A LITTLE GIRL, maybe six or seven years old with straight brown hair and timid eyes, walks up to you as you get off the bus. "Buy a button? For the march?" she asks. You've travelled nine or ten hours in a miserable excuse for an economy bus to be able to march today. For a dollar, you can't refuse her. You buy the button, and allow the girl to pin it to your shirt. It reads. "Affirmative Action/Smash the Bakke Case." Welcome to the largest civil rights demonstration in 15 years.

As you drove up, you saw the line of people, four abreast, circling clear around the gates outside the White House, waiting for the grand tour. From where you now stand, those people are still visible, several blocks away from where demonstrators are gathering on the Ellipse behind the White House. The tourists are watching, you figure, a little excited to have visited town on a day when something happened.

The march won't get underway for another two hours. By then, the buses will have arrived, unloading thousands of demonstrators who have traveled from as far away as Wisconsin and Florida. In the meantime, musicians entertain the gathering crowd with songs of protest. Their performances are interspersed with selections from records suitable for demonstrations, played through the P.A. system. The sun's out, and when the breeze is not blowing it's warm enough for shirt-sleeves. It's a perfect spring day, the cherry blossoms are blooming and 20,000 demonstrators will march from the White House to the Capitol building today in defense of affirmative action and minority rights.

No one here is the slightest bit interested in Allan Bakke's personal fate. But because he sued the University of California, claiming he suffered "reverse discrimination" at the hands of the U.C. Davis admissions team, Bakke put himself in the center of an assault on the constitutionality of racial and ethnic quota systems, and on the very concept of affirmative action.

WAITING FOR THE MARCH to begin, you walk around, sizing up the crowd. Children from D.C., middle-aged nurses from Detroit, students from Howard, Harvard, Oberlin and countless other schools, members of the Lesbians and Gay Males for Socialism from Boston. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, native Americans. If you aren't a racist and you aren't a cop, you should step right in, maybe dance a little to the strains of Gil-Scot Heron before the organizers begin assembling the ranks. "New York just arrived in 103 buses," says a pre-march speaker. "There's 20,000 of us here now! Ain't we nice!"

You wander around some more, waiting for the order to line up and head out. Beyond a three-headed effigy with the names Bakke, Vorster and Carter pinned on it, you spot a row of hard blue hats, glistening in the sun. You recall anti-war rallies in the '60s--when hard-hats with American flag-pins and tatooed, bulging arms did their patriotic bit for Uncle Sam--and a surge of adrenalin runs up your back. There's always that possibility, in a large demonstration...

But no, these hard-hats belong to the New York Coalition of Black and Puerto Rican Construction Workers, and that ten-foot-long "Beat Back Bakke" sign they're holding up removes any doubt. You start talking to one of the hard-hats, and find that he is more than willing to explain his concern about the Bakke case. "Bakke is not only affecting the schools, it is affecting us," he says. "Ours is a job that the average person could do without a high school diploma or college degree, and still make a decent wage. Right now, minority hiring in construction is based solely on quota systems. If the Court makes quotas illegal, then we lose about the only thing we have going for us a people that hasn't had the opportunity to get good education."

You clasp hands for a moment, tell him good luck. Then you're off into the crowd, throwing a clenched fist of solidarity in the air as you go.

LINES OF MARCHERS are forming now, eight-abreast. "Milwaukee just arrived with ten more buses. We're 25,000 now, 30,000." The organizer exaggerates, you know he exaggerates. The sound of rhythmic African drums fills the air, and you are perfectly happy to exaggerate along with him--"Ain't we pretty! Ain't we nice!"

The march is well organized. Maybe a hundred march guides, keeping people from overflowing from their lane, where there are no cars, into a lane of opposing traffic. At the head of the long procession is a truck equipped with loudspeakers, leading those marchers within earshot in chants like, "Allan Bakke, he's no smarter, just a tool for Jimmy Carter," or,

Hey, have you heard

What is the people's verdict?

People from every race

Unite to smash the Bakke case.

Further back, different chants and songs develop. You hear one band of people try to resuscitate "We Shall Overcome," but somehow it doesn't make it--it seems only an out-of-tune recollection of what it once was like 12 or 13 years ago. It's not that people have stopped believing they can overcome. (Although why should they? What is there in the past ten years to convince them otherwise?) But the song is hard on people who want to believe they are accomplishing something by marching; it's a reminder of the hope that people placed in King, a hope that got pretty small around 1968. This time, after a verse or two, the band of singers give up on "We Shall Overcome," and instead, resume chanting "We won't go back, Send Bakke back." This time round, even if there is still hope, there is little illusion.

Indeed, standing on the bottom steps of the Capitol building, tired after four hours on your feet, it occurs to you that this demonstration, its organizers and participants, are among the most reasonable and practical of any you have ever encountered. Take the speakers, for example. No big names. This big, high-voiced man from California--he's one of the initial organizers. So's the lady in the red dress who's talking economics. You've never seen or heard of either of them before. And the Reverend? Absolutely essential: "Put your hands on the radio and your two dollars in the bucket if you don't want the organizers to be left footing a $15,000 bill."

NO GRAND RHETORICAL pronouncements. No simple enemies to hate, such as white people in general. "We're no longer talking in the narrow, nationalist terms of the late '60s," the big man, Grantland Johnson, says. "We've attempted to build this movement in a multi-racial manner, because it's not the white man who oppresses us. We must place the minority struggle in a broader economic context. Bakke just happened to be the incident that sparked it." It's hard, trying to channel 20,000 people's anger at an economic abstraction rather than at something concrete like Bakke supporters. But even if the economic analysis produces less immediate gratification than does empassioned rhetoric, it may well prove the best result-getter in the long run.

You listen to two hours of speeches Saturday afternoon, and you wonder if the rally isn't going on just a little too long. But when it's over, you have the sense that somehow, this demonstration was a little different, just a little better than you'd bargained for. You want to believe in this movement. But you know how touchy The System is about acknowledging its more painful economic realities. Speakers at the rally hinted that perhaps the government prefers that its economically ailing whites misdirect their anger at minorities, rather than direct it at the government. The racism-as-interference-pattern-for-government-and-corporateelite theory. A hard one to swallow at first, but in the next few days you will begin to find some basis for it, especially when you start scanning national news publications when you get home to see how they covered the demonstration. Many of them didn't. The L.A. Times gave it about three inches, which was three inches more than the New York Times gave it. And The Washington Post ran a small piece on it in their Local News/Obituaries/Classified section; that same day, the Post's leading story was about black suburbanites learning the joys of cultural assimilation. Go on: scratch your head; it hasn't quite sunk in yet.

With only a little time before your bus is due to arrive to carry you back north, you walk along the Washington streets. The sun is down now, but the sky is still deepening, an electric blue background for a postcard-pretty, 1000-megawatt Capitol dome. Your legs ache a little, and you feel drained, peaceful in the night air. For a second, staring at the brilliant white Capitol dome, you feel a pang of--nah, really? You?--patriotism. It's getting late. Some kids are running across the courtyard below the Capitol building, brandishing sticks and hollering away the silence.

Your bus is waiting.