Recovered history: Before Occupy DC there was Resurrection City

The architect for Resurrection City was John Wiebenson, longtime friend, landlord and cartoonist of the Progressive Review. 

John Kelly, Washington Post - It was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who had the idea to use nonviolent protest to do for the poverty-stricken what he and other civil rights leaders had done for disenfranchised blacks. After King’s assassination, his successor at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, saw the project through.

The first demonstrators arrived in Washington on May 12, 1968, on buses from Mississippi. Fifteen acres had been secured near the Reflecting Pool. An architect named John Wiebenson designed simple structures for the demonstrators — eventually numbering more than 2,800 — to live in. Soon Resurrection City had streets, a city hall, a general store, a cultural tent, a first-aid station . . .

It also had rain. It rained 11 of the first 19 days that Resurrection City was in existence, turning the ground into a muddy, gloppy mess. Even so, many residents contended it was nicer than the homes they had left behind. Sen. Eugene McCarthy sent a telegram endorsing the campaign. Mayor Walter E. Washington visited Resurrection City, declaring: “All I’ve seen is in pretty good shape. . . . Things are well in hand.”

But many of the same criticisms that dog the Occupy Wall Street movement soon surfaced, chief among them a lack of clear demands. Calls for “freedom” and “justice” were not specific enough. Wrote The Post: “Sympathetic Senators and Congressmen who have kept an informal liaison with Campaign leaders are pleading for clarity.”

Still, it was hard to argue with the protesters’ main desire: a meaningful job at a living wage for every employable citizen.

A rally was planned for June 19 — Juneteenth — and the demonstrators’ permit to camp on the Mall extended to June 23. On Solidarity Day, 50,000 marchers fanned out from the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

That was the high point of the Poor People’s Campaign. Any affection for Resurrection City evaporated the next day. Marchers said that on the evening of June 20, someone threw a molotov cocktail in Resurrection City. Police said the fiery debris came from the camp — and was aimed at them. They fired more than a dozen tear-gas canisters into the encampment.

Already there had been complaints that crime was rampant in the makeshift city, although organizers pointed out that there is crime in every city, even plywood ones.

On June 24, police cleared Resurrection City of its remaining residents, arresting stragglers without serious incident and charging them with congregating without a permit. A day later, crews came to pack abandoned belongings in boxes and take them to the Navy Yard to await owners who may have been arrested.

As a GSA worker named Junior G. Walker pulled nails from plywood A-frames, he told a Post reporter that he felt disillusioned. “I got to feel something, man,” he said. “They’re my people.”

In October 1968, Ebony magazine printed an essay by the man who had been Resurrection City’s city manager: Jesse Jackson. “There is an inherent contempt that the economic system holds for the suppressed at the bottom of the economy,” he wrote, adding, “Resurrection City cannot be seen as a mudhole in Washington, but it is rather an idea unleashed in history . . . . The idea has taken root and is growing across the country.”

A reproduction of one of Wieb's Resurrection City shelters. Below the real thing

 John Wiebenson

John Wiebenson (R) with architectural partner Kendall Dorman

 

Sam Smith, 2004 - Architect John Wiebenson died the way he lived - helping somebody and fixing something. He had gone to Martha's Table to check out a fumed filled space below an old auto garage planned as part of the organization's expansion. The fire department said later that only 16% of the air down there was oxygen, not enough to keep someone alive. In fact, for several hours the only people who went in wore gas masks and hazmat clothing.

But Wiebenson was not easy to dissuade once he decided something needed to be done. And he had imported to this capital of risk aversion some of the casual affection for adventure of the Colorado in which he had been raised. Wieb, as everyone called him, simply did what he thought
had to be done.

Which is one reason there was housing for Resurrection City in the 1960s and the Old Post Office is still on Pennsylvania Avenue and some of the niftiest maps of DC were published and Bread for the City got a new headquarters.

Wieb was also one of that tiny party of architects who really understand that buildings are meant to serve people and not the other way around. He also understood that one of the ways this happened was with spaces that made you happy. Joanne Leonard wrote in the Washington Post, "With cutout paper letters stuck to the window of his Connecticut Avenue office, John Wiebenson identifies himself and his partner, Kendall Dorman, as 'basic' architects."

I knew that office well because for 23 years I was a subtenant in a back room at ridiculously low rent. It was a complicated arrangement because while I was Wieb's tenant, he was my cartoonist, and I had the only fax machine on the floor. And the only bathroom. Wieb created for the DC Gazette (now the Progressive Review) the first urban planning comic strip in the country, Archihorse, a subtle blend of his professional and geographic background.

One of the things I noticed along the way was how comfortable Wieb was with something that either bores or baffles some architects - the details of making your dreams actually function. There was just no conflict in Wieb's mind between imagination and results. It had to be different and it had to work.

His house was right around the corner on S Street where he lived with Abigail - his wife, anchor to windward, enthusiast, calmer down, brightener up, and head of Lowell School - plus three sons striving to outdo their father in independence, competence, and humor. They lived in an anarchistic mélange of styles, but mostly in a place that, while lacking the look, still somehow had the feel of a western cabin that you had just entered after a long ride in the snow.

It was there that Wieb had presided over Wild Man Nights, Friday meals at which he and his young sons would prepare and eat a meal without any utensils or normal table manners, picking up steaks in their hands and smashing baked potatoes with their fists while reading and discussing the latest comic books. Like most of what Wieb did or built, Wild Man Nights had several primary characteristics: they were different, they were fun, and they worked.

What you have read here over the years has been deeply affected by my proximity to this remarkable man who loved freedom and common sense and helped me to cling on to them.