A Peace Vigil Sits near the White House. A Congressman Wants It Gone.

Yomiuri Shimbun

2 days ago

Just beyond the tall metal fence encircling the White House, visitors from Europe paused outside a makeshift shelter on the red brick of Pennsylvania Avenue to offer thanks to a graying man in a wheelchair. Then a couple from New Jersey approached with questions. A man asked to take pictures for his wife. Sometimes, a whole tour group would descend, all at once.
Philipos Melaku-Bello is used to this parade of people. He's been stopped here every few minutes – with questions, challenges, gratitude, offers for help and support – for more than four decades.
Melaku-Bello, 63, is the longest-serving steward of the White House Peace Vigil, a 44-year protest calling for nuclear disarmament and an end to global conflicts. To maintain its position in Lafayette Square, just across Pennsylvania Avenue and visible from the north side of the White House, the demonstration must be manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Melaku-Bello spends more than 100 hours each week keeping the vigil alive. He is aided by a rotating cast of volunteers. Some stand watch through quiet mornings and scorching lunch breaks. Others work overnight shifts, spending the darkest hours of the day under a tarp covered in flags and banners that read: 'War is not the answer!'
The demonstration is widely considered to be the longest continuous act of political protest in U.S. history. It has survived seven presidents, countless global conflicts, hurricanes and blizzards, heat waves and floods. It has outlasted several U.S. wars, including the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.
Now, it faces a new threat: Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-New Jersey) wrote a letter to the Interior Department calling the vigil 'a 24/7 eyesore' and accusing the protesters who maintain it of hijacking a national park. He demanded the agency review its legality and, if appropriate, disband the demonstration.
Van Drew did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
'Let me be clear: nothing in the Constitution guarantees the right to erect permanent structures and occupy public land day after day, year after year, in a manner that creates public safety hazards, degrades the appearance of one of our most iconic parks, and burdens both the District and the National Park Service,' Van Drew wrote in May to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
Van Drew is a fourth-term congressman who was initially elected as a Democrat, but changed his party affiliation to Republican in 2020 to protest the first impeachment of President Trump, to whom he pledged his 'undying support.'
Trump has repeatedly pressured D.C. and other cities to do more to target encampments and homelessness. This year, the president issued an executive order that directed the Park Service to remove all homeless encampments from federal land in the District and last month directed federal agencies to find ways to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness and addiction.
But the peace vigil is not a homeless encampment. Its tent – used by vigil keepers to shelter from the elements – houses literature, signs, water and other supplies. Melaku-Bello and other volunteers maintain homes elsewhere.
A spokeswoman for the Interior Department declined to comment on Van Drew's letter or say whether the agency was furnishing a report on the vigil.
'While we do not comment on congressional correspondence through the media, the Department of Interior takes all correspondence from Congress seriously and carefully reviews each matter,' spokeswoman Elizabeth Peace wrote in an email to The Washington Post.
When asked about the potential threat of removal, Melaku-Bello smiled and gestured to the handwritten copy of the First Amendment he keeps on display. This, he said, is not the first time someone has wanted the vigil disbanded.
Decades of threats
The Peace Vigil began on June 3, 1981, when its founder, William Thomas, appeared outside of the White House holding a placard that read, 'Wanted: Wisdom and Honesty.'
With time, he accumulated other signs and broadened his message. Soon, it was: 'Ban All Nuclear Weapons or Have a Nice Doomsday' and 'Live By the Bomb, Die By the Bomb.' In his 28 years as the vigil's primary keeper, Thomas was homeless on and off, arrested several times for illegally camping in Lafayette Square, and surveilled nearly constantly by the Secret Service.
Still, he amassed a following.
Long before social media could beam a message around the world in an nanosecond, Thomas relied on a network of alternative publications, groups and supporters from out of town to spread the word of his protest. One such supporter was Melaku-Bello's father. It was through him that Melaku-Bello found his way to the vigil.
In 1981, Melaku-Bello was an anarchist kid from Southern California who believed in radical equality, peace and punk rock. He was touring the East Coast with his bandmates, performing at alternative venues – including the original 9:30 Club in D.C. – when he first came to visit the peace vigil.
It was, at the time, a small operation, with Thomas and a handful of others filling out round-the-clock shifts. Melaku-Bello said he volunteered to pull an overnight, three nights in a row, while he was in town. He found it peaceful, he said, staying up in the park as the city emptied and quieted down.
'It was basically young people who agreed with this neo-anarchistic ideology of no more wars, no more top-down systems, no more misogyny and racism,' Melaku-Bello recalled recently, sitting under an umbrella outside the shelter. 'That there had to be a better way.'
From then on, every time Melaku-Bello found himself in the District for work or art or any other reason, he would make a pilgrimage to the Peace Vigil and relieve the keepers for one night or several.
By the 1990s, Melaku-Bello had moved to the area and secured a job with the Alexandria parks and recreation department. He split his time between the job he got paid to do and the job he gave himself: supporting the peace activists and their mission and filling out the rotating crew of vigil keepers outside the White House. At their peak, Melaku-Bello said, they had a group of about 20 in rotation. That number tends to swell when other big protests come to town.
Today, there are about a half-dozen.
Thomas died of pulmonary disease on Jan. 23, 2009, at the age of 61. His longtime collaborator Concepcion Picciotto became the face of the vigil soon after. Seven years later, Picciotto died after spending three decades of her life outside the White House 'to stop the world from being destroyed.'
Soon, Melaku-Bello, who for decades had been a behind-the-scenes organizer, was thrust into the spotlight. He is the last of the original activists still dedicated to preserving their protest, and, over the past decade, has become its de facto leader – a title that he, a lifelong opponent of hierarchies, rejects.
Global support
Melaku-Bello said the number of hostile interactions he's had in recent months with passersby has increased – not just compared to what he experienced during the Biden administration, but also compared to President Trump's first term.
The vigil keepers have been physically attacked, spit on, heckled and called names and slurs. On a recent afternoon, a young man wearing a kippah shouted at Melaku-Bello for waving the Palestinian flag. On several occasions, Melaku-Bello has returned to his protest to find posters torn down, kicked in and vandalized. Several are covered in ink.
In its 44-year run, the protest has faced several legal challenges and been under near-constant watch by police agencies that patrol in and around the square, as well as the Park Service, which bans camping in Lafayette Square, requiring that a protest be active to qualify as a First Amendment demonstration.
The vigil has been torn down or removed just a handful of times, according to media accounts. It happened twice roughly a decade ago, when the makeshift structure that shelters the vigil keepers from the elements was left unattended in violation of Park Service rules. The protest was also forced to move from Lafayette Square in 2020, amid confrontations between racial justice demonstrators and police following the murder of George Floyd.
Over the years, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the District's longtime nonvoting representative in the House, has aided them in reestablishing their protest after U.S. Park Police have cleared the demonstration.
Norton, who has had a decades-long relationship with the vigil keepers, also became their champion in Congress, helping the activists craft legislation that calls on 'all countries possessing nuclear weapons' to begin the 'verifiable and irreversible elimination of such weapons.'
The delegate has introduced a version of this bill every year since 1994.
In March, she introduced the Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Conversion Act for the 17th time. This year, the delegate included language that would direct the U.S. to 'redirect resources that are being used for nuclear weapons programs to be used for addressing the climate crisis and human and infrastructure needs, such as housing, health care and restoring the environment.' The legislation has never been brought to the House floor for a vote.
Norton, in a statement to The Post, bristled at her colleague's attempt to dismantle the demonstration.
'The First Amendment protects peaceful protests, even when they're seen as unsightly or inconvenient, and even when they occur in front of the White House,' Norton said in the statement. 'The Peace Vigil has stood in front of the White House for more than 30 years, with its organizers engaged in principled activism at considerable personal cost. If Representative Van Drew's claim that the vigil creates public safety hazards were valid, it would have been removed long ago.'
'Finally, Representative Van Drew argues in his letter that the Peace Vigil burdens D.C., but his district is in New Jersey,' Norton added. 'As D.C.'s sole member of Congress, I'm the best advocate for the District, and I wholeheartedly support the Peace Vigil, its organizers and its message.'
Van Dew's letter accuses the peace activists of sending 'the wrong message to law-abiding Americans.'
'This isn't about stopping a protest. It's about upholding the rule of law, preserving one of America's most iconic public spaces, and ending a double standard that's made a mockery of both,' the congressman wrote.
Despite these recent attacks, Melaku-Bello said the vigil's following has only continued to grow.
He frequently gives interviews to international press and relies on social media to communicate with followers and donors. Melaku-Bello – who speaks eight languages fluently and is as comfortable quoting Black Sabbath as he is Stokely Carmichael – has amassed supporters in countries all over the globe, and has used his platforms to speak out against global conflicts and, most recently, Trump's protectionist trade policies.
'I have a big following in the Philippines, I mean, I have a big following on a lot of continents,' Melaku-Bello said with a chuckle. 'A lot of times they'll send me messages through WhatsApp or through Instagram or Facebook Messenger. They'll send me articles that will come out in their country about us. It's cool.'
On a recent afternoon, Melaku-Bello balanced an open umbrella on the arm of his wheelchair to shield himself from the sun as temperatures crept close to 100 degrees and the bustle of Lafayette Square simmered.
Music from a trombone player across the street lilted past. Vendors hawking cold water, political T-shirts and, occasionally, ice cream greeted him like an old friend as they patrolled the plaza. A man on a scooter paused to assure Melaku-Bello that he would be back soon – to do an overnight shift at the vigil.
Then, a woman approached.
'Thank you for your protest,' said the woman, a German journalist named Ulrike Schirmer. 'You are a single man, but you do more than many leaders do at the moment.'
Melaku-Bello bowed his head in a gesture of gratitude.
'We are going together into the future,' Schirmer continued. 'That's my interest here. Not people trying to force us to separate.'
'Thank you, sister,' he said.
As she turned to go, he waved – to her and others who paused to watch the exchange – then settled back into his chair, ready for another photo, another hello, another round of questions.
He's got time, after all. He'll be here all day, maybe all night.
And then back again tomorrow.