A Black Carnival in the Park: Hippies, Housewives, Husbands Join in an Ungainly Alliance

One of the many posters in the Spring Mobilization peace march headquarters read, "The Original Great Springout--A Megalopolitan Peacepipe Pow-Wow--Saturday, April 15, 1967--Many Smokes and Spring Seasonings--Lites, Kites, Pipes, Rites, Sights, Beads, Reeds, Bells, Shells, Smells, Cells, Kids. Aimals. Flowers, Feathers, Corn, Bananas, Peppers, Seeds, Nuts, Forbidden Fruits, Instruments.

"Blessed by: Brotherhood of the Love of Christ, Community of Poets, Easter Coast Spring Ball, East Village Other, Innerspace, Jade Companions, League for Spiritual Discovery, Liberty House, New American Church, Peace Eye, Psychedelic Fellowship."

That's how Greenwich Village announced the march to its own. The Mobilization was headquartered in the Village, and the Village welcomed it with open arms. The artsies, craftsies, and hippies who turned out en masse last Saturday gave the demonstration the air of a carnival--a black carnival.

First Arrivals

They were the first to start arriving in Central Park, where everyone was to congregate by 11 a.m. for the parade to the United Nations building. By 9:30 there were already several hundred hippies gathered on one grassy knoll.

It was sort of a be-in. Pungent incense, sweet music, bright balloons wafted on the thick morning-foggy air. One girl sat on a small boulder playing a recorder to the accompaniment of a Heinz-kosher-pickle-can drum. Another stood around in a waist length alumninum foil mini-skirt and flexed her thighs, making the word "Peace" which was painted on both her legs in fluorescent psychedelic lettering undulate weirdly.

Out in the middle of the meadow was a young man attired like a king in a flowing red velvet robe. He had walked to New York in the Boston to Washington peace march which left here March 25 and is scheduled to arrive at the Pentagon May 8. "We are going to launch the yellow submarine," he explained. Many young people wore buttons with the yellow submarine sprouting daffodils out its periscope. It is becoming a symbol of the youth peace movement. "Peace with Beatles power" was a popular slogan. And everyone in the meadow clutched a yellow daffodil.

Flower Power

On a large boulder in the southeast part of the meadow, a student held up a sign, "Draft Card Burnings Here," No need for a barker. The press and about 1000 others crushed in on the 75 as they lit up to chants of "Flower power" and renditions of "Aint Gonna Study War No More."

In another sideshow, "The Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam"--a group of Greenwich Village intellectuals staged six different "carnivals of death" on floats around the Park. One show consisted of poetry readings delivered from a stage decorated with sculptures of mutilated babies and severed hands. The whole thing was entitled, "Vietnam Monument, Designed by Johnson, McNamara & Co."

On another hill members of the "Ad Hoc Committee for a Revolutionary Contingent," a radical group, built a tower of black poles and flew Viet Congo flags along with one American Revolutionary War flag. Some of the revolutionary contingent changed into black pajamas and coolie hats to emphasize their solidarity with the fighters of the National Liberation Front.

Under the flags stood Boston's most faithful counterdemonstrators, the Polish Freedom Fighters, brandishing a "Bomb Hanoi" placard. One of them, who gave his name as Cliff Arneson and said he had just gotten out of the service, mounted an overturned trash can and began haranguing people about the necessity to fight in Vietnam "to preserve our freedom and theirs."

Afterwards, a twelve-year-old girl, clutching a daffodil, approached him. "Excuse me, Sir. You just said women and children get killed in Vietnam. What freedom do they get?" she asked.

"Mam," he explained, "everyone gets killed in war. It wouldn't be war not to kill people."

Then, concluding, he declared, "We will either stop Communist aggression, or..."

"Destroy the world," a member of the crowd suggested.

"Yes, or destroy the world," he finished.

Meanwhile, a new breed, a much more solemn breed had begun to arrive in the park. Many had travelled all night in the buses that pulled up along the west side of Central Park. There were hundreds of buses and they came from Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Atlanta, from all over the East.

There were teachers, many of whom wore academic gowns. There were doctors, some in white uniforms. One group identified itself with the sign, "Psychology--Psychotherapy: We Serve Human Needs, We Condemn Human Waste." Another sign read, "Architects Prefer to Create."

To the side, a couple of distinguished-looking gentlemen were arguing. One, a passerby, was disputing the effectiveness of peace marches. After a while he pulled out his credentials. The other gentleman, a marcher, responded, "Well, I have a Ph.D. in physics. We don't have to brag to each other."

Women's Strike for Peace was there in strength, toting shopping bags with anti-Vietnam slogans. A whole truckload of small children sang folk songs under the slogan "Children are not for Burning." Of course, there were students--straight ones, too--from Washington University in St. Louis, from Indiana to Howard. One section of the parade was reserved for a thousand labor representatives.

The Communist Party of New York City--about 100 strong--marched in the section for religious groups, right behind the Spencer Memorial Presbyterian Church.

The size and diversity of the demonstration was due to the kind of coalition which sponsored it. The coalition included from the far left the militant Youth Against War and Fascism, which has called for unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam; and the Sparticist League, a splinter of the Communist Fourth International, which calls the Progressive Labor Party right wing and Trotskyites middle of the road. It also included the more moderate Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Dr. Martin Luther King and the motherly-moderate Women's Strike.

Most of the groups joined the coalition with misgivings. The National Council of Students for a Democratic Society refused to endorse the march at the December meeting and finally came around just two weeks before the demonstration. Ronald Yank, a Harvard Law student and SDS co-chairman, commented on the hesitancy. He said many SDS people were turned off by King's position on the war, "which ignores the fact of U.S. imperialism." He said King was primarily concerned because the poverty program was suffering from the war, and Yank thought that was a pretty superficial basis for opposition. "They're not getting their pice of the pie so they're against the war," he concluded.

Other SDS members object to the whole idea of national demonstrations. They believe local organizing is a much more effective way of combatting the war. It is significant that Harvard SDS appropriated only $20 to its Mobilization effort and stipulated that the demonstration would not interfere with its ongoing programs, such as labor organizing.

The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 23,000 strong, split over the Mobilization. It never endorsed the demonstration although Dr. Benjamin Spock, SANE co-chairman, was a Mobilization leader and many SANE members marched. It is understood that SANE withheld official endorsement because some members found the Spring Mobilization too one-sided in laying blame for the war--almost all on Washington.

Every group had some beef or other. Peter Orris '67, of SDS and the student Mobilization Committee, described the planning meetings for the demonstration as "dogfights." When Dave Dellinger, chief organizer of the New York march and editor of Liberation magazine, introduced the spokesmen of the Mobilization to the press the Friday before the march, his caution was almost humorous. The spokesmen ranged from Dr. Spock to Floyd McKissick. Dellinger emphasized several times that the statements would represent personal viewpoints, and "not an official Mobilization line, because there is none."

The press didn't help their unity, either. Dr.Spock accused the New York press corps of trying to split the moderates from the coalition by overpublicizing its radical elements. His gripe was no Richard Nixon. At the Friday press conference, the questions--almost all of them--fell into three general categories:

* Sir, there have been widespread reports of Communist control and manipulation of your demonstration. Is there any truth in this?

* Sir, you have welcomed extremist groups to your coalition, some of whom espouse violence as a tactic. Will there be any violence in tomorrow's demonstration?

* Sir, some groups are planning to carry Viet Cong flags in tomorrow's parade. Don't you think that is highly provocative? Do you approve?

The New York Daily News' front-page Saturday morning story on the march was accompanied by one photograph--a picture of a Communist Party official making a statement that Communists controlled the Mobilization. The New Times kept its feelings pretty much on the editorial page where Saturday morning it condemned the demonstration as ineffective, both morally and politically.

In spite of the internal strife and external harrassment, the coalition held together without a single defection, and when King, Spock, McKissick, Dellinger, Bevel, and the other principals led the march out of Central Park toward the U.N. shortly after 12 noon, they had a lot of people behind them.

The leaders marched quietly, almost grimly. They didn't smile except to brush off an occasional insult from the sparse crowd on the sidewalks. The fog had lifted slightly but it was still a very gray day. Appropriately, a little boy marched beside Spock holding onto his hand. "Hey, Spock," somebody yelled. "Take a walk. I shoulda never read your book."

Hecklers

In addition to sporadic heckling, a group of about 200 counter-demonstrators waving American flags buzzed around the protestors all day. They had an answer to "Hey, hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today": "Hey Hey Ho Chi Minh, How Many Kids haveyou done in?"

King and company reached the U.N. without incident after an hour's walk. They had been too quiet, too dignified to provoke trouble. But the march continued all afternoon. At 5:30 when rain finished it, thousands had yet to reach the U.N. As the marchers to the rear got younger and hippier and their slogans wittier, incidents multiplied.

Beer cans, eggs, paint, soda bottles, chunks of concrete, and pieces of steel showered from Manhattan skyscrapers. One girl was struck on the head by a bottle of paint dropped from a thirtieth floor window. The paint splattered fifty feet and the girl was taken to a hospital unconscious.

Police went after a few of the bombadiers, but they were pretty powerless against this sort of attack, all 3000 of them. They stood around about every 100 feet looking uncomfortable and humorless, but striving for that "objective" attitude which their chiefs had announced they would maintain. One officer, however, betrayed his feelings when two girls asked if they could cross in front of a part of the parade that was being held up at an intersection. "They might abuse you, but go ahead," he said.

Guffaws

Yet, the incredible get-ups which many of the younger demonstrations sported were often too much even for the police. Many a sergeant broke into a jolly guffaw at the sight of a boy wearing a banana-peel headpiece or a girl covered with psychedelic paint. And on the bus from the U.N. after the rally one cop had a friendly chat with a couple of demonstrators who complimented the police on the handling of the crowd. That was credit where credit was due. No matter what the police thought of it, they handled the protest well.

The marchers handled themselves well, too, with the exception of the "Ad Hoc Committee for a Revolutionary Contingent," which charged down 7th Ave. instead of Madison Ave. and attacked Times Square armed services recruitment booth. After leaving Times Square, they clashed with about 100 police near the U.N. and five or six of them were badly beaten with riot sticks.

Later Saturday evening, Alan Krebs, a leader of the Revolutionary Contigent, accepted his "eight or ten" casualties stoically. "It was a possibility that we would break right through those police," another Revolutionary explained. "But we were playing it by ear and decided not to." Other revolutionaries practiced karate during the post-mortem.

After it was all over, Mobilization headquarters was a scene of happy exhaustion. Demonstration officials felt that the large and diverse turnout proved there was "broadly-based" opposition to the war.

Whether or not the march had significantly helped the peace cause was a different question. With so much publicity going to the Revolutionary Contingent and the Communist Party, it may have repelled many sympathetic people. But the Mobilization people did not worry.

Bevel was happy enough with the way things went to suggest, off-the-cuff, that they march on the White House. Other Mobilization officials jumped at the idea and the date was set, May 17. They telegrammed President Johnson Monday night, telling him to get out of Vietnam in a month or get ready for visitors.

There has not yet been time to enlist support of all the groups involved in last Saturday's march, but people at Mobilization headquarters think they can keep the coalition together for the new march.

That is questionable, however. In the week prior to the march, many of the more radical elements of the peace movement discussed massive civil disobedience as a protest tactic.

They were generally in favor of launching such a program. King, himself, said in a New York Times interview, that "If our nation insists on escalating the war and we don't see any changes, it may be necessary to engage in civil disobedience to further arouse the conscience of the nation and make it clear we feel this is hurting our country." By the end of the week, many were convinced that civil disobedience on a significant scale will be adopted, causing a split in the movement between moderates and those farther left.

But there is just an off-chance that, flushed with the New York success, the whole movement will become more militant. Asked if her group had ever resorted to civil disobedience, Mrs. Dagmar Wilson, founder of Women's Strike for Peace, replied, "No, but I'm not saying we won't. There's a limit to our patience. And we have a fine example in our grand-mothers and mothers who fought to get the vote.