Building a Ghetto
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. Building a Ghetto By Richard J. Margolis Resurrection City The white taxi driver who took me to Resurrection City said they were a bad omen, "those jigs on the mall. Ya notice...
...We can go up at least as high as the Monument...
...He was grinning...
...You wanna write something...
...I started to write down the overheard argument in my notebook...
...King's picture was everywhere—on placards, and on buttons youths were hawking for a dollar apiece...
...LETTER FROM FRANCE...
...Only a nation of gluttons, a people who eat to kill time, could have allowed matters to deteriorate so horribly...
...He has suffered the fate of martyrs, become a souvenir...
...Well, there was a chill in the air...
...Peter looked puzzled...
...They brought a black cloud with 'em...
...I'm here to stay...
...Resurrection City seems a little of both...
...Dark figures wrapped in blankets seemed to float by like Hollywood Indians...
...Just write that we ain't got nothing to say to you...
...On the other side of the fence a little girl scooted by on her tricycle and smiled up at me...
...A few real Indians were supposed to be there, too, but I didn't see them...
...I walked slowly, deeper and deeper into the City, past the Communications Booth, past some children playing kickball, past a shack with flowers in cardboard milk cartons flanking the front door...
...I punished the cabby for his bigoted language by giving him a very small tip, thus reconciling middle-class liberalism with middle-class miserliness...
...Hundreds of people, apparently tourists, were standing around staring at each other...
...It began to drizzle the moment we came through the gate...
...He talked about the four stages of the Poor People's Campaign—information, education, negotiation, and demonstration—and I gathered that after a week of trying the first three they had already entered the fourth...
...He called for questions, and a reporter raised his hand...
...One shack proclaimed in red paint: this is the great society war-hate-poverty the american dream Peter was pointing his camera over the fence and clicking it rapidly when four young blacks shouted at him to stop...
...We ought to make you clean up the trash," I was told...
...They seemed to be looking for something that wasn't there, turning everything over and putting everything back...
...Resurrection City is entirely surrounded by a wooden snow-fence, about as high as a man...
...A man with an armband gave me a hard stare...
...She was going back the next morning to her husband and her 13 children in Chicago...
...I returned to Resurrection City late that night...
...Don't harp on freakish manifestations," he said...
...They wore green jackets that said "Pride, Inc...
...The camp was lit here and there by fires in trash barrels, and people were huddled near them for warmth...
...We had in common only these threadbare habits and the falling rain...
...New busloads of sufferers arrive daily...
...We need able-bodied men...
...It reminds me of the days before the Nazis came to power...
...What are you looking at, boy...
...buses kept crawling in and out of the parking area...
...Many have nothing in their stomachs...
...The Lord provides for those who provides for themself," she informed us...
...Thanks to my black walking partner, I was able to chat with a couple of residents over the fence...
...some have violence in their hearts...
...Attention all mothers who want to have their children housed at night—there are homes available for 60 children...
...We need 12 marshalls immediately...
...Nobody helps each other...
...The next day was gloomy and cold...
...Outside Resurrection City the scene was confused...
...he asked...
...One's first impression of it, Richard J. Margolis, a free-lance writer, specializes in urban affairs...
...We walked eastward toward the Monument, the fence and the new City on our right, the long, beautiful Reflection Pool on our left...
...This smells like revolution," he muttered...
...The reply was unprintable...
...There were about 600 press people waiting to get in, and we all gathered around Jesse Jackson for a briefing...
...They are cold, crowded and lacking in all the essential amenities, including plumbing...
...The reporters dutifully wrote it down...
...Press hours" were from 12:30 to 2 p.m...
...Rat Patrol...
...But the poor are asking for nothing the rest of us do not already take for granted...
...glimpsed through a taxi window, is that of a thoughtfully arranged slum: row upon row of plywood A-frames, mostly unpainted, and lots of little children playing on the muddy, un-paved "streets...
...But no one knows where it will end...
...But, look, I'm on your side," said the reporter...
...You're messing up our place...
...The din was general, dominated by screaming jets taking off from National airport and by patient or panicky voices booming over the public address system: "We have a vehicle that is willing to take 50 men and women that wants to take showers...
...one of the green jackets said...
...We had a brief tug of war...
...The other resident I talked to that night was a young man from Milwaukee...
...One female volunteer, please, one female volunteer...
...There is a shortage of milk for the children, and of hot food and cigarettes for the adults...
...A black Bazarov...
...Two children were dangling their bare feet in the pool...
...If you're just a sightseer, you can go home now...
...While waiting to get in I watched the women rummage through the clothes pile...
...It may take us 267 years to get what we want in Washington...
...Mister, what are you looking at...
...Actually, they are no better and no worse...
...Don't touch the notes," I said, hugging them to my chest...
...Sir, what advice do you have for the people of Canada...
...Everything being done here insists that we at last recognize this...
...He seemed stunned...
...Some no doubt feel more alienated here than in their previous slum...
...Then he lectured us on our responsibility to write the truth about Resurrection City so that the American people will understand what they must do...
...He was a man without illusions—tough, weary, determined...
...One was a large lady from Chicago who was busy picking at a huge pile of clothes spread on a table near the gate...
...Ya notice how cold it's been since they come...
...This ain't no zoo," one of them said...
...A green jacket tried to grab my notes...
...I considered going limp but instead I grew stiffer...
...He spoke of sleeping on suburban lawns, "where the grass is softer...
...I explained that this was a peaceful revolution, that the poor people were seeking redress through legitimate democratic channels...
...He had delivered a bottle to a room in which a naked white couple was disporting, and he hadn't been able to take his eyes off the woman...
...If we run out of space," announced Jesse Jackson, the poor people's city manager, "we can build apartments...
...In front of a tent labeled "Child Care" a youthful wasp reporter was arguing with a half dozen blacks...
...It is true that Resurrection City is not yet a community...
...From time to time a pair of sentries patrolling the borders shined flashlights in our eyes—the cops teach well—and told us to keep our distance...
...Ya think that's an accident...
...This is urgent...
...It's lonely here," she said, "not what I expected...
...In a second the center of gravity had shifted to me, and the other reporter had vanished...
...Most of the shacks bore such legends as "Soul House," "Black Is Beauty," "We Shall Overcome" and "Johnson Can't Jail Us All...
...It has a single, narrow gate for pedestrians and it is not easy for a rich man to get through...
...The man at the gate was wearing a blue armband and carrying a bullhorn through which he finally addressed us outsiders...
...He was confident, affable...
...Yes, sir," he said, "it seems like the rain don't want to stop...
...I decided to circle the perimeter of the City on foot, and was soon joined by a German photographer named Peter Munzberg...
...Does anyone know the whereabouts of the keys to the warehouse...
...Hey, what's that guy doing...
...This time my taxi driver was black, bourgeois to his fingertips and timidly curious about "those folks in there...
...Get the fuck out of here, whitey...
...He was not reassured...
...I retreated, remembering Richard Wright's story about his bellhop days in a Southern hotel...
...I showed him my press card, but he said I was too late, I had missed "the press hours...
...Twice I stopped to interview and twice was told to move on...
...Officials of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (sclc) are fond of saying the new shacks are much superior to those the poor people left behind...
...It took us 267 days to get it," he said...
...It was the only smile I got in Resurrection City...
...These people have, as a reporter remarked to me, "the arrogance of poverty," and Resurrection City is their biggest put-on yet—a grim joke that begins at the Lincoln Memorial, creeps across the long mall toward the chalk-white Washington Monument and ends...
...volunteers, mostly white and female, were signing up at a volunteer booth, and in another booth nearby a bearded black man from San Francisco was displaying paintings of Martin Luther King Jr...
...We need shovels at the back of the dining tent...
...But don't you want to be a spectacle...
...Then someone held my arms and someone else got my notes...
...Don't let him do that...
...They were torn and thrown on the ground...
...You can't make a spectacle of us...
...Like all well-planned slums, the site is miles away from the nearest shopping facility...
...A-frames make good billboards...
...It is impossible nowadays to dream up a miracle white people will doubt, provided it resembles a plague...
...The taxi turned into the circular driveway of my hotel, and the black, liveried doorman hopped over and opened the door...
...He had spent last year marching in white neighborhoods, agitating for a fair housing ordinance...
...It was an old, familiar game—the door held open, the smile locked tight—and we played it...
...He mentioned the difficulties of being non-violent "in a country that teaches violence on television and in Vietnam...
...Isn't that why you are here...
...He parked and then we trekked along the fence together, impressed by the silence emanating from the encampment and by the beauty of the illuminated obelisk beyond...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 12
