Sam Smith - In 1957 I was hired for the summer as a news reporter for Washington’s WWDC. On paper at least, I was a student at Harvard College, but I spent more time at WHRB, the student run broadcast outlet. WHRB was a radio station, but it also functioned as a counter-fraternity, a salon des refuses for all those who because of ethnicity, class or inclination, did not fit the the mold of Harvard. Other organizations sought students of the "right type," WHRB got what was left over…
My summer bosses at the DC radio station were two Texas liberals -- news director Joe Phipps and his assistant Bob Robinson. My initial task -- writing nine newscasts a day -- interned me in a small corner room with just enough room for one window, four news tickers, two typewriters, several phones, reams of yellow copy paper, even more rolls of yellow ticker paper and a maximum of four human beings.
Each newscast was expected to be different, whether the news had changed or not. Three of the newscasts occurred during evening drive time and were a half hour apart. This coincided with the most likely period for accidents and thunderstorms. Since WWDC paid $1 to $5 for every newstip it aired, I would be regularly inundated with accounts of fallen limbs and fender benders as I struggled to write three newscasts in an hour and a half. Often the copy ended up like this
The Washington I had returned to in the summer of 1957 was, on the surface, a quiet, rarely air-conditioned southern town. But despite the apparent somnolence, DC was actually undergoing a mass migration of blacks from further south….
Despite the demographic trend, however, there was nothing remotely approaching black power. More than once, when calling the DC police dispatcher to check on the overnight action, I was told, “Nothin’ but a few nigger stabbings.” It had, after all, only been twelve years since the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell arrived to take his seat in the House of Representatives. Stepping into his office for the first time he found a memo on his desk headed “Dos and Don’ts for Negro Congressmen.” One was “Don’t eat in the House dining room.”
A reporter called me at 2 a.m. the morning after the funeral of Sweet, Precious Daddy Grace, the colorful bishop of the United House of Prayer for All People. “I’m down here waiting for them to choose Daddy Grace’s successor,” he whispered into the phone, “and I’m the only white person here. How about coming down?”
I got dressed and joined my
friend at 601 M St. NW -- two young white guys sitting quietly in the pre-dawn
darkness of a church basement hallway waiting for the end of a seven-hour
deliberation. Finally, the 224 elders from as far away as New Bedford, Mass.,
and Miami selected Bishop Walter McCullough by about 30 votes.
Just before I returned to WWDC upon graduation in 1959, Joe Phipps left the station to begin a radio news service headquartered in his apartment down one of the long, dark, cabbage-perfumed halls of the Chastleton apartments at 16th & R NW. I started working for Deadline Washington. on my off-days and after work on other days -- putting in 12-14 hour stints. Often I would be on joint assignment for Deadline and WWDC.
Covering the normal tales of city, I made a note I the fall of 1959:
Yesterday, driving to the Hill from WWDC, I had two accidents and a holdup come over the police radio, all just off my normal route. So by the time I got down there . . . I felt like I had already had a pretty full day even though it was only 10:30 am.
But far more serious business was at hand. In August 1960 I wrote in a letter:
Have been covering some of the anti-segregation demonstrations around the Washington area. The results here have been hopeful. Good police work has kept violence to a minimum although the presence of neo-Nazi Lincoln Rockwell and his “troopers” doesn’t make the situation any simpler. Quite a few lunch counters have been desegregated. Glen Echo Amusement Park is resisting despite a month of picketing and a Bethesda theater is also refusing to back down.
Earlier that year, four black college students had sat down at a white-only Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in fifteen cities in five southern states and within two months they had spread to fifty four cities in nine states. In April the leaders of these protests had come together, heard a moving sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
By the end of June, I was reporting the desegregation of lunch counters in Northern Virginia after sit-ins by groups led a Harvard Divinity School student, Lawrence Harvey. Harvey then took his troops to Glen Echo.
Although I saved few recordings from that period -- tape was expensive and usually recycled -- I still have the raw sounds I made that day. On it a guard and Harvey confront each other:
Are you white or colored?
Am I white or colored?
That’s correct. That’s what I want to know. Can I ask your race?
My race. I belong to the human race.
All right. This park is segregated.
I don’t understand what you mean.
It’s strictly for white people
It’s strictly for white persons?
Uh-hum. It has been for years. . .
You’re telling me that because my skin is black I can not come into your park?
Not because your skin is black. I asked you what your race was.
I would like to know why I can not come into your park.
Because the park is segregated. It is private property.
Just what class of people do you allow to come in here.
White people
So you’re saying you exclude the American Negro.
That’s right.
Who is a citizen of the United States.
That’s right.
As a biracial group marched outside with picket signs, Harvey led a group inside to sit-in at the restaurant and mount the carousel horses. The case ended up in court and less than a year later, the park opened for all.
Meanwhile the House and the Senate were tying themselves in knots over civil rights legislation. In the House, the egregious but courtly Judge Howard Smith, czar of the Rules Committee, promised that “I shall not dilly, I shall not dally, neither shall I delay” and then proceeded to do all three. Judge Smith had once justified slavery on the grounds that the Romans and Egyptians had used it to build their civilizations. He also noted that southerners had never accepted the idea that the “colored race” had equal intelligence, education and social attainments as whites.
He was not alone. Over on the Senate side, I reported that “This afternoon it was JW Fulbright who said the issue of discrimination was non-existent -- raised every four years for political reasons.” Fulbright at the time was participating in a southern filibuster that had already been going 69 hours, far longer than any previous effort.
Among those also taking part were Sam Ervin and the rambunctious, hard-drinking Russell Long who managed to hold the Senate floor for eleven hours. This, however, was no record. Senator Wayne Morse had once gone over 18 hours and two years earlier, Strom Thurmond had held the floor for more than a day. One filibuster drifted into another and the hours turned into days.
At the time, I saw these stories as separate events but it seems now that maybe it wasn’t a bunch of stories I covered back then, but rather the end of one big story, a story that Americans such as I had been raised to believe, a story about perfectibility and how close we were to it and how easy it would be to go the rest of the way. At the end of the story was not what we had been told to expect. At the end of the story, it turned out, was Jimmy Hoffa and Charles Van Doren and Gary Power and Judge Smith, and guards keeping people out of amusement parks and coffeehouses being shut down by cops who thought poets were dangerous. It turned out that the end of the story was that much of the story hadn’t been true.
I had stopped noticing the shine of the marble. The floors of the House and Senate office buildings became harder, the hallways darkened, and the doors that lined them seemed to conceal more than they invited. Even on foggy and rainy evenings, the Capitol dome no longer floated in the sky but sat lumpy and leaden on top of the Hill, waiting for a new story to begin.
