A CAMPAIGN OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

UNTIL NOV. 8, ACTIVISTS FOR THE HOMELESS FAST, FACE DAILY ARREST

None of the eight housing activists from Seattle had been arrested before, so perhaps it was understandable that they needed advice last week on jail house rules for their trip behind bars in the District.

"Do they let you keep your hat in jail?" asked Joe Martin, 38.

"When they take the urine test, do you have to do it in front of somebody?" asked 67-year-old Mary Haggerty.

Mitch Snyder, of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, which provided food and lodging for the out-of-town protesters, briefed the group on what was in store. The next day, Wednesday, Martin and three others -- including a lone Louisville man -- lifted their voices in song in the middle of the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, illegally breaking the hush maintained by gawking tourists.

Speaking through a bullhorn, a U.S. Capitol police officer ordered the protesters to cease, and about a dozen members of the Civil Disturbance Unit materialized, in black jumpsuits, surrounding the singers.

"I ask you to sing along," Martin said to the tourists, who kept silent.

Still singing "This Land Is Your Land," Martin, Stella Ortega, Wayne Quinn and Louis Valdez Jr. were handcuffed and led away.

That scene, with variations, has been unfolding every weekday since Sept. 26, when the first wave of protesters from around the nation set out from Snyder's CCNV shelter on Second Street NW on a short march to the Capitol. The protests will continue until Election Day, Nov. 8.

Daily, the protesters have held a vigil on the West Steps, then carried out an act of civil disobedience designed to focus public attention on the lack of housing for the poor and homeless. Specifically, group members say they want Congress to restore deep cuts in housing programs that have taken place since 1981.

The protest movement, coordinated by CCNV, also includes 13 people, the 45-year-old Snyder among them, who have just passed the halfway point in a 48-day fast that also will end on Election Day.

The protesters have tried to evict one senator, occupied the offices of another, released chickens on the grounds of the Capitol and generally made a spectacle of themselves. That was their goal.

As of Friday, 110 people had been arrested, all charged with misdemeanors such as obstructing traffic or demonstrating on Capitol grounds.

On the 21st day of his water-only fast, Steve Sonnone, 50, of Hartford, Conn., was feeling too weak to walk to the Capitol on his metal crutches. A fellow faster pushed Sonnone in a wheelchair.

Disabled from a spinal injury he received the last time he had a job, Sonnone said he has been homeless for six years.

His fellow street people scraped together money, even collected aluminum cans, to pay Sonnone's $46.50 bus fare to the nation's capital. He only had enough for a one-way ticket.

When he first learned he would be without a home some years ago, Sonnone was naive about the vicissitudes of life among the homeless.

"I was pretty green," he said. "I went to a mission a week beforehand and asked them to reserve a bed."

He has since learned about the hardships. But he said he is here in Washington not so much because of his own predicament, but for the children he sees in the subculture in which he lives.

"I couldn't understand when I'd see children living in temporary shelters, see women in the middle of winter being put out of a shelter in the morning with a 2-year-old baby and a baby in her arms, eating in soup kitchens till she could get back into a shelter at 5," Sonnone said. "How does a 2-year-old child fall through the cracks?"

Sonnone spoke as he sat on the steps of the Capitol during the daily protest vigil. His fellow fasters and protesters were handing out leaflets to tourists. Periodically, a tourist would snap at a leafletter, "Why don't you get a job!"

"Oftentimes," said faster Dave Hayden, 42, of Roanoke, "those folks that do stop and talk and show some sensitivity are from overseas."

The negative reaction that the protesters sometimes receive "signifies the coldness and detachment that we have from the suffering of poor people," said Hayden, of Justice House, a social service agency.

"The poor are God's question to us," he said. " . . . So we're faced with a choice: We run away from it or we respond by trying to alleviate the suffering of those people in need."

The National Academy of Sciences, in a recent report, cited a study estimating that 735,000 people are homeless on any given night. At least 100,000 of them are children, according to an estimate by a panel of experts convened by the academy.

The panel, in a supplementary statement endorsed by a majority of its members but omitted from the formal report, also concluded, "Contemporary American homelessness is an outrage, a national scandal . . . . We have tried to present the facts and figures of homelessness, but we were unable to capture the extent of our anger and dismay," according to published reports.

Snyder and other protesters cite that report when speaking of the depth of the homeless problem. For many of them, the human toll of homelessness has moved them to such radical actions as going without food for 48 days.

Stewart Guernsey, 37, who runs a program for the homeless in Boston, said his participation in the protests and fast was part of a process. "It's largely a faith statement for me, more even than a political one," he said.

Although her organization asked that she not be arrested, Josephine Archuleta, 46, of the Emergency Housing Coalition in Seattle, said she was proud of those among her group who were cuffed Wednesday and taken away.

"Somebody with handcuffs on is a criminal and those were not criminals," she said. "They are good people who do good works and they are not criminals."

"No," added Hayden, "the real criminals are the ones who permit buildings to sit abandoned . . . in the face of mounting homelessness."

Hayden, who like the rest of the fasters looked weaker and leaner by the day, participated in the first day's protest on Sept. 26, when more than 100 people from Roanoke tried to enter the Capitol with a six-foot wooden cross. Those arrested, 27 in all, included two juveniles.

On Wednesday, 25 people from Cleveland arrived by charter bus with the intent of again disrupting tourism in the Rotunda. Eleven people from Cleveland were arrested Thursday and later the same day the Seattle and Louisville protesters appeared in court and were released.

Emerging from custody, Louisville protester Valdez said, "Well, it was quite uncomfortable to sleep on a plain piece of steel."

"And every meal was bologna sandwiches and doughnuts," added Valdez, 59, assistant director of the St. John Center, a shelter for homeless people. "I don't want another bologna sandwich for a long time."

But for Valdez the bright spot in the experience was the encouragement he heard from other inmates. "They told me it was a good thing, keep up the good work," he said.

Ortega, affiliated with a social service agency in Seattle called El Centro de la Raza, and Beverly Sims, of Seattle's Emergency Housing Coalition, said that the two-day sojourn to Washington had shown them that their work on behalf of the poor and the homeless in Seattle is being repeated by others nationwide -- that they are not alone.

"You know, you really get a sense of a national movement," Sims said.

As he briefed the group from Cleveland Wednesday night, Snyder, who had lost 25 pounds from fasting, asked how many had ever been homeless. Almost half raised their hands. He asked how many provided services for the homeless; again about half raised their hands. And then he asked if anyone had ever been arrested. No hands.

That, Snyder told them, is good news for the movement.

"When you see new people," he told them, "it means that the depth of concern is growing."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.