AN UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION

For a moment last weekend, America had a different view of homeless people -- not as recipients of charity, of which there is a fair amount, but as demanders of justice, of which there is little.

Bums who beg have a place in our national life, from cartoons in the New Yorker magazine that depict the humorous ingenuity of down-and-outs putting the touch on sidewalk passersby, to the benign neighborhood wino who says he needs a quarter for a bowl of soup but who knows -- wink -- that we know it will go for a pint of rotgut.

The 100,000 and more who marched in Washington were neither beggars nor drunks. If they were, the name of the organizing group that brought them here would have been Shelter Now, not Housing Now. Shelters, called poorhouses in the 19th century, are for those who can't make it without society's charity. Houses are for those -- elderly people, single parents, children, the recovering mentally ill, the unemployed and the poverty-wage underemployed -- who either have made it in the past or can make it in the future, provided they are included in the same social, economic and political structure that cushions people who do have houses.

Citizens who were once called "the deserving poor" now have a rightful claim to be called "the deserving unhoused." Who, and where, are they? The time to meet some of them was not the afternoon of the march but two days before, when, by foot or by Greyhound, they slipped into Washington.

Barely. The main open-air encampment for the homeless was in the capital's Siberia -- a soggy up-slope on marshland that borders the fetid Anacostia River in far Northeast. On the opposite side of the fenced-in area was a cemetery, which was across from the D.C. morgue and an AIDS testing clinic, while behind that was the D.C. Jail. This was about the only site in town on which 300 squatters could settle and not be blamed for lowering property values.

For two days before the Saturday march, poor people from such groups as the Detroit Union of the Homeless, the Tucson Union of the Homeless and the Philadelphia Union of the Homeless organized the country's first national convention of the homeless. A yellow- and-white striped tent, about half the size of the football field at RFK Stadium that loomed in the horizon a mile away, and as high as a weak punt, had been set up. After a few hours it had the sheltery look -- mats, blankets and cots laid out next to boxes of gleaned bread, rolls and fruit. A generator, chugging like a rowboat's motor, kept a few light bulbs burning dimly.

On the early evening of the first day, Savina Martin of Boston and the director of WINGS -- Women's Institute for New Growth and Support -- ran one of the four workshops that had the unstated goal of ending the fiction that homeless people are helpless people. She had 20 citizens in her audience, none of whom had a taste for anything except the straightest of talk. Martin, agile of tongue, supplied it.

At the end of the convention, the group produced a statement and a list of demands. They were like delayed mines, exploding long after being set in the shelters and flophouses of Tucson or Boston. The demands were no different from those brokered routinely by healthy and employed people: "the opportunity to be productive" and "to work for a livable wage."

A decade ago, when homeless people began turning up in the cleaner parts of town, a national drive was commenced to open shelters. Congressional committees toured them and, with the expected ruction, occasionally held hearings in them. One congressman hopped into a food Dumpster to display his worry about poor people who eat out of them.

At the same time that federal money came forth for shelters, other funds were denied or sapped. Plant closings, layoffs, minimum-wage or sub-minimum-wage jobs, plus the elimination of money for low-income housing were unstoppable economic forces that drove people from their apartments and houses. What wasn't true in the 1970s is now true of the 1980s: Families make up 75 percent of the homeless.

They were on view at the marshland by the Anacostia River. Large numbers of children passed the time by playing pickup games of baseball. They were joined by a couple of good-natured policemen, neither of whom had any taste for the job of keeping the lid on.

Small chance that it would blow. Citizens at the first national homeless convention were too intelligent -- all PhDs in street smarts -- to waste time in mindless rage. They were here to show justified anger.

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