Sunday I was at a party celebrating the unanimous vote of the Berkeley Board of Education to put solar panels on Washington Elementary School, where I volunteer telling stories and singing songs. I sang “Sun, Sun Shine”  “Sun, Sun Shine” sung by Caitlin Brook Powell and The Singing Rainbow and another storyteller told a sun story from Africa. Best of all, I met a woman who had been in the Peace Navy in the early sixties, demonstrating against warships in the San Francisco Bay, when I was organizing peace marches on dry land. I was with the American Friends Service Committee, I told her, not a paid position, but on the peace committee. She told me, which I had forgotten, that the Peace Navy was under the auspices of the AFSC too. I asked if she knew Ben Seaver and Ross Flanagan [they were on the AFSC staff then]? Yes, she did. But she and I had never met. Now she is organizing the hillside of crosses outside Lafayette, one for each serviceman or woman killed in Iraq. She talked about the man who comes to play taps on his bugle every Sunday, of the families who come with photographs and flowers. Here’s a little story from the olden days, that goes with these photos I found.  Malvina must be introducing one of the speakers, not singing, because she isn’t holding her guitar. One of the guys on the committee planning this march was worried because we were having three speakers—Linus Pauling, a guy from the auto workers’ union I think, and somebody else—and he was going to have to tell them at lunch before the march that they’d come all this way and would each get only twenty minutes to speak. So he was sitting at the table working up his courage when Linus Pauling said “There are three of us, so I think we should each limit ourselves to twenty minutes.” The others agreed. Phew! So the other two spoke for twenty minutes and Linus Pauling spoke for thirty.  Linus Pauling speaks. “Peace” is not a word that sings well. Malvina wrote several peace songs that didn’t use the word. This one was inspired by the astronauts’ descriptions of looking back at the earth.  From Way Up Here, words by Malvina Reynolds, music by Pete Seeger, © 1962 by Abigail Music, BMI. My mother was young enough to enjoy much of the sixties (which were her sixties too,) but she wouldn’t have wanted to spend three days and two nights on the CORE bus going to the ’63 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and another three days and two nights going home, like I did. I had gotten a call from Women for Peace asking if I’d like to go as one of their delegates. They said apologetically that they couldn’t afford plane tickets. I didn’t like flying then, so I was just as happy to take the bus. I didn’t know the other delegate, a young black woman named Maryann. But we settled in to the very back seat and talked the whole way to Washington. There was a film crew on the bus, headed by Haskell Wexler, before he was THE Haskell Wexler, making a documentary called The Bus. We were told that if they zeroed in on us in the middle of a conversation we should just go on with it as if they weren’t there. Fine. But then when Maryann and I were in the middle of a conversation about the death penalty they asked us to move to different seats and start over again because the motor was making too much noise where we were. We tried starting over, but it wasn’t really the same. The conversation I thought should have been in the film but wasn’t, was one they filmed when we were at our last stop before DC, walking towards at yet another HoJo’s, wondering if the weather would be as hot as this the next day, talking about what we should wear to the march, totally trivial, and we rounded the corner and saw a bunch of black and white kids in overalls. SNCC! Wow! This was really happening! We were put up at a college dorm. That night we had dinner at the home of some locals who weren’t going to the march. They had heard there might be violence, and they were afraid. We had slept on the bus and eaten at all those HoJo’s to get here and they were right here and not going! Humph. Back at the Women for Peace meeting in San Francisco, they had told us that they barely had money to get us there and back, and none for bail, so we were not to do anything that would get us arrested. No sit-ins, just march. We agreed. But the morning of the march, when we were waiting in the designated hotel lobby for the rest of the California delegation so we could all march together, a bunch from SNCC came in, singing and conga-lining, and Maryann and I just fell in with them. To hell with the California delegation! As we approached the White House on our way to the Mall, we wondered if they planned to sit in or something. They were still singing. We kept following them, singing. If we got arrested, so be it. But they passed the White House and we got to the Mall. We were at the far end of the reflecting pool from the stage. Not only was there no violence, but I have never been in such a huge crowd of people being extra nice to each other. We ran into Ross and Dorothy Flanagan (who were on the peace march committee back in paragraph one). We listened to a lot of speeches and songs, then Maryann and I got restless and began to walk back to where our bus was parked, among the hundreds of busses. We were between a couple of government buildings on one of the streets leading off the mall when we heard Martin Luther King begin his speech. The sound system carried perfectly, so we stood and listened to the whole speech. Then we went to our bus. There was no film crew on the trip home, and we lost some of the passengers, too, who were students going to eastern colleges. The anticipation was over and we sprawled out, tired and relaxed. We passed the time talking to various folks, and one older guy with a saxophone would play tunes and we’d try to name them. I kept up with Maryann for a while, then we lost touch. I wrote a song (my first ever) about going to the march. I don’t know where it is now and can’t remember it. I didn’t write another for years. While I was in Washington, my husband and some of his friends hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney. I was sorry to miss that, but I’m glad I was where I was. @2007 by Nancy Schimmel http://www.afsc.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette_hillside_memorialhttp://lpi.oregonstate.edu/lpbio/lpbio2.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_on_Washington_for_Jobs_and_Freedomhttp://www.womenforpeace.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Wexlerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Nonviolent_Coordinating_Committee
Peace march, San Francisco, early sixties. Photo by Jerry Schimmel.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
BEFORE THE “SUMMER OF LOVE”—THE MARCHES