Capital Camp

It was nothing so crude as a march on Washington, nothing so trite as a White House picket line. It was a camp-in. And a stroke of publicity genius at that. Some 90 impoverished Negroes from Mississippi's tent cities last week staked out for themselves some of the choicest acreage in the Great Society--the tulip beds of Lafayette Square, just a few steps across Pennsylvania Avenue from Lyndon Johnson's front door and within nailing distance of his bedroom window. "We want," declared Camp Leader Frank Smith, 25, "to let the President see exactly what the housing situation is in Mississippi."

They were clearly violating a federal regulation that prohibits camping in Washington parks. But then who would like to be remembered as the President who ordered the eviction of poor Negroes from his doorstep? Certainly not Lyndon Johnson, and Presidential Assistant Bill Moyers icily referred reporters to the Interior Department, which runs the city park system.

Clear Title. Interior admitted that the camp-in was an infraction of the rules--then had second thoughts. Since the demonstrators were only sleeping in the park in shifts, reasoned the department, their tents were merely symbols of protest, and protest is within the law. "They're not camping," solemnly declared Walter Pozen, a department spokesman. "They're demonstrating."

With clear title to the tulips, the campers suddenly found themselves very popular. A detail of park police guarded them from hecklers; cars stopped with blankets, clothes and food. When they were not invited out, they could always drop in for a meal at the nearby Bible Way Church. Life on Pennsylvania Avenue, in short, was almost like life in Washington County "except here we gets more food," observed John Henry Sylvester, "more publicity, more protection, more money."

Nix for a "Hoax." The publicity was what nettled Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity, target of the protest for not having acted on the campers' requests for $1,356,000 in housing and training grants. Said OEO Spokesman James Kelleher: "They can sit in the park until Christmas, but we're not going to provide funds for something that's a hoax."

Smith bowed finally to the demand that his group go back to Mississippi and lay the proper groundwork for an agency grant. For, while the capital camp-in smacked of a Gogol comedy, the plight of the Delta Negroes, evicted from their sharecroppers' homes after they struck cotton plantations last year, was indeed tragic--and hardly likely to improve without federal help.

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