Shantytown Debacle

...For Resurrection City itself, however, Doomsday—as Fager calls it— followed hard on Solidarity Day...

...King's plan had developed as the "last desperate demand" of the advocates of non-violence, but at the same time it had reached toward new alliances and techniques...

...He added a word of thanks to the Government "for getting us out of . . . that mudhole...

...By mid-afternoon on July 24, 230 Campaigners had courted and been favored with arrest on Capitol Hill, while Resurrection City had been cleared and sealed off...

...GEORGIE ANNE GEYER has covered the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News...

...And poor press relations made it that much more difficult to put a good face on the problems that began to fall like hammer blows on Resurrecton City—weather-induced problems of morale and physical well-being, a rising tension between blacks and Mexican-Americans, an increase of crime inside the City, a decrease in population from 2,500 to 500...

...Charles Fager, before Resurrection City, had been a junior Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff member in the Southern campaigns, and out of that experience had written White Reflections on Black Power...

...It envisioned an unprecedented collaboration of the poor across racial lines...

...Most fundamentally, it embodied a fresh appeal to the nation to heed not only its Constitution but also its customary professions regarding freedom from want and fear...

...The anticipated brutal reactions of the Washington police, it was believed, would provoke a surge of sympathy and support...

...MELVYN DUBOFSKY is professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee...

...As a physical reality, Resurrection City seemed to have impeded as much as promoted real confrontation...

...Lincoln's gleaming Memorial and gleaming ideals...

...But, Fager writes, "the Campaign never succeeded in bringing about the desired confrontation with the Federal Government over the issues of poverty and public responsibility...

...Brave plans for boycotts and political ventures gradually collapsed under the weight of human exhaustion...

...The Campaign's press relations deteriorated rapidly, their collapse aided immeasurably by the hostility of the young "marshals" whose distrust of reporters led them to break every rule in SCLC's book...

...But this makes it the more tragic that Campaign leaders, despite earlier intentions, ruled the City off-limits to most of the public they had sought to confront...

...Fager tells of the surprise and disappointment of those reporters at Resurrection City who, like Fager himself, in earlier days had known an utterly self-assured Abernathy...

...The end product was to be irresistible pressure on Congress and the Administration to meet the fundamental demands for rights and jobs and education and autonomy for the poor...

...She wrote the recently published book, "The Latins...

...Surely a large part of the answer lies in the behavior of the public which, pressed to look at poverty, seizes any excuse to look the other way...

...THE REVIEWERS WILLIAM ("BILLY") McCANN is a free lance writer and critic...

...He does find substance in Abernathy's claim, on Solidarity Day, that the Campaign had elicited a significant response in eight major Government agencies...

...There was simply no time to transform Ralph David Abernathy, the man who had been so essential to King's rise, into a leader who could be accepted on his own terms...

...BERNARD F. DICK, an associate professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, has written numerous articles on William Golding's work...

...Or was the failure merely, as the guilt-ridden liberal is likely to assume, another judgment on the satisfied middle-class America, black and white, that refuses to look at the shanty-towns of our society, whether in a natural or in a contrived habitat...

...He edited "Ambrose Bierce's America...

...It sought to instigate a nationwide economic boycott...

...But it was too late...

...According to the Campaign's scenario, thousands of poor people were to settle in Resurrection City, then sally forth in an ascending series of peaceable demonstrations...

...He arrived in Washington in the summer of 1968 armed with a tape recorder, a press card, a penetrating intellect, and hope...

...Reviewed by William R. Hutchison The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 embodied a simple, appealing, and apparently workable idea...

...This book strengthens the message by documenting the near-helplessness of leaders whose previous efforts had placed them among the ablest organizers of mass movements in the Twentieth Century...

...These troubles were compounded by the Campaign's failure to rouse enthusiasm among Washington's black population, and by frustration that followed the leaders' repeated promises of "more meaningful" demonstrations...

...he has little left for silver linings, or even for efforts to give pathos the dimensions of tragedy...

...However, Andrew Young, once an assistant to King, was willing to admit that "we got our rumps kicked in Washington...

...Fager's adverse criticisms of the Campaign are often sardonic, yet they never seem to undermine his stance of profound sympathy and support...

...Hosea Williams, an Action Director who by now knew the ironies of his title, declined to have himself arrested, explaining that "we got things to do...

...Was their conception, for all its directness, really too elaborate, too dependent upon a consummate stage management...

...Abernathy himself, having always believed and predicted that he and his friend would be killed together, had difficulty understanding just who he was in a world bereft of Martin Luther King...

...He wrote "We Shall Be All," a history of the Industrial Workers of the World...

...His account brings into play both the deeply felt sympathies of a participant and the realism of one who thought the Poor People's Campaign a debacle...

...Solidarity Day, the mass meeting of June 19, initiated a series of more aggressive, if not always more meaningful or better planned, demonstrations than those that had characterized the first days of the Campaign...

...Fager spends all the capital of his sympathy in an impressive feat of critical understanding...

...Faced with eviction from East Potomac Park, Campaign leaders decided against the adamant stand that so many of their previous announcements had promised...

...With Resurrection City gone, Williams thought, the Campaign could "focus on the real problems—with Congress, for instance —instead of wasting half our energy trying to keep kids from throwing rocks...

...and these in turn would prepare the ground for a national boycott...

...Some SCLC staff members continued to speak of having struck terror in Lyndon Johnson's heart, and described the demise of Resurrection City as a mere transition from Phase One to Phase Two...

...Resurrection City proclaimed the devastating helplessness of the poor in a society too well off to know what poverty is...

...Almost no close observer, certainly not Fager, is likely to dispute Young's assessment...

...Another anomalous and deeply damaging feature of the Campaign was the unintended homage it paid to the programmers and image-makers in our society...

...They seem to have failed...

...Fager skilfully limns the features of an organization caught, in spring 1968, between the need to persevere in the Campaign and the impossibility of building adequate leadership in the time available...

...He agrees with Andrew Young's comment that, win or lose, SCLC this time had moved up from the Bull Connor bush leagues into Class A competition...

...With so much riding on their integrity and credibility, SCLC's harried leaders were repeatedly forced by their "scenario" into false positions on such relatively trivial issues as whether or not they intended to move from the Pitts Motel into Resurrection City...

...The death of King presented SCLC with the crudest kind of Hobson's Choice...

...Martin Luther King and his successors proposed, through the construction and peopling of their shantytown in Washington's East Potomac Park, to stun the world into awareness of how the Other America looks against the backdrop of Mr...

...ANTHEA LAHR has contributed reviews to The Nation, The Village Voice, and The University Review...

...In the shantytown, in the mule train, the hands were those of the American poor, but the voice was that of IBM or Madison Avenue...

...The tougher question is whether or not the Poor People's Campaign could claim any sort of success whatever...

...WILLIAM R. HUTCHISON is Charles Warren professor of the history of religion at the Harvard Divinity School...