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She beat up policemen. She had a reputation, brother. She was an
informer, she was in the sporting world, you know what I mean? She had
women on the block and all that kind of thing. She lived over the top of the
Samuelsons.
So we were picketing the 1700 block of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Samuelson goes down and gets Salina and her bunch to cause trouble, you
see. And they came upon the avenue, in the 1700 block. Thurgood
Marshall, who is now, as you know, the one and only Black Supreme Court
Justice, had a first wife whose name was Vivian, but everybody called her
Buster. Buster and I were walking down the street. Well Buster looked like
she was white. So one of Salina's henchmen busted her head. She had to
have some four or five stitches put in her head. A couple of the pickets were
actually knifed. And of course you know the policemen were there. Well
the picket line was broken up as a result of Salina's activities.34
It is important to note that not all of the contention that arose during the
Pennsylvania Avenue campaign occurred between community and store owners.
Divisions within the community and the movement itself emerged and, ultimately,
signaled a shift in power. One internal contradiction developed because
community adult leaders of all types were being forced to chose sides in a battle
they could not ignore. Many elite forces sided with the boycott and some emerged
in the leadership circles of the struggle: Reverend C.Y. Trigg, pastor of the
Metropolitan M.E. Church and head of the local (and previously inactive) branch
of the NAACP, and Josiah Diggs, owner of the Dunbar Theater and officer of the
Knights of Pythias, were both on the Citizens Committee and active combatants.
Others, like Reverend Beale Elliot- who declared to an Afro reporter, "Yes, I'm an
Uncle Tom," and who advised "young Tom" and "young Mary" that "you make it by
the sweat of your brow and your own effort in life"— moved into stubborn public
opposition to the boycott. Still others were caught somewhere in the middle.^
Complicating the first contradiction was a second that revolved around
Costonie himself. About a month and a half previously, prior to the final campaign
against the A & P stores, a number of Costonie's supporters among the Baptist
clergy broke with him, reportedly because he was "putting on a program of false
faith healing." Costonie's meetings in Baptist churches seem to have ceased. After
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