Sam Smith – In 1963, I traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to cover the hearings of the US Commission on Civil Rights. The hearings were not just about civil rights abuses in Mississippi but an investigation into the bleakest corners of the American soul. No story I ever covered would affect me more. My skepticism concerning the American system, learned as a Washington radio reporter, was quickly turning into something far less passive and patient. A few months later, I had driven to DC's Benning Road to pick up riders participating in a one day bus boycott against higher fares. All over town, people like me were substituting for the buses as some 100,000 citizens stayed off mass transit. I wrote an article about my experiences and not long afterwards got a call from the protest organizer, who was looking for help dealing with the media.
Which is how I ended up working with a man sometimes described in the press then as "dashiki-clad Negro militant Marion Barry." Barry, the local director of SNCC, was starting a major campaign -- the Free DC Movement -- to end the colonial status of the city's 800,000 mostly black citizens. DC was still very much a southern town and years later Marion would introduce me as "one of the first whites who'd have anything to do with me." In fact, there were others, most notably L.D. Pratt, a fedora-sporting, self-taught prairie populist given to phrases like, "Look, man, we've got to implode the power base." When he wasn't planning strategy, he was holed up in the Library of Congress digging into ideas and history and discovering words like "implode."
Marion was different then -- earnest, effective and without the omnipresent odor of scandal he would come to carry. To be sure, Marion hit upon any woman passing through his penumbra, but he also worked day and night, took risks that other wouldn't, went to jail, inspired, created, organized, led, pled and soon came to be regarded as one of the most important black leaders in town. Our different ethnicities were never a point of conflict, and I early saw him not only as someone who could lead the city towards the self-government we hadn't had in nearly a century, but who could run the place when we reached that goal.
When people wrote about Marion years later, they wouldn't mention all that 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. 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. The first goal of SNCC's Washington project, the Free DC Movement, was home rule for the city. But as the movement grew, it expanded its scope quickly -- at one point including a massive attempt to identify the true holdings of every slumlord in DC in order that effective action could be taken against them. In pre-computer days, it was a project doomed to failure but it suggests both the energy and the diligence of the times.
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 possessed started to disintegrate. 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."
But it wasn't really funny and I knew it and I think he did too and when he went to jail, I wrote an article in which I quoted Jack Burden, the journalist in All the King's Men who turned into Willie Stark's henchman: “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.”
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