance and/or who marched to
the Capitol were thus treated to this eerie spectacle. But here is where things
got a little awry. Got as confused as they did in the 1960s when strategy,
basically voting for a regime or going down in the mud for fundamental social
change were the two main poles of attraction. Put people, thoughtful people in different
camps. The 23rd of June was an almost chemically pure example of that old dilemma-in
one place-hell, in one speaker at times. On the one hand speakers, including
prime leader Reverend Barber who knew how to work the crowd into a revival
spirit no question, spoke of “revolution” which I assumed was meant in the
traditional sense like the original American or French revolutions. In the next
breath, and this was truest when the Reverend Jessie Jackson brought in for the
occasion, a former King aide and later a Democratic Party presidential candidate
himself, spent his every word talking about heading to the ballot box come
November. Now revolution and voting are by no means mutually exclusive, but I
got a very queasy feeling I had been here before, had been cajoled into doing
the same old, same old. And you wonder why I am a little eye-jaded about the
future prospects of this campaign.
