Spring of 1972.
It was Ira’s idea.
The women and children of America would go to Washington and join hands around the Congress of the United States. In a symbolic act of solidarity with the women and children of Vietnam, we would demand that no more funds go to continue the war. No more funds to bomb, napalm, strafe, gas, torture and massacre the crossfire victims in that country. We wanted the violence, at least from our side, to stop.
It might have been one of the largest demonstrations Washington had ever seen. As it turned out, it was the most difficult, demoralizing, battering, discouraging task I have ever taken on in my life. But I learned how strong my faith was when I knew I was right; and I learned something about what it’s like to be sabotaged.
I asked Coretta King to join with me in sponsoring the demonstration we later named Ring Around Congress. We were one black woman and one brown, both dedicated to nonviolent action. We met in New York. She was quite swept off her feet by the idea, and in her words, it was the historic moment for it.
We asked Cora Weiss of Women’s Strike for Peace if she would help us organize. Years later she and I would split over my open criticisms of Hanoi’s human rights record. She is strongly left-wing, and by no means a pacifist. But she was and is one of the finest organizers I’ve ever met. She said yes and recruited four other women: Amy Swerdlow, Edith Villastrigo, Barbara Raskin, and Barbara Bick. They were tough. We were a formidable group.
We divided our territories and tasks around the country. My first task was to contact Another Mother for Peace and see if they would sponsor us and promote our march through their newsletter. They were not known for radical action, and had never promoted civil disobedience. We were not planning on civil disobedience, but it was something that had to be considered should anything go wrong in Washington.
They adopted the idea with no hesitation. How could they lose? It would be American moms and kiddies saying no to war. The peace movement no longer consisted solely of “dirty hippies and KGB agents.” The dirty hippies were there, naturally, many with wigs paid for by the FBI, and the KGB agents were there, too, trying to figure out who the CIA and FBI agents were. But the honest movement now included priests, housewives, lawyers, educators, businesspeople, politicians, students, and even a few entertainers.
Coretta gave the project whatever respectability I couldn’t. Another Mother for Peace held up the mailing of their newsletter long enough to tuck our announcement into every one of its hundred thousand copies. And the responses started coming in to our offices almost immediately. Yes, the mothers said, yes, and a thousand times, yes.
Responses to the East Coast offices were equally enthusiastic. Very soon Ira and I began to wonder if we would have a logistics problem. It looked as though there might be a hundred thousand people ringing the Congress.
The first blow came two weeks into the planning when Coretta King changed her mind. Coretta’s secretary had called Cora. I was stunned and requested a four-way conference call with Cora, Amy, Coretta, and me, in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Carmel Valley. Whatever had gone wrong we could surely make right. During the call I pushed for a reasonable explanation of Coretta’s change of heart, but she would only say that she had changed her mind and thought the timing for the demonstration was not right. She would be a participant like the hundreds of other women and groups already on our list, but wanted to be off the leadership position of co-sponsor with me. I reminded her that two weeks before she’d said the timing was not only perfect, but historic! She was unmoved. I wracked my brain to figure out who had gotten to her. And why. Surely the march could do her, or her image, no harm. She asked me for a list of names of sponsors so that she could write and inform them of her new position.
With the wind knocked out of my sails, I called Ira and discussed whether or not to continue. We decided to go ahead. And I made the very un-Gandhian decision to take my time sending the list of sponsors back to Coretta.
Ira and I flew east. We set up headquarters in the Georgetown Inn, a little one-star hotel down near the C. and O. Canal. It had no room service and only one phone we could use, but that little hotel would provide for us, both figuratively and literally, a shelter from the storm to come. One of Washington’s worst floods was slowly gathering momentum in the muggy overhead clouds, and a campaign against our march was gathering momentum somewhere in the Capitol
Unaware of impending trouble, we had our first big meeting. It was thrilling at first. The room was filled with strong women, both white and black, spilling over with ideas and ready to go to work. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, someone accused me of paying one of the black women for the work she’d done. The disruption had begun. I smelled power plays and tried to sort them out so that tempers might be assuaged and egos properly pampered. I couldn’t find the source of the trouble. Some women demanded a special meeting. We must, they said, get permission from the “black community of Washington” to have our march. Fine, we said, let’s have a meeting.
In the meantime, groups, clubs, church members, school kids and families were signing up by the scores. I was sure we could patch up the local infighting in no time at all.
Coretta’s secretary called and asked me if I’d sent on the list . . .
The next day the skies opened up over Washington with a vengeance. Many parts of the city were flooded, including the basement and parking lot of the Georgetown Inn. We opened our hotel room to a group of soaking wet, angry, rude, and vindictive blacks who claimed to be “the representatives of the black community of Washington, D.C.” Ira and his band of organizing women were all present. When everyone was seated, there was a momentary and very stiff pause during which we could hear the pounding and splashing of the rain, a sound which in other circumstances might have united a group of strangers by its ferocity. I started to say something by way of a greeting, but was quickly and in no uncertain terms interrupted by Mary Treadwell, a formidable tank of a woman, at the time married to Marion Barry, the other apparent leader of the group.
“AHHH . . . am speakin’ first,” she announced.
And speak she did.
She told us that we had no business in Washington. That the blacks in Washington were sick and tired of cleaning up the streets after white demonstrators and peaceniks had left town. She said that the issue of the day was not the war in Vietnam, but rather the black/white issue, which we should be addressing. We must, she announced, call off our irrelevant march and demonstration. The others all nodded in agreement.
I was confused, but not intimidated. In fact I was furious. Forgotten was the claim that I was paying off blacks. The accusations seemed to change with the winds of the storm outside, as though our adversaries were searching for the most vulnerable spot within us. We listened as one after another they issued their ultimatums. We must pack up and leave Washington, they said. It was not our city. I wondered who in the hell they were. One thing I did know. If this baloney kept up it would sap our energies completely. I didn’t know the half of it.
I was sitting crosslegged on the floor and my purse fell out of my lap. One of the things that tumbled out was the picture of Kim, the ten-year-old girl covered with napalm, running naked down the streets of Saigon. A skinny black man sitting near me in a three-piece suit picked up the picture and grunted scornfully.
“Huh. I s’pose you impressed with this picture.”
“Well, yes I am,” I responded.
Well, let me tell you, girl, that this ain’t nothin’. She got napalm all over her back an’ so what? Dey drop that stuff ever’day in mah neighborhood. You folks prob’ly not aware of that li’l fact. This picture means nuthin to me, nuthin!”
At last it was my turn to speak. I tried, and so, one by one, did the other organizers of Ring Around Congress. We were ridiculed, shouted at, and denied. It became clear that our visitors intended to stay with us in our modest flooded-out hotel until we submitted to them and told them we’d get out of Washington.
When none of us budged, the “representatives of the black community of Washington” said they were planning a “summit” meeting on the same day as our march, to deal with the real issues, and if we were foolish enough to go ahead with our march they’d come out and throw bricks at us. Barbara Raskin got so frustrated that she stood up on a chair and screamed at the top of her lungs, “SUMMIT! WHAT THE FUCK IS A SUMMIT?!” We laughed, but our laughs were met with icy, arrogant, and disdainful looks.
By three o’clock in the morning they settled for a compromise: we could think about everything they’d said, and we’d call them in the morning. They got up to leave.
One man who’d said nothing all night whispered to me as he passed, “I’ll be back in an hour.” We wondered who the hell he was, and if we dared trust him. Ira and I turned out the lights. Two men who’d been standing across the street since we’d arrived went home. An hour later there was a knock at the door.
Perhaps if this man had not come back to see us in the wee hours of the morning, we would have been so discouraged and confused that we would have fallen for the whole Mau Mau act and gone home. But he said, very softly, “There’s somethin’ fishy goin’ on. Ain’t no Washington nigger gonna git up at nine o’clock in the mornin’ on the twenty-second of June and go down to the Capitol buildin’ an’ throw bricks at you. Sumpin’s behind all this. Never you mind that part. Your march is right. You are right. Keep on with it. Don’t let ’em stop you,” and he left.
We kept on with it. We didn’t let them stop us. But they sure as hell slowed us down.
First, we lost every black we’d had on board. One lovely woman who had volunteered found all of her tires slashed. She showed up in the crowd on the day of the march, at what I must assume was serious risk to her personal safety.
Julius Hobson, a black Washington organizer, was in the hospital dying of cancer. We found him in his bed smoking a cigar. He said the smell of the smoke was so revolting that it made his nausea a little less awful in comparison. He was furious with the goings-on and claimed folks were being paid off by somebody up higher to stop our march. He said that if he was the only black in Washington to be there, he’d come and march with us on June 22. On the morning of the twenty-second the nurses found him trying to sneak down the hall on his crutches, and they put him back in bed.
Coretta’s secretary called and asked me to please send that list . . .
Our “opposition” now contacted every major name in the antiwar movement to invite them to the “summit” on the black/white issue on June 22. For anyone already signed on with us it created enormous confusion. Most good white liberals, and certainly most good white radicals, deserted us. Or, out of deference to the blacks, felt the diplomatic thing to do was stay home on that day. One of our original organizers, who lived in Washington, was unable to take the pressure put upon her, and quit. We couldn’t get any new recruits because we had just enough time to contact the old ones and reassure them that the march was still on. I began doing television news every chance I got and when I was offered a spot on one of the morning shows almost cried with relief. National television would be above and beyond the Washington scuffle, and would provide a platform for me simply to talk about the march and invite all the mothers and kids in the country to join us. My spirits picked up.
I called Angela Davis and invited her to be a sponsor. Her name would panic some American housewives, but she was, in fact, a woman, a black, and against the war in Vietnam. Her secretary said yes without my even having to speak to Angela. I explained what was going on in Washington, and that Angela might be pressured to back out. The secretary said Angela knew all about it and didn’t care. I called Marion Barry.
“Marion?” I said, from a pay phone. “There’s something you ought to know about. Angela Davis has signed on with us.”
There was a long silence at Marion’s end. Finally he said, “You just don’t quit, do you?” and I said, “You wouldn’t respect me if I did, would you?” I don’t remember if he answered.
That evening Ira and Mom and I had dinner at the Raskins’. Seymour Hersh was there. He was funny, sarcastic, cynical, and fast. I was letting off steam by imitating Barbara when she’d stood up on a chair during the all-night meeting and screamed, when a phone call came for me. I straightened up and climbed off the couch to take my call.
“Yes?”
“‘Dis Joan?”
“Yes.”
“Listen here, Joan, I wanna TALK to YOU! Who the FUCK you think you are? I mean you don’ have no right callin’ ANGELA! ANGELA ain’t your property! If she belong to anybody it’s US, you dig, and you ain’t got no business layin’ han’s on ANGELA!”
“Angela’s not anybody’s property,” I said boldly. “She happens to support our march, that’s all.”
“YOUR MARCH, FUCK YOUR MARCH, GIRL, ANGELA DON’ KNOW NUTHIN’ ’BOUT YOUR MARCH, YOU LISTEN TO ME, GIRL.” I held the phone away from my ear. Then I covered the receiver and, in a stage whisper, told the roomful of friends what was going on at the other end of the line.
“Why don’t you hang up?” was Seymour’s timely and sensible suggestion. I put the phone to my ear and listened for one more moment and then hung up. I felt refreshed, but I also felt as though I’d been physically assaulted. And I felt afraid.
Coretta’s secretary called about the list.
With only a few days left Cora began receiving telephone calls from a man named George Wiley, the head of Welfare Mothers’ Rights and a friend of hers. He tried to reason with her to stop the march, and when she didn’t acquiesce he implored her. She came to me, wavering for the first time, wondering if we were doing the wrong thing to continue, and I told her if she quit on me I’d lie down and die. She was torn every time he called. We turned the calls into a joke. I’d come into the office in the morning, having almost regained my spirit during the night, and Cora would greet me with “George Wiley just called,” and I’d scream “NOOOOO!” and we’d all laugh, except it wasn’t funny. The only woman who never flinched or hesitated was Edith Villastrigo. She was about five feet tall and tough as nails. It was she who suspected that we were being attacked from higher up than a group of hostile local blacks.
The sabotage continued until and through the twenty-second of June. The two black men remained on the corner across the street from our hotel. The “representatives of the black community” quit calling us and concentrated on calling everyone else in the country and inviting them to their “summit” meeting. I traveled around doing television and radio. The rain continued to pour down on Washington. I was packed and getting ready to fly to New York when the morning show phoned to cancel.
“We’re real sorry, but we’ve had to put someone in your place. It was the timing . . .”
“But you can’t! You told me—”
“Well, yes, I know, but these things happen. Anyway you should be glad, because it’s Ralph Nader, and he’s basically for the same things you are . . .” I don’t remember the rest.
I went up to the roof of the hotel where Mom and I had put chairs so we could sit in the sun between cloudbursts and listen to the sound of the city’s air conditioners. I was too stunned and dejected to do anything but stare at the gathering clouds. I didn’t even cry. When I look back hard at my life, I can think of no time when my spirits sank so low, and when I felt so battered and powerless.
Ira, in his resilience, was my best medicine, reminding me cheerfully that at times like this one must continue to work against all adversity, if one feels that one is morally correct. He pooh-poohed the morning show, and told me of all the latest developments: A train of mothers and children would be coming from New York, and another from Baltimore. Candice Bergen was going to march with us. Mimi flew in to join us. LaDonna Harris, much respected wife of Senator Fred Harris, would chair the rally on the steps of the Capitol. Women were coming from as far away as Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, and California. There would be simultaneous demonstrations in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Minneapolis, and Boise. I couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if Coretta had thrown her weight behind us, and if “the representatives of the black community of Washington” had had something better to do with their time for the month of June 1972.
On the twenty-first, Coretta’s secretary called. Coretta was threatening to have a press conference if I didn’t send her the list of sponsors. I apologized and said it would be in the mail within the hour. It didn’t matter anymore. (Coretta and I have since mended the breach between us, but have never discussed what actually happened. I have developed a huge respect for her over the years.)
On the morning of the twenty-second, Hurricane Agnes had left nothing dry in her wake. We considered renaming the march “Surf Around Congress.” We went to our posts, putting Edith and Ira on the phones to reassure callers that the march was still on. The rain stopped long enough for us to gather our grand total of twenty-five hundred women and children in a church, and march from there to the Capitol. The train bringing hundreds of marchers from New York’s Penn Station got as far as Baltimore, then turned back because of the flood. The women organized the trainful of people, and upon their return to New York, they raised their banners high and had a “Ring Around Penn Station.”
Barbara Raskin’s ten-year-old son, who had given us the name Ring Around Congress, spoke at the rally, with LaDonna Harris and me holding him up to the microphones. Mimi and I sang, played with the kids, and taped messages for Vietnamese children. Others lobbied their congresspeople. Cora Weiss took the microphone when we actually encircled the Capitol building and shouted, “WE HAVE RUNG THE CONGRESS! THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN OF AMERICA HAVE RUNG THE CONGRESS!” as we nearly yanked our arms out of their sockets trying to form a chain. We were covered by all three networks, Time, Newsweek, and the Associated Press.
Later we laughed about that single string of folks making a ring around Congress, but under the circumstances, it wasn’t a bad showing.
The following year a friend of mine called me and said he had just read in the proceedings of the Watergate hearings that Ring Around Congress was one of the demonstrations the Nixon administration had tried to stop. It must have been a pretty small honorable mention, because I have not been able to locate the quote. But Mimi still thinks they seeded the clouds.