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Vietnam Moratorium MarchBy Laura RichardsPrincipal organizer, Sam Brown, of New Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (New Mobe). This was the first march since Martin Luther King in 1963, and it was the biggest held up to that time. The official estimate was 500,000. It was a triumphal occasion. The sheer size of the event created a sense that the tide of American opinion was turning against the war. It was a cold march, bitterly cold, much worse that Washington usually gets in winter. I had come from Chicago, 17 hours on a bus from Northwestern's campus, and I still felt cold. We drifted back and forth across the Mall through the day, hearing the speakers and musicians indistinctly, if at all, through pole-mounted microphones wholly inadequate for the purpose. But we were there. We were living in the police state of Amerika, under the cold, intrusive glare of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and John Mitchell's Justice Department. Even so, we were less tightly constrained than now. The demonstrators could move right up to the perimeter of the Justice Department, or go inside the Smithsonian museums to warm up. Toward the end of the day, as obligatory tear gas floated across the west lawn of the Capitol, the marauding few who wanted to make a complete day of it charged down 7th Street, in the old Kanns and Lansberghs block, where the arts district is now, smashing a few storefronts. At twilight, as the march dissipated, we wandered into the Statler Hilton bar for a celebratory drink. The Cambodia Incursion ProtestThe Vietnam Moratorium march was a planned and orchestrated expression of disapproval. The Cambodia demonstration was a spontaneous howl of protest. We all just showed up to make plain our disgust at one more excess, one more war crime by a lawless White House. This was before Pol Pot's killing fields eclipsed American depradations. Our conduct seemed worse for our refusal to own up to it: entering Cambodia was not an incursion; we invaded, upping the ante when it was time to come home. The mood of the Cambodia protest presaged the countdown chant at the end of the war: Quang Tri, An Loc, Saigon by six o'clock. The weather was beautiful and the city full of flowers, an irony felt by us all. The Million Man MarchI left work a half-day early, and took Sam out of kindergarten. My baby would be among those present. Minister Farrakhan had asked women not to attend, but I was a feminist and an Episcopalian, and most importantly, an ex-newspaperman. The story was on the Mall. Who would have believed there really would be one million African-American men assembled on the Mall. It shouldn't have been possible. Take thirty million African-Americans in all, half of them women and girls, at least a million men in jail, on drugs, or out of money. Others wouldnt be able to get away from work or get excused from school, or had bad circulation and couldn't take the long hours sitting on a bus. A few just didn't like Farrakhan. Anyone who'd done event turnout knew that with the pool of available African-American males, a Million Man March might be an appealing rallying cry, but in no way constituted a reasonable estimate of actual attendance. Yet there they were. |
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