"I don't know about the march..." confesses an elderly lady from Beacon Hill, Her husband nods in agreement.
A middle-aged man with slicked-back hair lounges outside a florist's. "The march is good, It will point out that the issue isn't racist. It's a busing issue..."He is from Dorchester and smiles and shrugs.
Had they been on Boylston Street their opinion would not have been much different. To march down Boylston would surely be a symbolic victory, but the civil rights movement had plenty of those and people still stone black children. "We shall overcome..." is a beautiful song, but the issue is not spiritual it is nuts and bolts. Do not stone the buses. Build better schools. People do not have to like each other, a little respect is all that is needed. But nobody wants to assume that load, so the brunt of it falls on the schoolchildren. Ant they are far too mutable to support it.
At 3:05 P.M., it is warm and sunny. The sky had broken down on Commonwealth Avenue. The march arrives at the Commons where an estimated 15,000 people joins it. But it was over. The action had come and had passed and had been more disturbing than conclusive. Nothing could be said that had not already been done. Or left undone.
At 3:10 the speeches start. Day lapses into evening. The red sun cases behind the speaker's platform until finally hidden by the Prudential Tower. The crowd swells over the rising field then shrinks about the snow-fence-enclosed platform. The speechmakers rise to the podium and fall back into the mounting obscurity.
The keynote speaker, Reverend Ralph Abernathy of the S.C.L.C., gets a big hand with "Power to the people." Dick Gregory's "This is a sick, insane, unethical country..." gets a bigger hand. "We will oppose the reactionary violence of the Capitalists and their lackeys." Jesus Lopez a Puerto Rican predicts, "With the revolutionary violence of the workers."
Linda Lawrence, a Boston schoolgirl, tells the crowd she is called a "nigger lover." A man in the crowd shrieks with delight. "Oh yeah! My woman's called that too..." Bebopping through the crowd, he stops to hassle a lesbian wearing a "Dyke" button.
Claudette Furlong, the leader of Women United for Action, announces, "We're ready to lay ourselves on the line, as we have shown today..." The crowd loves her, too.
Over the heckling of the African Unity League, senator-elect Owens delivers his words. "Sellout..." they scream as he smoothly relates his decision to march down Boylston Street accompanied by a few companions. He is made for T.V. consumption. Something to believe in.
A young oriental man stands before a huge yellow banner covered with about 10 lines of slogans. These words were on it. "We Defend National Democratic Rights. Socialist Working Class Anti-Racist Unity Struggle." "Quite a mouthful," someone says to him. The man smiles and nods, then resumes pacing before it. He seemed to be trying to fit the banner into one frame.
Night arrives and the Young Eternal Souls from St. Louis replace Professor George Wald at the microphone. Two kids spray-paint a sidewalk red and blue. It is too dark to read their message. The Commons is sodded with cans, lunchbags, styrofoam cups and leaflets. The trees are strung with red, white and blue lights, with some green ones over by Park Street.
The world appears different from those brief flashes during the march when all was focused on the present and nothing else really mattered.
But this was only a play of light and shadow. For the real issue had never been approached. In the midst of 'honest-to-God' battle it was forgotten, while 'Viva la Revolucion' et al was the day's chant. Though the revolution might be coming, the march was supposed to have been for the children. And not much was heard of them. They floated around somewhere in the background, but only as an abstract concept, lingering in the shadow of the ultimate truth the revolution. Perhaps children are too small an issue. Certainly they pale in comparison with revolution. But just give them another ten years. Then we will have a humdinger of a march.