Peace Marchers on the Sidewalks of N.Y. : Group Tours Big Apple Before Starting Final Leg to Nation’s Capital

They made it. The Peace Marchers, their ranks swelled to 878 recently, have crossed the continent on their walk for global nuclear disarmament. The Great Peace March reached the Atlantic coast last week, spent a long weekend here and left for New Jersey on Tuesday. Now they start the final leg of their journey to Washington, which began in Los Angeles on March 1. They expect to arrive in the capital on Nov. 15.

To get to Washington from Los Angeles you normally do not hang a left in Pennsylvania and go to New York. But from the very beginning, participants have had their sights set on this city. Reaching it has been no less important than reaching the capital, they have said: This is the home of the United Nations; this is one of the world’s great cities; this is the Big Apple.

Last Thursday as the marchers prepared to cross over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan from a park alongside the Hudson in Fort Lee, N.J., one father held his hand out to his little girl saying, “Let me take your hand. We’re coming into a big city now. There’s 12 million people over there.”

Hard-Won Experience

Actually there are more like 7 million people and most of them never saw the marchers. The Great Peace March did not exactly take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten--or any of the boroughs. But by now, thanks to experience hard won along the way and a growing sophistication about the nature of their effect, most marchers don’t expect to stop whole cities dead in their tracks. They want to reach individuals with their message and in New York there was plenty of opportunity for that.

They marched through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island and delegations visited the rest of the city’s boroughs--the Bronx and Queens, planting trees for peace, as they have in cities and villages across the country, speaking in churches, synagogues and schools and before organizations.

In their brief visit, for many of them their first, they had a combination of experiences that not many native New Yorkers can match: They marched across three great bridges, the George Washington, the Brooklyn and the Verrazano Narrows and camped in the shadow of a fourth, the Triborough, on Randall’s Island in the East River. They walked through Central Park, picnicked in the rain in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, lunched at Grant’s Tomb on Riverside Drive. They rallied in Harlem at Africa Square where 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard intersect; rallied again at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza across the street from the United Nations; again in front of Madison Square Garden; again at City Hall. They held fund-raisers at two trendy discos and a Catholic church in Spanish Harlem, rode the subways, bought knishes, hot dogs and fat pretzels from street vendors, got swept up in the World Series enthusiasm for the hometown team.

It began with a homey welcome while they were suspended high above the Hudson. As they reached the New York side of the bridge, the first sophisticates of Gotham to greet them were the first-graders of P.S. 173, shivering and excited, each of them wearing construction-paper drawings about peace and warbling “all we are saying, is ‘give peace a chance.’ ”

Also on the bridge walkway--the War Resisters League; disc jockey Casey Kasem, having just completed a four-hour fund-raising broadcast for them; some local politicians; Aaron Kaye, who was telling everyone he was “the mad Yippie pie-thrower” of yore who was still devoted to his profession; and members of the West Park Presbyterian Church. And running toward them on the bridge, just in from the Coast, jeans king and peace activist Fred Segal and “Hill St. Blues’ ” star and march supporter Betty Thomas, both of whom had joined 200 marchers Thursday morning on the Donahue Show.

(Phil Donahue had devoted the whole show to the Peace March that morning, providing the march with its most far-reaching forum to date. By Tuesday morning, it had drawn around 500 letters bearing about $7,000 to the march’s New York office.)

‘New Solutions to Peace’

As they stepped off the bridge, crates of big red apples awaited them from the Living Forum, a group of artists, one member said, “looking for new solutions to peace.”

On the ground, a sound truck played salsa and marchers and welcomers danced in the closed-off, residential street, applauded by a few people hanging out of apartment windows. Local politicians, members of local peace groups and what was described as “the progressive community” made welcoming remarks.

Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins delivered his prepared remarks and then paid them the ultimate New York tribute: “I think you’re tough.”

“Can you believe it?” marcher Tracy Bartlett, a young woman from San Diego, asked as she bopped along the street eating her Living Forum apple. “This was just a twinkle in the eye in Barstow,” she joked, recalling the darkest days of the march eight months ago when the group, stranded by the bankrupt sponsoring organization PROPeace after just two weeks on the road, foundered on the edge of the desert for two weeks, trying to regroup.

At no point during their visit here did people line the streets to see them. There was no ticker tape from Wall Street nor did anyone paint a green line down Fifth Avenue. Of the streets they paraded through in Manhattan--on the sidewalks because their numbers did not warrant stopping traffic--among them elegant 57th and tacky and touristy 42nd, it was poor and proud 125th that provided the warmest response. There were few windows for people to hang out of, most of the old buildings having been gutted long ago. But on the ground people grinned, made the peace sign and gave their “God bless you’s” and “Glad to see you’s.”

“This is Harlem, U.S.A. Check it out,” one old man said fondly.

Isolated Hostility

They met only isolated hostility in the city, barbs like “Kill all the Reds,” “You’re all Communists” or “Get a job.” The marchers answer the latter with variations of “we have a job and this is it.” A few chic-looking women on 57th Street froze when offered handbills. Others ignored them, looked mildly amused or turned off. The police were tolerant, providing plenty of protection. (“If nothing’s happened in 3,000 miles, we don’t want it to happen here,” Inspector Michael Markman of the 34th precinct explained at one point.) Some police officers made snide marks to each other, out of earshot of the marchers. Most were polite but firm.

“Come on,” one cop, who was holding up traffic, chided some lagging marchers as New York drivers raged on their horns. “If you’re gonna march for peace you’ve gotta march. Don’t hang out.”

By Friday morning when they assembled at Columbus Circle on the edge of Central Park they were old New York hands. Even their Porta-Potties, parked in front of the ornate fountain, bore a sign over one of the doors saying “Bloomingdale’s.”

Friday was United Nations Day and they proceeded to a rallying area across town near the U.N., led by people from the Bread and Puppet Theatre of Vermont carrying billowing, eerie but happy-looking white birds, and joined by New York supporters, some bearing their own banners such as Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility.

To their disappointment, the marchers, easily among the most supportive friends the U.N. has in this country, were not permitted to rally at the U.N. itself, but around the corner on city property. A delegation of 25 marchers, however, including 18 international marchers and seven Americans were received at the U.N. by Yasushi Akashi of Japan, undersecretary general for public information, and several other officials, in a little ceremony in the Peace Garden.

The marchers attached great significance to being there, and a few of them expressed it with almost an awed innocence, that seemed somewhat unsettling to the career diplomats.

Childlike Emotion

Irma Adame, a Mexican-born marcher from Fresno bearing a little bouquet of flowers, spoke with childlike emotion about her love of flowers and peace and gave Akashi a red carnation.

Momentarily taken aback, he accepted it, hugging her.

Yoko Ono and the Rev. Jessie Jackson were among those who spoke to the crowd of about 2,000 at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. A small-voiced Yoko Ono referred to her late husband, John Lennon, saying he had once said, “ ‘We can make it. We can make it together.’ That’s all there is to it . . . Surrender to peace.” Jackson called the march a success, and with his customarily resounding oratory brought them to chant with him at the end, “Give peace a chance.”

Jackson extended his words to include a whole range of issues related to social justice--domestic poverty, civil rights, women’s rights, apartheid, Nicaragua. Those connections, especially between the arms race and economic crises, characterized the New York events, especially at a rally the Peace March joined with a coalition of groups demonstrating for “Peace, Jobs and Justice.”

In a voice almost strangled with emotion, Jose Rivera, a Bronx assemblyman, at one point told the marchers: “Visit the Bronx, so you can carry the message of what budget cutbacks and money for the military does to a community.”

Along with the serious messages, a lot of fun, spirit and emotion all were in evidence at Saturday night’s concert at St. Paul Catholic Church in Spanish Harlem, a cavernous, grand old building with peeling paint and reverberating acoustics. Singers Pete Seeger, Odetta and Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary), veterans of many an old fight for justice, sang the old songs, praised the marchers and, in the case of Yarrow and his daughter Bethany, vowed to join them on the final journey.

Wild Wimmin for Peace

If such performers, singing “Blowing in the Wind,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “My Rainbow Race,” brought back the feel of the ‘60s, other performers decidedly did not. No group sounded and looked more like the ‘80s than the peace march’s own Wild Wimmin for Peace. There the band of young women stood, in the sanctuary of the church, their backs to the white marble altar, playing the saxophone, guitar and drums, singing a song introduced as being about “the sexual abuse of the language by the military,” belting out lines like “I don’t care how big your missile is.”

On Sunday they walked over the Brooklyn Bridge in the rain and a group of about 40 or 50 movement loyalists--some of them people who have been at it for years, refusing against the odds to give up protesting, demonstrating, lobbying, voting--stood there on the Brooklyn side of the bridge, bundled up but catching too much of the wet wind coming full force down the river. Faces shining, smiling brightly, they applauded the marchers, saying “Welcome to Brooklyn. We’ll be marching with you today.”

Later, a cab driver from Haiti who had seen them go over bridge, asked about them, astonished to hear they had walked from Los Angeles. “Such dedication! What are they protesting?”

“That is a good cause,” he said of global nuclear disarmament, going on at some length on the “billions and billions” the arms race was costing. “They have more than enough to destroy the world already. What are they looking for? And with people suffering so.”

He came back to the marchers, almost sadly praising them, commenting “they need more people to join them,” if they were to have a great effect on a city like New York.

“I think people here live with such great pressure, they cannot give much to something like that. They are just concerned about their own survival.”