07 May 2009
 
Marching Season

(Marchers)
 
The summer of 1966 was completely normal in Arlington County, which is to say that it featured some temperate days and some that cooked the brain in the spirit in humid air wafting up from the lower south.
 
The District of Columbia is a cusp city, definitely not North, though close to it, and close enough to the South that it became a city of refuge for citizens newly minted by emancipation.
 
“The District had the charm of the North,” said John Kennedy, “combined with the efficiency of the South.”
 
The dog days of that summer made the pool at Big Pink an attractive place to be. The eight story tower was a good place to watch the change. Built to exacting standards, the apartment dwellers felt that they were part of a new wave of progress. The marble floors of the lobby gleamed like the Shoreham Hotel where Frances Freed lived. With an underground garage, residents of Big Pink could travel in air-conditioned ease from their jobs on the Hill right to the below-ground entrance and into the elevator.
 
Big Pink was located on the old boundary fringe of scrub trees along the expanded and deepened course of Route 50. The road had been gouged deep into the soil, and for this stretch near Arlington Hall Station, had on-and-offramps just like a freeway.
 
It was easy enough to enter the Buckingham neighborhood from the south, and avoid the unpleasantness that was happening with distressing frequency at the corner of Pershing and Glebe Road, across the street from Frances Freed’s office.
 
Demonstrators from ACCESS- the Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs- had been protesting the Buckingham rental policies all summer. Mostly white, nearly all youthful, the group of earnest protesters were committed to opening up the County.
 
With the exception of pockets of Negro neighborhoods like Hall’s Hill that dated to the end of the Union Occupation, a color line was drawn across the county. Loosely defined by the fall line of the Virginia Piedmont, the de facto line was the concrete of Route 50 that slashed the little jurisdiction in half. The new homes in the upper half of Arlington were small but neat. The further north you went, the more luxurious they became.
 
At the Fairfax line, there were mansions where people like Senator Bobby Kennedy lived at the place he called Hickory Hill. It was big enough to have horses on the property if he wanted.
 
If there was public money for improvement in the County, it was spent north of the highway, and Big Pink and the Buckingham complex started proudly a full fifty feet on the right side of the road.
 
Frances recognized that times had changed, and that Buckingham had to grow with it. The ground on which the complex sat was skyrocketing in price, and clearly could be used more efficiently by bigger, taller buildings.
 
Big Pink was to be the prototype of a series of towers that would replace the low garden apartments. They so pre-war, small rooms and no parking. They were no longer in keeping with a more imperial America that had shrugged off the shackles of the Depression and decided on attached garages and built-in appliances in the kitchen.
 
With all the progress, 1966 had a summer of unease. On July 31 and August 1, 1966, there was a flurry of UFO sightings in the Washington and Baltimore areas. Prince Georges County police watched lighted objects maneuvering erratically across the sky. In Baltimore, residents of the Country Ridge housing development were awakened early by barking dogs and the sight of a hovering, egg-shaped object with flashing lights.
 
It was easier to stay in the luxury of central air conditioning, or take a refreshing dip in the glittering blue water of the pool on the west end of the building.
 
All the commotion at Glebe and Pershing attracted unwanted attention for the government officials and Spooks in the neighborhood. The Klan had raised its hooded head in Virginia again as the specter of integration loomed. There had been a periodic presence in Arlington going back to the old days, but the New Klan had its strongholds elsewhere. In the old Dominion, the Klaverns were active down south of Richmond, along the North Carolina border, and east to Suffolk.
 
Arlington had its own unique problem, in the form of a retired naval officer named George Lincoln Rockwell, who had some very curious ideas about the color of skin and race relations in America.
 
We will get to George presently, but he was very much aware of what was happening at Buckingham. His headquarters that summer was at 928 North Randolph Street, one of a row of little bungalows east of the Parkington Shopping Center and north of the Navy Research Labs. As the crow flies, it was about three blocks from the Buckingham Swim Club, which as a public accommodation on a sweltering summer, must have seemed an attractive place for Arlington residents of all colors to swim.
 
That had a direct, if tangential relationship with where they were permitted to live, and that is precisely what ACCESS and the demonstrations at Buckingham were about.
 
The cooling breezes of late September brought on the marching season in Arlington.
 
On October 7th, ACCESS Chairman Charles Jones announced that a peaceful march would be conducted over three days and 14 miles of suburban Arlington. He informed the press that 35 trekkers would “highlight the inequities between negro and white housing.”
 
The march would set out from Gum Springs, a historically African American enclave south of Alexandria City, and proceed north along US One through Old Town and camp at the public housing projects north of the historic district. From there, the group would advance through Del Ray to Arlington, camping at Green Valley, a freedman’s village that grew up on the grounds of Union Fort Barnard.
 
Mr. Jones said there would be a block party that night, it being Saturday. Sunday would conclude the moving demonstration at Buckingham, where the marchers would circle Frances Freed model all-white village seven times.
 
Some members of the working press asked about the recent threatening calls and letters to several of the ACCESS leaders.
 
Mr. Jones was unfazed. “We have trained out marshals and marchers to be sure they will respond peacefully to the taunts, threats and possible violence which the marchers may receive.”  

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com