Notes From Homefront '88

Tonight I found a notebook I kept as a participant journalist covering a three-month homeless encampment in 1988. Homefront began as a "spontaneous" encampment at the Statehouse following a Boston Common memorial service for those homeless who had died the previous year.

While Homefront started as a protest that was backed by middle-class advocates, this support eroded as the homeless increasingly saw the encampment as an end in itself. Within the first two weeks at the Statehouse, the camp had become entirely self-managed, and most of the advocate support fell away. In the third week, Homefront was chased by police from the Statehouse steps across the street to the Boston Common. Within days, the camp was moved again, this time to the steps of City Hall, about four blocks away, where it remained for the next two months. While church-based allies continued to bring meals some nights, the people in the camp were left largely on their own to scavenge for food, manage security, and negotiate with the City.

My roles as journalist, activist, and increasingly, friend, became hopelessly intertwined as I tried to support the often difficult personalities that led the camp. Over the course of covering Homefront, I saw street homelessness at both of its extremes. On one side was a rawness and brutality that took my breath away. Whatever blanket notions that I had of the noble poor died at that City Hall encampment. At the same time, I saw people who had absolutely nothing pull together to form a community that was fiercely their own. As difficult, violent, and riven by faction as that community often was, it always aspired toward something better. At its best, Homefront represented the idea that those who were on the very bottom of society could take control of their lives by camping on the doorstep of power to demand something better.

The following three character sketches are written from drafts done in 1988. Sadly, I've lost the article that came out of the three month experience.

Mennen
An aged Black man sat straddle legged on the City Hall steps. As a half-dozen Homefronters looked on disinterestedly, he uncapped a bottle of Mennen aftershave and raised the strong-smelling liquid to his lips. "The one good thing about Mennen," joked an onlooker, "is that you can buy it on Sundays."

Tilting his head back he closed his eyes and poured the green cologne down his throat. He gagged and drooled, and then dropped straight back, hitting his head on the bricks with a sickening thud. The man sprawled across the steps, unconscious.

Homelessness hardened people, and the vibe at Homefront had taken on more and more of the viciousness of the streets. All of their targets — The City, the State, the Federal government — sat comfortably in air conditioned offices and had guards protecting their doorways. The homeless, on the other hand, were easy targets for everyone, including themselves.

"Someones going to die on Thursday," one woman prophesied. She whispered it again. "Before this is over, someone's going to die." The violence had been building for weeks, and fights were now nearly continuous. The frustration of nearly three months of squatting with nothing to show were taking its toll.

In the late evening, Lee, a thin white girl who was as tough and mean as any man I'd met, viciously beat a blind crippled woman named Carol as the Homefronters looked on, although a few women tried unsuccessfully to intervene. City Hall security looked on from behind a glass door. Carol was taken away in an ambulance.

Homefront security usually broke up men's fights, and their inaction as a blind woman was kicked, punched and stomped was hard for some to understand. "When women fight, it's different," said Grizz, "cuz then you get involved with their boyfriends. You just have to let it alone.

It was true. Behind Lee stood Jerry, and behind Jerry stood most of the Puerto Rican Homefronters and some of the Cubans. Lee was protected. Lee was also crazy.

On Thursday came the news that the camp would break the next morning. Homefront was at peace. The violence of the previous day disolved as people digested the news that it was over, and that these people who had been so close for these months would all go their own ways. A body was found that night in a South Boston drainpipe. She was identified a few days later as Lee. She'd been strangled.

Crazy Joe
He looked a little like a long-haired Jack Nicholson. "I got an old lady I'm taking care of," he said. "She's crazy. Proposition 2 1/2 released her five years ago from Mass. Mental to the street and she's been there since. She wears miniskirts and no underwear and the guys all want pussy but she don't give none up. She needs a protector." Her medicine costs $6. Money that neither she or Joe had. "We had a fight this morning and she's on the Common somewhere. I told her she knew where to find me."

Joe showed off his tattoos. Love across the knuckles and a death's head on the shoulder. "I worship death," he scowled. With a wink he pointed to a small cross on his other shoulder. "But there's this too." He paused for effect. "But I got that one when I was fourteen."

"I worship death," he said, "because death is the only thing that ever lasts."

The Prophet
Wilamena is a striking Black woman who likes to preach. You can find her on the street, at the Statehouse, at the Copley Library, on the Common, wherever the homeless gather to spend time, talking self-help and Jesus.

Walking down Tremont toward Government Center, Wilamena placed her bags on the sidewalk and spread her arms to the sky. "I'm HOME-less, but not hellllplesssss!" She crossed her legs and sat on the pavement. There we sat for the next hour.

"Shelters and welfare are the bondage of the soul," she said, curling her lips and widening her eyes for emphasis. "If they can't possess your soul, your mind, your body, they'll try to take your dignity away. And that's the bottom of the pit. That's homelessness."

"I've always spoken the truth, and people beat you down for that. The schools, my parents, the church, welfare, they all tried. I'm not religious," she said. "But I have religion. God talks through me. Churches just split people up."

Homefront, for Wilamena, was a place to find herself. "To participate politically," she said, "I'm coming back alive, 'cuz living in that shelter I was dead. They manipulate you, and they humiliate you. My life means nothing if they destroy my soul."

What Would Mitch Do?

On July 5, 1990, I was holding together a homeless protest encampment at Boston's Federal Building when I got the news that Mitch Snyder had hung himself in his CCNV shelter.

Just six years earlier, in 1984, I'd met Snyder for the first time. About ten of us drove a van from Amherst, MA to Washington, DC to get arrested during the culmination of CCNV's Harvest of Shame campaign. Snyder took his 51-day fast right to the brink and, with the help of people like us who had been mobilized to put our bodies on the line, won the building that would become the massive CCNV shelter.

Our affinity group refused to post bail for ourselves and spent three days in DC Central Cell Block on a diet of baloney sandwiches, donuts, and coffee before a judge dismissed our charges.

After college, I found my way into homeless activism through various encampments and other direct action style protests. By 1990, I'd walked across Massachusetts in a homeless march, organized buses to two Housing Now! mobilizations, and participated in a street brawl with Boston cops during a CCNV-inspired "Tear Down The Boards" housing takeover. I'd mastered the logistics of street feeds, makeshift encampments, and security.

Mitch Snyder, for all his P.T. Barnum qualities, knew how to get people to put their bodies on the line for a cause that mattered. He understood the dynamics of movement building. While Snyder was often accused of being too simplistic, in his hands this was a virtue. Homelessness wasn't a specialized social services issue. It was an unacceptable moral travesty of radical inequality in a land of plenty. His was an accessible language of outrage that asked for your commitment.

I remember that 4th of July weekend encampment for many things. Robert, a cross-dressing homeless Vietnam vet, insisted on doing security. I was sure he was going to get his ass kicked. As it turned out, nobody cared. Robert had a gentle air of authority, even while wearing hot pants and a halter.

There was also a hard drinking wheelchair-bound Marxist who lived in poverty about a block away and kept dropping in. He had a way of talking in camp meetings that fired people up. I thought he might develop into a leader but he turned out to be too far gone. There were a few good hours of vodka equilibrium — when he found his optimal balance between the shakes and oblivion — but his window of effectiveness was just too narrow.

But mostly, I remember that camp and the news of Mitch's suicide as the symbolic end of an era. The 1989 Housing Now! movement had failed to cohere and maintain momentum, and had dissolved into infighting among national groups over leadership and tactics. Meanwhile, homelessness was still growing, and the phrase "compassion fatigue" started to be heard for the first time.

There was a moment when the movement against homelessness could have combined direct services sophistication with direct action militancy, but instead, our moral outrage turned into complacency. As a movement, we lost our nerve.

A week or two after his death, we held a memorial across the street from the Boston Common at Park Street Church. There were all the predictable eulogies and reminiscences of poignant or revealing moments. Then my friend Lisa Kuneman — a line-worker at Pine Street Inn and an activist with our Homes not Bombs group — walked up to the pulpit.

She broke down as she talked about how much we needed Mitch, and how angry she was that he’d done something so selfish. Hers is the only speech I remember. She was right. She still is.

But I'm not angry at Mitch Snyder anymore. I'm mad at the rest of us.

Tonight I see that the Port Authority is hell bent on demolishing 162 apartments for low-income families in Burien, thus canceling out much of the progress that's been made in recent years to increase affordable housing stock in King County. It's the latest in a long line of outrages.

I wonder what Mitch would do?