For me, Holy Week 1971 was unusual. I spent it in jail. As a representative of Commonweal.
It began with a group of seminarians, Protestant and Catholic. They devised a plan to mount a demonstration on April 6 near the White House to protest “the contrast between the Easter promise of life” and what was happening in Vietnam, especially “in countless My Lais.” (William Calley, the leader of the platoon that massacred hundreds of people in My Lai, had just been convicted in a court martial; he received an outpouring of support in many sectors of the government and public; Calley died last April.) The seminarians would spend Holy Week in jail fasting from solid foods. Several priests, ministers, and seminary professors agreed to participate. So did Commonweal, the National Catholic Reporter, and Christianity & Crisis, by then all ardently opposed to the war. I was Commonweal’s designated hitter.
The idea was floated that the three journals would issue a joint editorial on the war. It was an idea totally in keeping with the fact that they were 95 percent in agreement on the war—and totally at odds with publishing schedules and the finicky temperaments of editorial writers. As far as I know, nothing came of it.
The idea was also floated that this peaceful but “disruptive” demonstration might be a model for the Washington demonstrations planned for April 24 and the beginning of May. The first of these proved very “mainstream” and massive (150,000 marchers) and generally orderly. The second was “radical” and threatened to close down the government by blocking bridges and streets so that federal employees could not get to work. President Nixon’s attorney general, John N. Mitchell, mobilized thousands of D.C. police, National Guardsmen, and federal troops. They arrested over twelve thousand demonstrators and eventually held many of them in the Washington Coliseum and other places without food, water, or sanitary facilities. I doubt whether the first of these demonstrations needed our model or the second wanted it.
As for our own Holy Week effort, it quickly became clear that getting arrested and sent to jail would be easy. Staying there would not. Law enforcement in Washington had perfected a veritable turnstile for handling illegal demonstrators: they were booked; they were given or promised court dates; they were required to post a nominal bond; and they were released. It took the best legal expertise in town—from the American Civil Liberties Union no less, which is better known for getting people out of jail—to make sure we could remain there.
On Palm Sunday evening, we held a short church service. The next morning we gathered near the Executive Office Building, carefully steering clear of the White House grounds, where we would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the unyielding Secret Service rather than the accommodating Washington police. We filled the sidewalk, prayed, read Scripture, sang hymns, and were arrested. The official charge was “discommoding a sidewalk,” which sounds more like something a dog would do than a protest.
I do not recall exactly how many we were. It was standing-room-only in the police bus that hauled us off to be booked, fingerprinted, photographed, stripped, and to have all our nether parts expertly hosed down from twenty paces by a delousing liquid that had the delicate bouquet of Lysol. At least it was warm.
Prison officials, probably loath to distribute us among the prison population, were strained to find cells. I spent the first night with fellow demonstrators in a tiled infirmary room. A guard informed us in the morning that we had earned a few inches in a Washington newspaper. Then it was off to a classic movie-set cell block with tiers of cells on either side of an open space where, with much clanging of cell doors opening and closing, we were marched down to eat—or, in our case, to not eat. I shared a cell with Ronald Stone, a professor of social ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a former student and scholar of Reinhold Niebuhr. Nearby cells were also occupied by members of our group.
It was not exactly hard time. Fasting from solid foods was eased, I discovered, if you poured enough sugar in your coffee; just stop before it turned solid. Other prisoners seemed mildly impressed by our fasting. It probably distinguished us from being a bunch of largely white tourists in this largely Black population. Our conversations in the outdoor recreational periods were friendly and had little to do with either their legal entanglements or our protest. I was not a cigarette smoker, but cigarette paper and loose tobacco could be purchased in the prison, and I got the knack of rolling cigarettes for nicotine-addicted companions.
Nothing affected my prison life as much as a tall bookshelf in a corner of the eating area. It was filled with books donated from a Convent of the Sacred Heart school. Among the volumes was one every jailhouse lawyer should have, a thick edition of the Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church, perhaps complete with commentary. I left it but took instead The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and, more importantly, Raïssa Maritain’s We Have Been Friends Together, a deeply moving memoir I had read in college and then re-read on the upper bunk in our cell.
On Holy Thursday, our fourth day of fasting, word was passed among our group that there would be a Eucharist at one of our meals. We sat near one another. At some point someone stood—I didn’t know whether he was Catholic or Protestant, priest, professor, or seminarian—and, speaking quietly, pronounced the words of consecration. We took crumbs of bread and sips of water. Was this transubstantiation? I really did not care. It was transforming.
It was that night, I believe, that a few of us were reassigned to a large dormitory room for perhaps a hundred inmates. The space was positively bursting with energy. Prisoners exercising, bantering, arguing, doing a required number of push-ups for losses in a hand of cards. I was the last person to be assigned a bed—and there was none to be found. The guards ordered everyone to stand by their bunks, inspected the lot, and discovered the missing bed, which was in use as a common space for playing cards. I had the queasy thought that this commandeering of a recreational spot to accommodate a “visitor” from outside might not be taken well by those who had been using it. I fell asleep, but not before imagining how an improvised blade might feel slipping between my ribs.
We did not get to stay in jail until Easter. A younger seminarian was in fact assaulted by a prisoner. Word came down on Good Friday morning that we were all leaving to have our case heard in court. As one of the older, supposedly more respectable defendants, I was held out of the courtroom to be a witness. It wasn’t necessary. A policeman testifying had exaggerated the extent of our alleged discommoding well beyond the photos submitted as evidence. The judge dismissed the case. I repaired to the house of a friend, indulged in a lot of thick soup, and headed home to New York.
At home, I was welcomed with itchy arms. Promptly upon my departure for Washington, our two children had come down with chickenpox. While I was cozily locked in a cell reading Franklin and Maritain, my wife, a future editor of Commonweal (1988–2002), was caring for them. Fortunately, she was backed up by my mother, a Commonweal reader since the 1930s, who had flown in from Chicago to help. Maybe she always suspected that the magazine might land her son behind bars. If there was any heroism involved in my Holy Week in jail, it was theirs, not mine.
