Resurrection City Is Gone Now, But the Campaign Is Not Over

WASHINGTON, D.C. June 30--Resurrection City is gone now. Last Monday it nearly cost Washington a riot to get rid of it, but it is gone. And West Potomac Park, rich with mud and rubble, is West Potomac Park again.

Leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who are still in Washington with about three hundred campaigners (some in the D.C. jail), admitted last week that it is a good thing that the City is gone. The Rev. Andrew Young and the Rev. Hosea Williams of SCLC both said that the business was a mistake.

But the mistake was not simply the City itself, but rather the approach the leaders took.

In the beginning, after the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King, SCLC leaders held long discussions on whether they would go to Washington to build a movement of poor people, to win specific demands from Congress, or to do both.

At first the idea was 'movement building.' The Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy decided to keep his demands vague. He would bring his troops to Washington, camp out, moan, sing and wait. Resurrection City would be the core around which a political movement would then materialize.

The movement idea was based on the theory that poor people had been left out of American pluralism. They lacked the resources to compete as an interest group in the system so, economically and socially they were left out.

The first week the poor people were here newspapers, Congressmen, and liberal suburbanites were screaming for the poor people to make specific demands; What do you want? How can we support you if we don't know why you're here?

Those were distinctly middle-class concerns. The poor people of Washington and the rest of the country knew why the campaign was here.

But Abernathy gave in. His purposely vague demands suddenly firmed up. His 49 demands turned out to be mainly uncreative housing and welfare proposals already offered by the Johnson Administration. And the target of the SCLC demands was a reactionary Congress that was about to adjourn.

As an example of the direction of these demands the most important one became extending the Federal Food Stamp program--a program which has been attacked as restrictive by liberal and conservative observers alike.

Instead of aiming at the poor to build a movement, the campaign aimed at the white middle class for support for that nonexistent movement.

The frustrating five years since the march on Washington apparently had taught Abernathy nothing. On June 19th the whites from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs came and marched again, in the dull haze of Washington's heats.

Five days later, the City and Federal governments that most of the marchers had elected or supported or were members of ordered 1000 police in riot gear with shotguns and tear gas grenades to surround Resurrection City, and arrest the 100 inhabitants left inside for overstaying their welcome.

The lesson seems to be learned. The target is shifting, but it might be too late for this summer. Nearly everyone has gone home.

Since the death of the City, SCLC has been focusing on organizing the poor. The center of operations has shifted from West Potomac Park to 14th and U streets, the core of the ghetto, where the April riot began. The poor people's campaign is not over.