SAM SMITH, MULTITUDES -

There was another story of the 1960s that wound
its way across the pages of The Idler Magazine. It was first expressed
in a moving fashion in published letters written from Mississippi in the
summer of 1964 by my ex-college roommate, ex-wrestler and ex-paratrooper
Gren Whitman. During that same summer, three other young men - James
Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered while
organizing for black voting rights in Mississippi. Chaney was black;
Goodman and Schwerner were white.

From Biloxi on August 8, 1964, Gren Whitman wrote:

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Fear cannot be described, only felt. I have been frightened many times
In my life in varying degrees, in varying circumstances. And courage is
not the absence of fear. Fear is the essence of courage. What are your
emotions now, driving with us along a lonely highway in rural
Mississippi, in an integrated car? It you are frightened, you are with
friends, and you are sane. If you are not afraid, you know nothing about
Mississippi. You have never heard of the Freedom Rides and how they
ended in Jackson. You have never heard of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen,
and countless others. You have not heard of Neshoba County. You have
never talked with a Mississippi Negro or a civil rights veteran.
And if your fear has overcome your convictions, you have no business
with us. Go home.

Our three colored companions are profoundly aware that two whites are in
the car with them and what this will mean if we are stopped for any
reason. The two of us, likewise, know that though we are white, we
become as black as tar once we are known to be CR types. White
Mississippians make no distinctions. There is a strange and wonderful
and, for you, a new bond between us, compounded of fear, and dedication
and brotherhood. . . .

Our final stop is a colored settlement near a planing mill owned by a
Mr. Black. Most of these people are his, tenants and employees, We know
that he has told them not to talk to us and that they inform him each
time we come around. So we keep our visit short. We talk quickly and to
the point: "Join the Freedom Party. You need It. It needs you." No one
signs. Few talk. James, sensing that someone has already headed to tell
'Mr. Charlie' that we're talking to "his niggers" says "let's go" and we
git. Fast. There is always the next time. Folks have seen us, some have
talked, however briefly. The precious seed Is planted. The freedom seed.

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In January 1966, I got a chance to help plant the seed. DC Transit
wanted to raise its fares and the local chapter of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized to stop it. They urged
citizens with cars to drive bus passengers during a one-day boycott.

I joined the volunteers. On the morning of January 24, 1966, 1 hauled
myself out of bed, swallowed a cup of coffee, warmed up my '54 Chrysler,
and made my way to Sixth and H Streets Northeast, one of the assembly
points for volunteer jitneys. A boycott organizer filled my car with
three high school girls and a middle-aged and rather fat woman.

A bus drove by and it was empty. "They're all empty," the woman said, It
was the first bus I had seen that morning and I wondered if she was
right.

If both the fat lady and her husband worked, the fare increase DC
Transit owner O. Roy Chalk was seeking would cost them two week's worth
of groceries over the course of a year.

I let my passengers off and headed back to Sixth and H. At Florida and
New York, I counted five empty or near-empty buses. It wasn't even nine
o'clock in the morning and the boycott was working.

"It's beautiful," the man in the slightly frayed brown overcoat said
after he told me he was headed for Seventeenth Street. "It's working and
it's beautiful. Hey, you see those two there. Let's try and get them."

I pulled over to the right lane by a stop where two men stood.

"Hey man, why spend thirty cents? Get in," my rider called to the pair.

"You headed downtown?"

"Yeah, get in."

"Great. It's working, huh? Great!"

At the delicatessen at Twenty-fourth and Benning, one of the assembly
points, a young black who worked with SNCC greeted me: "Been waiting all
morning for a car to work from here; said they were going to have one,
but they didn't send it. Want a cup of coffee?"

"Thanks."

"I'm tired, man. Been up all night down at the office. We got some
threats. One bunch said they were going to bomb us, but they didn't."

We got into my car and continued east on Benning. Lots of empty buses.

"We've got to live together, man. You're white and you can't help it.
I'm Negro and I can't help it. But we still can get along. That's the
way I feel about it." I agreed. "You ever worked with SNCC before?"

"Nope," I said.

'Well, I'11 tell you man, you hear a lot of things. But they're a good
group. They stick together. You know, like if you get in trouble, you
know they're going to be in there with you. If you get threatened
they'll have people around you all the time. They stick together. That's
good, man". . .

People stuck together that Monday, I carried seventy-one people, only
five of them white. SNCC estimated that DC Transit lost 130,000 to
150,000 fares during the boycott. Two days later, the transit
commission, in a unanimous although only temporary decision, denied DC
Transit the fare hike.

Never had so many Washingtonians done anything so irregular and contrary
to official wishes. The assumption that DC residents would passively
accept the injustices of their city was shattered. SNCC and the Free DC
Movement had laid the groundwork for future action.

After the bus boycott, I wrote a letter to its leader congratulating him
and offering to help in the future. Not long after, Marion S. Barry, and
his colleague, L. D. Pratt, were sitting in my apartment talking about
how I could help with SNCC's public relations. I readily agreed; for the
first time in my life I had joined a movement.

Three years earlier Barry had quit his $5,500 a-year post teaching
chemistry at Knoxville College in Tennessee and joined SNCC. He soon
showed up in Washington to head the local office. Barry early formed an
improbable and ultimately nearly explosive partnership with an erstwhile
farm implements manufacturer, salesman, self-styled nutrition expert and
economic theoretician named L. D. Pratt. Barry was lean, black,
soft-spoken, self-contained and given to wearing a straw plantation
style hat; Pratt was husky, white, excitable, demonstrative, and covered
his baldness with a felt fedora that made him appear a character out of
a one-column cut in a forties edition of Time magazine.

Together they designed the boycott and a drive to win self-government
for the colony of Washington. Although the life of the Free DC Movement
would be measured in months, it seemed like years, for so much was
crammed into its short existence. Barry and Pratt both worked themselves
to the marrow and it was during those months that Barry first gained a
long-lingering reputation for always being late for appointments, news
conferences and actions. "I work on CPT - colored people's time," he
explained. Part of my job was to stand on the street corner and convince
the press that Marion really would show up if they just waited a bit
longer. . .

By the following fall, Barry would have been arrested three times, for
failing to "move on," for disorderly conduct and for holding a Free DC
block party without official sanction. . .

Marion was leading a movement, but it had some of the intensity,
closeness and spirit of a rebellion. Barry enlisted into the cause
anyone he could find. You would be talking on the phone and a special
operator would break in with an "emergency call" and it would be Barry
or Pratt or someone else with the latest crisis or plan. There were
black cops who had been spiritually seconded to the movement; and
ministers who served as a link between the radical Barry and the more
moderate civil rights movement; and friendly reporters who still
believed there was an objective difference between justice and
injustice. And through it all was movement, excitement and hope, not
even dampened by the thirtieth chorus of "We Shall Overcome" sung in a
church hall while waiting for Marion finally to show up. . .

While the 20-something Barry was an anathema to the white business
leaders and considered a rogue by the local civil rights establishment,
as early as 1966 a poll found him ranked fifth by black residents as the
person who had done the most for blacks in DC.

When people would write about Marion Barry years later, they wouldn't
mention the good part because they had never seen it. All they saw was
the cynical, corroded shell of a man they hadn't known and thought it
had been that way all along. Like an old car rusting in a pasture.

As Barry moved into politics, first on the school board, then the city
council, then the mayor's office I moved my support and enthusiasm with
him and without apologies. Once in the top job, however, his weaknesses
quickly lost their constraints and whatever greatness Marion might have
possessed started to disintegrate.

I had been close to Marion, but there came a time when I remembered Jack
Burden, the journalist turned henchman to Willie Stark in "All the
King's Men" and I told myself I didn't want to end up like him. And so I
let increasing distance grow between us until finally there was nothing
except the passing reference to times of which I suspect both of us were
prouder.

Later I would sometimes tweak him when we met.

"What's happenin,' Sam?"

"Not much, Marion. Just staying home with the wife and kids. How about
you?"

One February of an election year, he told me at a party, "We've got to
have lunch, Sam." I replied, "Marion, we don't have to have lunch until
at least July."

Yet there was a portion of the bond that remained unbroken. I would
sometimes describe Barry as a drunk uncle you both liked and hated. He
once introduced me as "one of the first white people who'd have anything
to do with me" and to his new third wife he said, "Sam and I go back a
long time. Over the years he's become more radical and I've become more
conservative."

When a purportedly drug recovered Barry ran for reelection the last
time, I took the position that I was all in favor of redemption; I just
didn't see why you had to do it in the mayor's office. With a straight
face, I suggested as an alternative that he follow the example of the 
Irish bishop whose long-ago love affair had just been exposed. The
bishop had gone to Guatemala to care for the Indians in the mountains.
The thought of Marion doing something like that completely broke up the
show's host.

During the campaign I also appeared on a TV show with Barry. In a more
serious manner, I pointed out to him that he had never apologized to the
people of the city for the pain he had caused them. He went into his
redemption speech and ended by saying that he hoped some day "Sam would
consider me redeemed, too."

That was the end of the show and we walked out together and sat down in
the lounge next to the studio. "Marion," I said, "I wasn't talking about
your redemption. There are a lot of people in this town who were
embarrassed and hurt by what you did and I don't see any sign that you
even recognize it." Barry still didn't seem to understand what I was
talking about and so I said, "Look, isn't it one of the twelve steps
that you're meant to make amends to those you have harmed along the
way?"

For a moment, he connected: "You mean I should tell them that I'm
sorry?"

"It might help."

Barry nodded and excused himself, but he hadn't really heard. As I
looked into his well-trained eyes I realized I had sought something
beyond his vision. For him there were no others.

And yet I still think of the good years. The years in which Barry was
one of a handful of people who made self-determination for DC possible,
the years in which he was the voice of progress and sanity on the school
board and city council. I think of a man who was willing to risk his
life for the freedom of others, who was willing to go to jail on the
chance it would help others gain a measure of liberty. And like Jack
Burden writing of Willie Stark, "I have to believe he was a great man.
What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled
it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks.
Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the
dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the
embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness
and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he
had it. I must believe that."

On the wall of my office is an autographed bumper sticker from Marion's
first campaign for mayor. It reads: "Barry -- the way things ought to
be." In his last words, Willie Stark said, "It might have been all
different, Jack. You got to believe that."

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