A memoir of MLK's march on Washington:
Several small groups of radicals, anarchists, civil rights movement people, crazies -- the quixotic among us at the time -- had concluded that the Great March on Washington had the potential to bring together a disparate group of Americans, mostly black Americans, and deliver a statement on the condition of the movement vs. American society. This had struck us (I was among this group of misfits) as just audacious enough to possibly soften some establishment hearts and maybe push the stone to a resting place at the top of the hill.
As the date grew near there was much chatter on the street to the effect that malcontents from far and wide intended to disrupt the event -- or worse. We, of course, were going to make sure they'd have to go through us first. This would, in the best case scenario, have resulted in a terribly bloody skirmish or perhaps numerous ones; in the worst, we'd all go down in a blaze of glory and there would be a riot of proportions not seen in the Republic, or at least its capital, in anyone's memory.
I was 18 and living in the throes of a "nothing to lose" mentality I had acquired over the preceding two years, for reasons that barely rate mentioning in hindsight. I guess it may be a marker of misfits that they often feel they have little or nothing to lose. We certainly felt that way, even though some of our number suffered from megalomania and several were potential plywood shack types, except that archetype (the Unabomber?) had not yet been coined by the media, which was still largely conservative and limited to print, the 5 o'clock news and Walter Cronkite. Actual journalism, in other words.
There were a number of groups of young people, well-intentioned liberal kids mostly affiliated with local church groups, planning to show up for the occasion. I'd started out that way myself, having been accidentally radicalized through my church, which operated under the loose banner of the National City Christian Church, Disciples of Christ. They'd not realized what they were loosing back in the fateful summer of 1960, but over the next three years our youth group was morphing into a radical-left cell capable of almost anything, whether it was a good idea or not. Quite often it was not, but arrival of the police usually only served to convince us it had been a great idea that just needed refining.
The summer of 1963, then, was marked by graduation from the liturgical approach of loose, liberal Christianity to the crazy quilt Moorish Orthodox Church of America, my natural next home. An offshoot or perhaps incarnation of the Moorish Science Temple, the MOCA comprised a group of jazz musicians, poets, artists, improvisational comics and a few deeply weird people like the guy with the mustache and cape (that's all I ever knew of his identity -- he much resembled Brian Stack's "The Interrupter" from the Conan O'Brien show decades later). As an acolyte of Salvador Dali (along with one of my close friends from school, who also taught martial arts and built explosive devices), the MOCA was a natural magnet for someone like me. It's served me well off and on over the years as it has waxed and waned as a force. The nominal headquarters still operate in Ong's Hat, N.J., in case anyone might conceivably be interested.
Via the MOCA I'd discovered an appendant underground group, which, out of consideration for possible warrants or lawsuits outstanding, will remain nameless here, and it was this group that developed the theory that there was potential for a big, bloody riot on the National Mall on Aug. 28, and that somehow a futile gesture by a bunch of young white guys might be just the thing to discredit those who came to bust up the party.
This is what guys think when they're 18, at least in the time locker that is marked 1963, and especially the subsection titled August in D.C.
Many of us had been involved in the civil rights movement since at least 1960, but we were the few now tired of singing "We Shall Overcome" and had begun instead chanting "We Will Overcome YOU!" That was the state of our mostly adolescent (and therefore not fully formed) brains as we began our slipshod, half-assed plan to position ourselves so as to turn back or at least befuddle the Forces of Evil on the day of the march. This is how I came to be on the Mall on the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King's now historic and legendary "I have a dream" speech. This is how my associates and I graduated from singing Kumbaya to organized and aggressive activism. This is how we arrived at that moment when we realized some of us could actually -- no, really -- die for a cause.
It is also why less than all of us showed up that day. It takes a calm kind of crazy to accept the potential for death when one is only embarking on what we for a brief period believe is "real" life.
Some of us were armed when we arrived downtown. Virtually everyone who was, wound up secreting his weapon somewhere on the periphery. Many of those weapons were never retrieved.
In the process of making our way to the Mall, we had to pass through some small groups of rednecked, frog-faced bigots who'd come out to scoff. Once during such a passage I heard, from right behind me, the words "Nigger lover." I froze, considered my options, dismissed the urge to kill, turned around and found myself facing an older man (probably the age I am now, but of course he looked much older, and was in the company of others who looked to be of similar age -- hate has a way of putting years on a person) wearing VFW regalia. I stared at him for a long moment, his eyes dropped, and I said, through clenched teeth, "May God help you." No one spoke. I turned back around and continued working my way through the crowd.
And so I found myself separated from my partisans, not alone in the least, but awash in a sea of humanity, most of it varying shades of brown, all of it remarkably calm and assured in its certainty that there would be no trouble at this event. There was a magnetic cohesiveness in that mass of a sort I have not experienced before or since. There was no Us and Them, no You and Me. I have never felt anything quite like it.
The world was in the process of being changed, and I was, had I chosen to frame it this way, trapped in the event. I didn't feel trapped, however, but cradled.
The rest, of course, is history, one of the most stunning gatherings, public addresses and dramatic sociopolitical moments in the history of the Republic.
I shook hands, held hands, laid my hands on the shoulders and had other hands laid on mine, of people I'd never met and even a few I had, as we steadied each other. By that point if one was there, nothing else mattered. One was lost, absorbed in something vastly larger than a single self.
One.
Less than five years later I would watch large portions of my city destroyed by the rioting we'd anticipated in advance of the great march. But that isn't this story. That is another story.
It is for this reason I am more than incensed by the lying "act of providence" that caused Glenn Beck to "accidentally" choose Aug. 28 for his "Restoring Honor" rally of right-wingers, Tea Partiers, neoconservatives, fascists, the delusional and the truly wicked, the New Kluxers disguised as patriots wanting something, something they cannot or will not identify openly.
Should Beck's rally start and end without incident I will be gratified. Should lightning strike it I will also be gratified, and probably converted to a belief in some sort of Zeus-like being who sits in the sky. Or maybe I'll just believe more in statistical probability than I ordinarily do. At any rate, such an unlikely event would be interpreted by Beck's followers as some sort of indictment, and not anything they could possibly blame on us librul socialist Muslim commie perverts.
My plan is to follow the route of the Rev. Al Sharpton's group, which will walk from Dunbar High School to the site of the to-be-unveiled statue of Dr. King.
I know my place.
Would that Glenn Beck knew his. He'll find it soon enough, on the junk heap of history. But Beck is not the problem nor his undoing the solution. It is all on the people who watch, listen, whoop and holler at Beck's incomprehensible yammerings.
Strangely, I feel 18 again. Maybe I never really stopped feeling that way.
SOME TRUTH
Quote:1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for [it], another person must work for without receiving [it].
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.
5. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
YOU ARE A THIEF WHEN THE GOVERNMENT GIVES YOU WHAT IT HAS STOLEN AND YOU KEEP IT .
@ican711nm,
ican needs to change our government, because both parties are guilty of what he's saying.
The other issue is that he doesn't understand the concept of the democratic republic.
He always seems to speak from a base of ignorance.
There was an interesting article in the NYT about Orange County, CA,
the place in America identified with the Republican Party during my young adulthood.
When I was a guest student at the University of Michigan in 1968, there was a young man who lived in the same apartment building whose mother ran the Republican Party in Orange County. He called her "mumsy." He was completing a Ph.D. in philosophy at the time.
Anyway, the NYT notes several things:
*registered Repubs make up only 43% of the voting pop., the lowest ratio in 70 years;
*45% of the pop. does not speak English at home;
*48% voted for Obama while 23% voted for Carter;
*poverty is increasing there with
25% of the pop. having been without health insurance during 2009;
*35 languages are spoken in the county.
For the entire story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/us/politics/30orange.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1
People like Glenn Beck and the Teapublicans are more dangerous to the USA than is al-Qaida.
@Advocate,
Yeah! They clap too much!
Besdies, a bunch of geese flew over the Glen Beck assembly in a perfect V-shaped formation. But then, what the hell do geese know?
@ican711nm,
All the talk about moderate Muslims not condemning extremists. This Rabbi (the full) Monty doesn't condemn the 5 Israelis who danced on the rooftop while the WTC were burning.
@talk72000,
talk 72000 wrote:All the talk about moderate Muslims not condemning extremists. This Rabbi (the full) Monty doesn't condemn the 5 Israelis who danced on the rooftop while the WTC were burning.
How many people did those 5 Israelis, you allege "danced on the rooftop," murder?
@ican711nm,
They could have saved lives as they knew before hand what was occuring. They had explosives in their van. They did not warn the public, the police or anyone but danced on the rooftop. By their lack of commission they are as guilty as the terrorists by not helping to prevent the disaster. It shows a cold blodded nature and lack of concern for American lives. So if a drowning American comes across your path you would let him die instead of calling for help.
@talk72000,
How many people did those 5 Israelis, you allege "danced on the rooftop," murder?
@ican711nm,
They are as guilty for not saving them.
@ican711nm,
How could those 5 Israelis, you allege "danced on the rooftop," have
prevented the airliners being piloted by al-Qaeda from colliding with the towers, the pentagon, the ground, and killing 3,000 civilians?
Ya think they could have blown up one of those airliners before it hit anything?
@ican711nm,
Maybe you lack the intelligence or just cold blooded enough to think that the 5 Israelis knew the event was going to happen and don't care that they never raised the alarm.. In addition they had explosives. Richard Pearle and Wolfowitz let these Israelis go instead of answering questions about their behavior and the explosives.
@talk72000,
No worse when GW Bush let the bin Laden family fly out the US when then secretary of transportation stopped all air traffic in and out of the US.
@cicerone imposter,
Osama bin Laden knew when to help GWB. He broadcast threats to help GWB along.
@talk72000,
You have not posted one shred of credible evidence that there were 5 Israeli's dancing anywhere.
Everything you posted mentions 5 people, but only by innuendo does it suggest they were Israeli.
@cicerone imposter,
Why do you continue to make that claim, when you know it is false?
Even the 9/11 commission said it was false, and 2 minutes of looking on
Snopes comfirmed that.
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/flights.asp
For someone who prides himself on being accurate, and who demands that others be accurate, you sure do like to keep telling this lie.
Why is that?
Ironic (perhaps) revelation of the week, from Mother Jones:
The outrage about the "ground zero mosque" has turned very ugly. . . People are calling Mohammed a pig. A New York City cab driver was stabbed today after his passenger asked him if he was Muslim. But I find the righteous outrage of those contending the former World Trade Center site is "hallowed ground" amusing, because they have no idea just how right they are. Before the World Trade Center was even designed (with Islamic architectural elements, incidentally), the ground was indeed sacrosanct: The bones of some 20,000 African slaves are buried 25 feet below Lower Manhattan. As at least 10 percent of West African slaves in America were Muslims, it's not out of bounds to extrapolate that ground zero itself was built on the bones of at least a few Muslim slaves. That is to say, hallowed Muslim ground.
For some time, activists, historians, and city officials have been working together to excavate and preserve the bones of the slaves buried under present-day lower Manhattan. A recent excavation of a 14,000 square foot section of the six-acre burial ground found that 92 percent of the 419 skeletons were of African descent, and 40 percent were children under 12. The bones of the 419 slaves were eventually reinterred.
African slaves couldn't be buried in New York City itself, so they were put to rest along the city's then-northern border, near present-day Chambers Street. The exact borders of the burial ground are fuzzy, and experts say that without test digs, they won't be able to tell how far it extends. The area they've excavated so far ends just a block or two from ground zero, but with the huge number of African slaves that lived and died in New Amsterdam, I find it hard to believe the burial grounds didn't extend further.
At any rate, some of the slaves' belongings were definitely at ground zero: About 100 boxes of artifacts from the African graves were stored at 6 WTC, which was crushed by the North Tower on 9/11, but thankfully archivists were able to recover them. A few of the items were strings of blue beads found buried with the slaves...which some think could be Islamic prayer beads.
Park51 won't even be at ground zero proper (across from Brooks Brothers or the Century 21 department store). But if it were, it would still be perfectly defensible. In fact, since WTC was likely built over the centuries-old bones of Muslim slaves, it would be a downright blessing.
