The People: The Dilemma of Dissent

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A yellow papier-mâché submarine cruised through the crowd, symbol of the psychedelic set's desire for escape. Angry-looking young Negroes from CORE and S.N.C.C. paced through the meadow carrying signs that read "I Don't Give a Damn for Uncle Sam" and "No Viet Cong Ever Called Me Nigger."

At one end of the Sheep Meadow, a group of young men burned their draft cards, the fumes of the burning paper mixing with the reek of incense and the throb of drums to produce a near-pagan sense of ritual. In the wake of a circuit court decision last week that seemed to condone draft-card burning, no cops moved in on the incendiaries. As police helicopters droned overhead and 3,000 cops watched calmly, the crowd's attention was directed to the entertainers in the meadow. A Greenwich Village group of puppeteers called the Angry Arts Theatre enthralled marchers with a performance of The King's Story, in which a Great Warrior wipes out The Red Man, The Dragon, The Priest, The King and the People, only to be killed by Death. "And that's the end of the King's story," said the man who played Death.

"Why?" "Because." Though one Bronx boy had booby-trapped several posters advertising the Saturday march, injuring a youngster who pulled one of them down, there was little subsequent violence. Police kept members of right-wing groups, including the Peter Fechter Brigade (named for a Berlin Wall victim), from mixing with the marchers.

En route to the United Nations, a handful of anti-antiwar demonstrators managed to pelt the peace parade with eggs. New York police on horseback—in contrast with the "Cossack" image so many Old Leftists apply to them—kept the countermarchers from breaking up the parade.

The nonideological, antipolemical nature of the march was best demonstrated by the response of the marching crowd to New Left cheerleaders:

Cheerleader: What do we want?

Crowd: Peace!

Cheerleader: When?

Crowd: Now!

Cheerleader: Why?

Crowd: Dead silence, followed by a shrill female "Because!"

Reneging on the Vow. At the United Nations, the carnival atmosphere dissipated. As a chilly wind whipped off the East River, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched across First Avenue to deliver a statement accusing the U.S. of violating the world organization's Charter to U.N. Under Secretary Ralph Bunche. "I saw you crossing the street," said Bunche in greeting King. "It was a shorter walk than we had in Selma, Martin."

Bunche's remark echoed the concern that many Americans felt in seeing King diverting his attention from the civil rights movement to the antiwar campaign. In a speech two weeks ago, he called the U.S. "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and com pared its use of new weapons in Viet Nam to Nazi medical experiments. Bunche and the N.A.A.C.P. had already criticized King's shift as a "serious tactical mistake." The Urban League's Whitney Young warned that "limited resources and personnel should not be diverted into other channels."