09 May 2009
Summer in the Suburbs
(The Hate Bus. Rockwell on right wears his Navy Flight Jacket)
I have to get to it at some point, so here it is. I have been looking for a missing pool, and the sound of the water filling up the one at Big Pink last night kept the idea fresh in my dreams. There are some nasty rocks that have to be tipped over in our prim blue County, and our historic, if long suffering neighborhood.
The seventy-year history of the Buckingham Community has just about everybody in it at some point, progressive social thinkers, liberal urban planners, diligent Spooks and communist spies in search of the nation’s deepest secrets.
As they say on the late-night infomercials, though, “Wait, There’s more!”
We had Nazis and the Klan, too.
On June 22nd of 1964, DC police arrested member of the American Nazi Party on charges of disorderly conduct after he refused to stop picketing the Statler-Hilton Hotel, carry an anti-Negro sign.
The arrested man was Buddy Bruce Beaman, 30, who gave his address as 928 North Randolph Street, Arlington, which was, in the summer of 1966, the headquarters of George Lincoln Rockwells’s American Nazi Party. The NAACP was holding a convention at the hotel at the time.
That was the style of the man who called himself the American Fuhrer. Hit and run; maximum media impact, since he ever had any serious popular support.
There is a surviving metric. In the presidential election of 1964, he against LBJ and Barry Goldwater as a write-in candidate, receiving 212 votes. IN 1965, he ran for Governor of Virginia as an Independent, polling 5,730 votes, or 1.02 percent of the total votes cast.
He was making quite a splash. People of a certain age here still talk about the Hate Bus Rockwell used to drive around town. It was a VW microbus decorated with his name and swastikas.
He was truly delusional on several levels. Records of the time show correspondence in which he assumed the public institutions of the time- like the famous “all white juries” we used to hear about in the South- would logically support him. He was a loon, but had a distinct flair for publicity.
In 1966, the Action Coordinating Committee for Ending Segregation in the Suburbs (ACCESS) had picked their own media target- Frances Freed’s Buckingham Community. ACCESS had conducted a series of high-profile demonstrations at middle-class apartment complexes in the Washington area that refused to accept African American tenants. This march was intended to dramatize the inferior house of those who could afford a better place to live, but were denied access to it.
Their target provided a lightning rod for the hate groups that long hot summer.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan and ACCESS picketed each other at the Buckingham Community Rental Office, right under Frances Freed’s office window, for two hours on August 22nd .
Poor Frances! The rental office had been the scene of weekly demonstrations since the big sit-in that resulted in ten arrests.
Suspend disbelief, for a moment, because the first on the scene that Monday afternoon were nine members of the Klan, men and women, in full regalia. They carried signs that read “Keep Virginia White” and “Smash Black Arlington.”
Shortly thereafter, members of ACCESS arrived to find the premium place in the parking lot nearest the office taken. They set up their own counter picket line. The two groups orbited in loose parallel, but there was no physical violence.
Rockwell assisted Klan as fellow-travelers on the hate road, but as 1966 rolled past, he came to believe the Klan was stuck in a regional segment of the past. After hearing Black Panther Stokely Carmichael use the slogan "Black Power" in a surreal debate that year, he inverted it, and adopted the phrase as a call to action. “White Power” would later become the name of the party's newspaper and the title Rockwell’s written equivalent of “Mein Kampf.”
The American Fuhrer decided to go it alone in responding to the ACCESS march across northern Virginia in October, 1966. The first leg started at the ruins of the burned-out shack where Mary Lou Carter lived with her seven children and four extended family members until fire consumed the place in January.
Fire engines could not reach the place because the roads were too bad.
ACCESS Chairman Charles Jones blesses the marchers from the door of the shell of the structure, saying it is because of Mary Lou and others who suffer the pains of segregation that we are here. We feel that down deep, people are still capable of responding to human situations and human suffering and we have to bring that to their minds.”
Twenty-five marchers, half of them white, set out from the ruins in the historically African American enclave of Gum Springs in Fairfax, headed for the Buckingham Neighborhood. They walked the seven miles to the courtyard of the housing project at 728 North Alfred just north of Old Town.
On their way north out of Fairfax on Route 1, they passed through Joe King’s Bottom, escorted by six County squad cards. Things were peaceful, except for the occasional taunt from passing motorists.
Once they got to Alexandria, a sole squad car had to suffice, and there is where the most memorable and surreal moment in the first day’s march occurred.
Frank Drager, a personal emissary of George Lincoln Rockwell, appeared in full Storm trooper uniform, mounted on an aging rented horse. He carried a sign that used the epithet we can’t utter any more anymore, paraphrasing Paul Revere’s call to action that “the British are Coming!”
Then he wheeled, and led the marchers into Alexandria where the cops made him put the sign away.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com