Another man in a polo shirt walked past the mass of police and, ducking through a crowd, remarked to a few onlookers: "All of this for high school kids? They would have been all right with one car. They had less than this for the riots after they killed Martin Luther King," he said.

The march made it peacefully for three miles, without any arrests or serious confrontations, to the police barriers erected across Broad Street near the First Union Center, where the vanguard had to choose between peaceful assembly in Franklin D. Roosevelt Park across the street from the Republican Convention, or a march on the convention and the hundred of police surrounding it.

They headed for the park, and, just as Republicans from Alabama began the roll call kicking off the convention inside the First Union Center, the march ended calmly. The police saturating the area had little to do, although the city would soon find need for its marshaled forces.

All Quiet in the Protest Pit

Despite rumors of more aggressive protests, Tuesday morning was hot and uneventful. At the First Union Center, behind three walls of eight-foot chain-link fence, were police in cars every 30 feet. Franklin D. Roosevelt park, where the March For Economic Human Rights had ended the day before, was enclosed by another perimeter of fencing, and more police. Only one entrance, at 20th Street, remained open. At the southwest corner, more than 300 yards from the convention center across a highway, a parking lot, four more fences and hundred of police, was a fenced-in enclosure dubbed "the protest pit" by demonstrators. The police had planned to control demonstrators by giving them pit-time in 50-minute blocks. Media reports before had predicted the area would be the main battleground for the week's protests, the focal point of protest.

On Tuesday afternoon, except for six plain-clothes police officers and a podium, the protest pit was empty. One speaker, Cole H. Kleitsch of the Walking Civics group, knelt off to one side and gathered his belongings after he had finished his time at the podium. He warned the audience of six police about the evils of political parties taking quotes from George Washington's 1796 farewell address, in which Washington spoke of the same theme.

Kleitsch was not bothered by the turnout.

"The city was kind enough to give us the spot and so I came and did my protest," he said.