Nation: Challenging the Pharaoh

Affluent America will have ample opportunity during the next few weeks to weigh the extensive—perhaps explosive —demands of the black poor. Last week, stepping out from shantytowns and slums throughout the nation, more than 1,200 marchers of the Poor People’s Campaign began the trek toward Washington. Some were weathered field hands who had never before left the cotton-blown bottoms; others were rambunctious teen-agers splitting from a desperate scene. “The cause this march represents is alarmingly real,” wrote Atlanta Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson. “Before any white man passes judgment on it, he ought to understand what he is judging.”

That tolerance was not always so evident among the marchers. “By the time we’re through in B.C.,” cried March Coordinator Hosea Williams, “white folks gonna say, ‘Where’s Dr. King? Wake up, Dr. King!’ These white folks killed the dreamer, but we’re gonna show these white folks what become of the dream. The poor people are marching to challenge the Pharaoh.” Led by Williams and the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, 42, successor to Martin Luther King, the poverty pilgrims wound through back-country roads in buses, battered cars and behind farm wagons drawn by mules named Stennis and Eastland, George Wallace and Jim Clark (for the former Selma, Ala., sheriff who bloodied many a black head during earlier civil rights marches).

Even a man of the cloth like Abernathy felt no compunction about wearing the marchers’ arm band reading “Mississippi God Damn.” In Boston, where 1,000 poverty marchers mustered en route to Washington last week, a self-styled “Polish Freedom Fighter” named Joseph Mlot-Mroz, 53, picketed the parade with a sign reading, “I Am Fighting Poverty. I Work! Have You Tried it?” In a sorry scuffle, the bow-tied anti-protester was stabbed and hospitalized in fair condition.

All Men. By contrast, the route of the Southern procession echoed with memories of earlier clashes in the civil rights cause. Passing through Selma, Abernathy paused beside the silver span of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, scene on “Bloody Sunday” (March 7, 1965) of a club-flailing confrontation between King’s marchers and Sheriff Clark’s lawmen. During a speech recalling King, Abernathy suddenly fell silent and let the tears roll down his cheeks. Then a huge Negro woman began singing: “Jesus—got all the power.”

At other stops, wreaths were laid at the spots where Mrs. Viola Liuzzo and the Rev. James Reeb died. In Montgomery, Abernathy wanted to place a wreath on the bier of Alabama’s late Governor Lurleen Wallace, but shied away in fear of provoking an incident. Instead, he sent Husband George a telegram that read: “I have just received the shocking news of the passing of your wife. Please know that we share your grief and sorrow, and our prayers are with you and your children.”

Abernathy was ebullient before his own people. “You’re gonna have hell on your hands,” he told a Selma audience. “I weigh 185 Ibs., and it’s all man from the top of my head to the bottom of my foot. I’m just 5 ft. 8 in. tall, but that’s tall enough. If it isn’t, I can walk on my toes too.” There is still considerable walking to be done before the talking starts in Washington. There, last week, officials granted permission for the marchers to erect their “Resurrection City,” whose plywood A-frames will house 3,000 people on 15 acres in West Potomac Park, just south of the Lincoln Memorial.