Word: shantytowns
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Churning through the trash-strewn gumbo that had once been a manicured meadow, a federal bulldozer last week interred the last traces of Resurrection City. Its few remaining inhabitants scattered or imprisoned, the shantytown capital and symbol of the Poor People's Campaign had long since become an ugly, anarchic embarrassment to their cause...
...banners. There was an angry flare-up over the black monopoly on policymaking. "Black militants have taken over, and nobody else gets a chance to talk," protested Reies Lopez Tijerina, leader of a group of 200 Mexican-Americans quartered at the private Hawthorne School about a mile from the shantytown. He complained that brown, red and white Americans were being bossed around by the Negroes and shouted down at meetings. "They are pushed down by black marshals, pushed out and humiliated." Abernathy finally made a pilgrimage to Hawthorne and promised Tijerina a larger voice for nonblack groups...
...headquarters of the Poor People's Campaign-the last project launched by the late Martin Luther King Jr-the shantytown is designed to prod Congress into taking action on behalf of the nearly 30 million poor Americans. To ensure that Congress gets the message, the poor will stage a series of demonstrations climaxed by a Memorial Day march that is expected to draw more than 150,000 participants. What worries official Washington-as well as the tourists who are staying away in droves-is that the "demos" may get out of hand, turning Resurrection City into Insurrection City...
Widespred speculation that the marchers would attempt to erect their shantytown on the Mall in front of the Capitol has preoccupied many Washington officials this week. Congressman William C. Kramer (R-Fla.), the author of the anti-riot provision of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, is pushing a bill to bar the marchers from erecting their shacks anywhere near the complex of federal buildings surrounding the Mail...
...critical question is whether or not the marchers will observe such restrictions as this one once they arrivein Washington. If the marchers' leadership should decide to build their shantytown on the Mall, even if denied a permit to do so, then the Government would have to decide whether to use force on the marchers. And if such a decision is not forced upon the Government over the campsite issue, it may still come at any time afterward, over the non-violent civil disobedience which Abernathy has forecast for the Campaign...