In Search of a Sense of Place. October 23, 2007.

Washington

I begin this week’s column at the Café Mozart, my favorite place for coffee in Washington, near the corner of H St. and New York Avenue.

I sit at one of four tiny tables in the window while the man at the cash register comes over behind the deli case to make me a double espresso. He serves it to me in an elegant, golden-edged china cup-and-saucer. The piping hot coffee fills the cup and is thick enough to chew.

I arrived here feeling just dimly aware that I was even alive after a breakfast function at the National Press Club where breakfast consisted of not-very-fresh pastries and coffee that was barely recognizable as such. Now, after a few sips, I am ready to conceptualize the beginning of something like The Decline and Fall of American Civilization. If I had a copy of Principia Mathematica in front of me, I’m sure that I could easily read it with comprehension inside of an hour or so.

Instead I turn my thoughts to recent events and my location in the city of Washington this morning. This six-corner intersection (13th Street comes in here, too) used to be known as Herald Square, after the headquarters of the now-defunct Washington Times-Herald. Abraham Lincoln hitched his horse here, across the street at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, or so the brass plate on the hitching post says, which still stands in front of the church, at the edge of the small triangular park dotted by large trees under which several dark-clad homeless men while away the day.

The Washington Post was around back in the middle of the last century, but it was not the city’s leading paper. Everyone who was anyone read the Times-Herald and cared a great deal about what the editor, Cissy Patterson, said in it. Unfavorable mention in the paper was most embarrassing; not being on the invite list for her parties was like being in Siberia.

The talk all over Washington, reverberating like tremors of an earthquake that just won’t stop, is of the impending election. That the House of Representatives will change parties is a foregone conclusion. The future of the Senate is still unclear.

I continue to watch Eyes on the Prize and would be happy to watch all fourteen or sixteen hours’ worth. Unfortunately, my local PBS station seems to have ended its showing with episode three, which focuses on the push for voting rights and the march across the Pettus Bridge outside of Selma, Alabama.

The juxtaposition of images from the now-distant 60s with our current decade (Whatever it is -- The zeroes? The aughts?) is strangely apt. In the 60s we watched the country tear itself apart on television. The decade that began with such confidence turned in the twinkling of an eye into a decade of despair. In American Visions, his great history of American art, Australian critic Robert Hughes called 1968 America’s annus horribilis. The years surrounding it were not much better.

The difference now is that it is a Republican Party and President who have led us into an unpopular war. Half of the Democratic Party was in open revolt against its own President, who was elected by a landslide. The current Republican Party is showing its stresses and strains, but no open revolt.

The Iraq War is also more limited; so is television coverage; fragmented, too. One could easily say: The 60s: the Decade Created by Television. Now, in postmodern fashion, there are many televisions. The national schism is not quite so obvious.

At the crossing of the Pettus Bridge, back in the winter of 1965, the television cameras caught all: the thin line of marchers, the waiting Alabama State Troopers, their charge, the clubbing, the tear gas; all ended up on the evening news. Throughout the years of the Civil Rights Movement, the cameras and microphones were there: showing the riots at lunch counters, the fire hoses turned on unarmed children, the eloquent speeches by Martin Luther King and other preachers. Eyes on the Prize shows it all again.

It also shows the conflict between the young preachers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the even younger organizers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. After the careful, measured, Biblical rhetoric of King came the aggressive, wise-cracking of Stokely Carmichael and others who got their fifteen minutes of fame, and then some.

A few days after Carmichael used the "Black Power" slogan at the "Meredith March Against Fear", he reportedly told King, "Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum and force you to take a stand for Black Power." (See Bearing the Cross (1986), by David Garrow.)

King responded, "I have been used before. One more time won't hurt."

Both men were after Black political power, but defined it differently and had different strategies for getting it. King was always aware of national and world opinion, knowing that American Blacks, especially in the south, had no hope unless helped by outsiders, somewhat like the American colonies had no hope for independence from Britain without the help of France.

When President Lyndon Johnson proposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and concluded his speech by saying “We SHALL Overcome.” Tears came to King’s eyes, for he knew that victory was at hand, or as much victory as could be hoped for. He knew that the ballot box would not yield instant results, but it would, with time, yield lasting results. Stokely and others like him never seemed to care about this. The Voting Rights Bill passed in the summer of 1965. If it had not passed then, it might never have passed at all. After the congressional elections of 1966, there were certainly not enough votes to pass it. By 1969, under President Nixon, it would have quietly died.

By 1971, Stokeley, Eldrige Cleaver and H. Rap Brown had held their press conferences, published their books, scared whitey, and either left for Africa or gone to jail. Eldrige Cleaver eventually returned, became a Mormon and joined the Republican Party, in exactly which order, I do not know. As the Greeks used to say, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.” The glare of media attention must be the most maddening and addictive intoxicant ever invented. Fortunately the Voting Rights Act was not repealed and the federal bureaucracy made sure that Blacks could vote. They did.

When the next Congress convenes, especially if present trends continue, we will see Black Power. There will be Black committee chairmen in the House of Representatives in Washington and in state houses all over the country. There will be hundreds of Black state representatives and senators; some of them will be Republicans.

What about the worst fears of white folks? That with Black political power, there would be Black demagoguery, inflammatory rhetoric, corruption and calls for retribution? Well, there has been some of all that, but if there is racial competition for demagoguery and corruption, I submit that white folks are winning by a large margin. Whom does the Black community have to compete with Rush Limbaugh, Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff?

The controversial Representative Cynthia McKinney lost in the primary election this August to a more sober-minded opponent. Rush says weirder stuff than she did, everyday, to millions of white folks happy to believe the worst. Representative Jefferson was caught with $100,000 in cold unexplained cash, but Jack Abramoff pled guilty to defrauding Indian tribal clients of millions of dollars, conspiring to bribe members of Congress and evading taxes. Several members of Congress are going down with him. No question who’s winning the sleaze contest.

Black Power is here and it is good for America. Perhaps the Sixties gave birth to healthy offspring after all. It might even be the new birth of freedom Abraham Lincoln promised us a long time ago.