Twelve Rebels Hidden in Washington, DC

By Tony Spadafora

"Twelve Rebels Hidden in Washington, DC" focuses on the quest for freedom and a "more perfect union", which has been drawing heroes and rebels from around the world since America's beginnings. Certified Master Guide Tony Spadafora takes you off the beaten path to meet heroes hidden in DC. Some fought for Washington's revolutionary ideals overseas; others struggled to bring about the "more perfect union" which the Constitution proclaims is possible. These magnificent people brought women's, civil, and workers' rights into being in surprising ways.

"We shall be as a shining city upon a hill," puritan John Winthrop proclaimed. "The eyes of the world are upon us." And what will they see?

Two of our 'rebels' carried Washington's revolutionary ideals into battle overseas. Most stood for civil, women's and worker's rights. One planned the original March on Washington . . . back when Martin Luther King was eleven. Another was the first to organize "First Amendment Activity" outside the White House. One donated his bonus from the American Revolution, a war which he made p0ssible to win.

All saw ideals to make not just a more perfect union, but a more perfect world. Like the eye on the back of a dollar bill, they looked forward, towards "A New Order of the Ages".

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667816838

Book preview

Title

Copyright 2021 Anthony Spadafora

ISBN: 978-1-6678168-3-8

Table of Contents

Who’s In Here?

Dedication: Captain James

Section 1:

Mary McLeod Bethune, Educator & Activist

Alice Paul and the Suffragist Movement

Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of the World

Kościuszko: Hidden Hero of Revolution and Rights

Marion Barry – Mayor for Life

Mitch Snyder and The Community for Creative Non-Violence

Leonard Matlovich: A medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one.

Simon Bolivar – The Liberator

Francisco Letelier -- Assassinated in America . . .by an ally

The Goddess and the Mystery Tank Man

Samuel Gompers – The Man in the Middle

A. Philip Randolph – In for the Long Haul

Some Suggested Itineraries

References

Who’s In Here?

This book is dedicated to Captain James, a Capitol Hill character. He’d be at the end of the bar until dusk, surrounded by a pile of history books, well-informed arguments, regulars, and a row of Irish whiskey shots. James drew all kinds of people – and support. He was able to raise a crew to cook for veterans, the homeless, and the community. He christened us the Rogue Saints, since the bar was our chapel. He passed the plate there, and dragged many regulars out of bed on Sunday mornings for an Irish coffee on the way to a nearby church basement. We cooked home-style dinners for those without homes. Church folk helped serve on real plates, and we’d all chat afterwards. That’s a DC neighborhood.

Section I. Women . . .

Chapter One:

Mary McLeod Bethune’s statue looks directly east, from Lincoln Park to the Capitol. She hands two children her legacy: hope, love, education. She was the first in her family born after Emancipation, and the first to go to school She paid this opportunity forward when she opened her own school with capital of $1.50. Later on, she opened a share of New Deal jobs to Negros as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Kitchen Cabinet.

Chapter Two:

The first protesters at the White House fence were ladies in white dresses. They carried signs asserting that fighting to make the world safe for democracy while women couldn’t vote was hypocritical at best. World War I supporters were enraged. The women were thrown, literally, into the DC workhouse. Organizer Alice Paul was strapped down and forcefed. The Belmont-Paul House Museum commemorates her and the suffragists, including the attack on their 1918 parade.

Chapter Three:

There is one statue of a First Lady in DC. Martin Luther King’s statue is looking through the cherry blossoms towards her. Eleanor Roosevelt did more for civil rights than anyone in the White House since President Grant. Her work included desegregating the Lincoln Memorial. (Yes, its 1922 dedication was segregated.) She integrated New Deal jobs programs. She took off with the Tuskegee Airmen and continued protesting the segregated military in the Right to Fight movement in the 1940s.

Section II, Civil Rights and Reform . . .

Chapter Four:

Each corner of Lafayette Park commemorates a European officer drawn to the American Revolution’s ideals. Thaddeus Kościuszko’s efforts are not well-known, but none were more effective. General Gates credits the victory at Saratoga to Kościuszko’s engineering skills. This is the battle which convinced France to support the American Revolution. Like Lafayette, Kościuszko returned home to fight in a doomed uprising, and then to languish in prison for years. Eventually both returned to America. Both addressed the Revolution’s unfinished business: freeing enslaved people. Kościuszko left his back pay and bonus to establish America’s first freedman’s school.

Chapter Five:

Whatever you may know about Marion Barry, in DC’s neighborhoods he will always be Mayor for Life. His statue, by the city hall, says so. It adds a champion of the people. . . . Just a thesis short of his PhD in chemistry, he moved to Washington to work for civil rights full time. He ran the DC chapter of a national civil rights effort, and established Pride, a local self-help effort. Its summer-jobs program lives on. But after Pride came the Fall. Barry was arrested and even imprisoned for cocaine, the 90’s party drug. While The b__ch set me up, Barry’s response to his arrest, may set outsiders snickering, his redemption and comeback warmed and inspired DC’s heart.

Chapter Six:

Mitch Snyder left a good job in the city, working for The Man, until he set out to ‘find himself’, a popular 1960’s journey. But the car he used was judged stolen, so he found himself in federal prison. His cellmates, activist priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan awoke a righteous anger against poverty in him. Another inmate pointed him towards DC, where he joined the Catholic-based Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV). Not only did they house and feed the poor, CCNV volunteers served Congress a buffet of food rescued from supermarket dumpsters. National coverage embarrassed the government into releasing a mountain of surplus cheese. Yet Snyder starved himself to obtain a surplus government building for a shelter.

Chapter Seven:

Forty years after his discharge, Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich was honored by the Air Force Times for his courage in ‘coming out’. Twenty-seven years after his death, his headstone, which reads A Gay Vietnam Veteran: They gave me a medal for killing two men / And a discharge for loving one – is the cornerstone of Congressional Cemetery’s Gayborhood. How could someone so gung-ho that he volunteered for three Vietnam tours challenge his beloved Air Force? Perhaps training airmen to respect others’ differences led him to respect his own.

Section III: The Shining City on a Hill

Chapter Eight:

In 1804, at Rome, Simon Bolivar knelt and declared, I swear before the God of my fathers ... that I will not rest, body or soul, until I have broken the chains with which Spanish power oppress us. The Liberator fought to form a federation of Latin American states. Lafayette presented him a medal containing a lock of Washington's hair, in honor of their shared ideals. His statue, near the National Mall, like most of his portraits, features the medal on his chest. For reasons beyond his control, he couldn’t match his mentor’s achievements, but he did fight hard; he rode over 43,000 miles, ten times more than Hannibal, three times as many as Napoleon.

Chapter Nine:

Going up Embassy Row, you see General Philip Sheridan pulling his horse’s head back, turning him towards the attacking enemy; his right arm stretching out as if to gather his scared soldiers. He did keep Washington safe from Confederate attack – then. But 100 years later, the first foreign political assassination exploded on American soil, just beside Sheridan’s statue. A cobblestone monument, shaped like a cut-down tree, marks the spot where Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet blew up the car of Chile’s former ambassador to the US, Orlando Letelier. He and his American associate, Ronni Moffitt, died.

Chapter Ten:

One individual, walking with a shopping bag, tired, yearning to breathe free. What can he do? Tank Man shows us . . . On June, 4, 1989, Chinese Communist Party tanks crushed a pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace) Square. As troops killed thousands, one tank pushed over the Goddess of Democracy statue, just created by students to symbolize their aspirations. The Goddess fell. . . . The next day, one anonymous man faced down returning tanks until friends pulled him away. Soon afterwards, videos of his stand were smuggled out. He remains safely anonymous. The Victims of Communism Memorial, a copy of the fallen statue, commemorates those who fell to Communist dictatorships worldwide, worldwide, known and unknown.

Working for Workers

Chapter Eleven:

Samuel Gompers sits serenely on Massachusetts Avenue, a man in the middle. He was born into struggle to end sweatshops, and had become a militant moderate: fighting for workers’ rights but not against the system. Extremists on one side suggested he wasn’t radical enough and tried to recruit his union’s members away. Extremists on the other had him arrested for agitation and sentenced to prison. He steered the labor movement between these two dangers, towards the American Century.

Chapter Twelve:

A. Philip Randolph played the long game. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American labor union, recruited him as president. It took a dozen years to get a contract. Later on, Randolph organized the 1963 March on Washington – in 1940. The plan scared FDR enough that he outlawed discrimination by military contractors during WWII. Randolph relented. Then, the March might have happened under Truman’s watch, but he desegregated the armed forces instead; another win for Randolph’s strategy. When the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom finally took place in 1963, it was for all workers: black, white and anyone in between. That was both Randolph’s and MLK’s dream.

Dedication: Captain James

But do people actually live here? people frequently ask us DC guides. One evening I hosted a father and two grown sons, on a business trip to Washington. You know, the father said, I really appreciated the monuments and the stories, but I’d like to see a real neighborhood bar. Is there such a thing here?

I’ve got just the place. I’d moved to Capitol Hill a few years before, when it was a scruffy neighborhood which welcomed all kinds of quirky characters. Taking guests would home be a real treat. "Have you