The black men undo come to Washington to march on the Mall were younger,
wealthier and better-educated Black Americans as a whole, and they were
far more willing to see Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan assume a
more prominent leadership role in the African American community according
to a Washington Post poll of participants in the Million Man March.
(Washington Post October 17, 1995)
Whippersnappper clerks
Call us out our of our name
We got to say mister
to spindling boys
( from Ole Lem by Sterling Brown)
I cannot accept that "balance the budget" will ultimately eclipse
a concern to balance the distribution and availability of wealth, of chances
for self-respecting ,survival.
(from Notes of a Barnard Dropout by June Jordan)
On October 1, 1995, approximately one million black men (the numbers will
always be in dispute) came together on the Mall in Washington, D.C. They
were of varying hues, professions, classes, backgrounds, educational levels,
hair types, dialects, ideologies, religions, geographies, affective styles,
and emotional temperaments. The day was crystal clear: a gift from God.
Fall sunshine warmed the earth where children slept peacefully at the feet
of fathers, uncles,brothers-black men who had brought them to witness a
striking exercise in American counterpoise. during the two weeks leading
up to the march, pundits had relentlessly declared the event would be a
balkanizing disaster for America. Black public intellectuals assured their
white constituents and young black disciples that it was mandatory for any
truly liberated, informed, and humane black man to separate the redemptive
message of Minister Louis Farrakhan from the messenger. This, of course,
made as much sense as saying although Bill Clinton implicitly endorses an
agenda that is Republican and has insulted Lani Guiner and Sista Souljah
and Jocelyn Elders in public and approves of welfare reform that will wreak
havoc on black communities, let us separate the President himself from his
message." It was difficult to tell if intellectuals who argued for
a mind/body split of The message from the messenger were serious,or simply
offering solace to white audiences. Did they really believe they could have
a foot in both worlds? Did they believe they could stand tall for black
redemption, and, simultaneously, distance themselves tom the only mass message
being seriously listened to by black people n the United States The black
mass message was indeed issuing from the body of Farrakhan"Body","
in this instance, signifies both individual and institutional forms, For
it is Farrakhan, the charismatic leader himself, who has rejuvenated and
turned into a continuing force, the body of the Nation of Island following
Elijah Muhammad's death during the 1 970s. And it is the embodied black
messenger himself who was the unambiguous presence par excellence on October
16, 1995.
Everyone on the Washington Mall whom I encountered or moved among had eager
expectations about the climactic moment at which Farrakhan would appear
to articulate the notions of atonement, black manhood responsibility and
community redemption that were goals of the Million Man March To be sure,
the march was a spiritual occasion. Like gatherings of the Promise Keepers
(those Christian athletic men Echo assemble in huge stadiums across America
to profess their faith), the October 16th assembly of black men was spiritually
and, in a broad sense, religiously motivated. Still, it was the ministerial
zest of Farrakhan, and no one else, that determined the spiritual flavor
of the event.
So, what did pundits mean when they talked of separating the message from
the messengers Were they being playfully poststructuralist, suggesting perhaps
the death of the orator: "What matter who speaks?"
What the separators hoped, l think, was to avoid a committed and forthright
analysis of dangerous terrains -- urban inner-city war zones and a desperately
depressed black psyche in an era of American racial oppression. They hoped
to serve as black filters for Farrakhanic "hate." One might argue
that Farrakhan's articulations are more akin to what the black writer Ellis
Cose calls "rage" than to "hate." But that is a point
to be addressed later in this essay. For the moment, we might simply acknowledge
the minister's downside. He has created a remarkable persona as a hatemonger.
He has cunningly deployed a dark voice that targets Jews as the cause for
the daily misery of the masses of black people in the United States, "Hold
on!" we want to shout on encountering this persona. "What do you
mean by Jews, Minister Farrakhan? Don't you know the word Jews has
instigated some of the world's bleakest horrors?" But such an inquiry
to Farrakhan would be akin to asking Newt Gingrich what he means by balanced
budget.
Balanced budget for Gingrich, like Jews for Farrakhan, is
an example of what the black critic Stephen Henderson refers to as a mascon
word -- a word that, like a sponge, absorbs the animus, bare intuition,
disappointments, stereotypes, and rank feelings of superiority of a race.
Mascon utterances don't allow for separation of the message from
the messenger, the utterer from the utterance. Surely Newt's Contract with
America can not be separated from a radical Republican's body called Gingrich.
Nor can it be separated from a mean-spirited, racialistic national agenda
to make the white American body rich and richer while eliminating completely
the United States' poor, elderly, and, in particular and most expressly,
minorities. Likewise, it is impossible to separate Farrakhan's recourse
to mascon scapegoating from a black mass constituency.
Yet, who among us is in a position morally to forgive, filter, or separate
a message of national oppression from the physical body of Newt Gingrich,
or William Jefferson Clinton. Who is in a position to condemn -- with feigned
innocence and incomprehension - - Louis Farrakhan for expressing an entirely
justifiable rage of a mass of black people targeted by the likes of Gingrich
and Clinton for a white budget balancing sacrifice And who is ethically
precise that she or he can say. "Hey, black man, you better wear a
sign down to that Washington march saying you separate the message
from the messenger"?
Where is the sign around our own necks pronouncing on the ignominy of a
United States Congress, Supreme Court, and White House posturing before
the full trough of "set asides" for Big Business in America and
Transnational Capitalism in whiteface? Where are the luminescent signs strapped
to our backs announcing precisely how we separate our President's and Congress's
messages as 'budget balancers' from their physical responsibility for the
suffering of hundreds of thousands of Federal employees and other unfortunate
Americans struggling to hang on to homes, food, and life itself?
A flashback: Who remembers when the American nation writ large (whites in
general) --but signed in lower case by particularly Jewish "leaders"
-- called on all black people, and especially black intellectuals, to condemn,
apologize, and sit abjectly in ashes at the crossroads because Khallid Abdul
Muhammed made a silly, anti-Semitic speech at a college in New Jersey. Were
the black people who then complied with such idiotic notions the same ones
who called for the mind/body split with respect to Farrakhan and the Million
Man March? Why do we as a group have to apologize for individual decisions
and follies?
On October 16, l 995, signs, buttons, shirts, hats, banners, posters, books,
arm bands, personnel, flags red-black and-green, starred-and-crescented
said: In organization and iconography this Million Man March is a Nation
of Islam triumph in a symbolic war. This march is as complicated, multifaceted,
common sensical, and surprising as the ability of Farrakhan to call it.
Perhaps, then, the Minister is the capable mass-concentrated site
of African-American meaning in a time of war; a War on Decency.
Statistics of this War on Decency are by now well-rehearsed, and
everyone in America, as we shall shortly consider, has an opinion about
who is to blame for America's general malaise. One in three black men in
the United States are in prison, on parole, or under the supervision of
the criminal justice system. More than half of black American children live
in poverty. Black American income is only 60 percent that of white America.
Black life expectancy is more than a decade shorter than white America's
Black youth unemployment is at 40 percent. Job opportunities and access
to even minimal public services to sustain life are comparatively rare for
most black Americans. Black homicide and AIDS are killing young black men
at staggering rates. Drugs are being pumped into black communities by rich
white profiteers like winter snow falling from laden skies. Is the country
at large outraged by the burdens and casualties of this War on Decency against
black America? Is any constituency concerned specifically , about the plight
of black American men -- young and old in and their unenviable condition
in the United States? A sampling of the concerns of American cohorts other
than black men gives some idea of what is on America's mind with respect
to politics, persons, and events.
First, white men, What are they concerned about? They are busy laying special
claim to anger became, in their paranoid imaginations, blacks and
women have it "so very good." A Million Man March would make no
sense whatsoever to such men. Then there are white women. They assemble
at ritzy spas and glitzy espresso bars to condemn the verdict and the defendant
himself in the 0. J. Simpson trial. Why? Because they believe Simpson should
have been convicted of murder because he battered his white American wife.
Did they see the Mall filled with the terror of a "million" OJs?
Black women claimed prerogative to condemn the Million Man March, Louis
Farrakhan, and the Nation of Islam because the Minister focussed particular
attention on the responsibilities, atonement, and sins of the fathers peculiar
to that archetype some black women love to hate: The Black Man. "Women
were excluded," commented some of the foremost intellectual black women
n the United States. Was this naiveness, or, did these women really not
have a clue about the loci of the march in the mass-approbation that is
gender discrimination in the Nation of Islam?
Then there were those black public spokespersons noted already who rushed
to judgment in the name of principles of decency, coalition, cooperation,
liberalism, and humaneness that have almost nothing to do with what one
hopes is their actual sharp perception of America's War on Decency. Surely
such black public intellectual spokespersons know that a war is in progress.
These blade intellectual men are, one has to assume, certainly aware of
the statistics of war. Why, then, would they be reluctant to see the Million
Man March as an act of resistance inseparable from Louis Farrakhan and the
Nation of Islam? Were they afraid of some amorphous, threatening council
of elders called the Jews? Scarcely. The motive of those famous black male
public intellectuals who lamented the inseparability of the message and
the messenger is clear. Their subject position as famous spokespersons is
bought and paid for by white men and women who wish to have their white
egos and assumptions massaged by black bucks and entrepreneurs.
"Everybody," then, was against a joined-at-the-hip, message and
messenger Million Man March. Everybody, that is, except more than a million
(a disputed figure) black men who came to the Washington Mall Men who waited
with quiet joy (Cornel West would agree that these terms are not contradictory),
easy dignity, and sober anticipation - standing at parade rest in October
sunshine for twelve long hours -- for the Messenger to appear and deliver
his embodied blessing, challenge, and call to local social and political
action.
Black men rode midnight trains and fourteen-hour chartered buses; drove
lexuses and hondas and mercedes and tauruses and "hoopties""
to the Nation's Capital to participate in an inseparable ceremony in which
the opinion of the most powerful black independent mass-oriented organization
in America was represented by the messenger who called the march into existence.
'The hundreds of thousands of black men who came were described by The Washington
Post -- over and again -- as "middle class. " By which the newspaper
meant black men with serious jobs who are not unaccounted for in of offical
census rolls of this country. Whether these black men were forthright or
equivocal, practicing Nation of Islam adherents or unabashedly independent,
they all sensed the inseparability of message and-messenger, For it was
this inseparability that is in any rational or practical account of the
Million Man March caused them to chant as the hour grew near: "FARRAKHAN,
FARRAKHAN, FARRAKHAN!" "Middle class black men" calling for
the Messenger. Did they call for Farrakhan because they endorsed a gospel
of hate, a philosophy of scapegoating Jews No. In part their chant was,
quite simply, the verbal representation of a distinctively American 'Black
Man Thing." It was the sounded intensity of a peculiarly American manifestation
of rage and desire.
Returning for a moment to Ellis Cose and his engaging book The Rage of a
Privileged Class, we find the following story of a "middle class middle-aged
law-firm partner's encounter with the rituals of black success in America:
One source of immense resentment was [his] encounter of a few days previous,
when he had arrived at the office an hour or so earlier than usual and entered
the elevator along with a young white man. They got off at the same floor.
No secretaries or receptionist were yet in place. As my friend (black partner)fished
in a pocket for his key card while turning toward the locked outer office
doors his, elevator mat blocked his way and asked "May I help you?"
My friend shook his head and attempted to circle around his would-be (white)
helper, but the young man stepped in front of him and demanded in a loud
and decidedly colder tone, "May I help you?" At this, the older
man fixed him with a stare, spat out his name, and identified himself as
a partner, whereupon his inquisitor stepped aside. My friend's initial impulse
was to put the incident behind him, to write it off as merely another annoyance
in an orderly day. But he had found him self growing angrier and angrier
at the young associate's temerity ."Because of his color, he felt he
had the right to check me out. "(pp. 48-49)
A later formulation by Cose succinctly captures the implicit structures
of his friend's experience: "Whatever difficulties Americans may have
thinking of blacks as potential CEOs, no particular imagination is required
[for whites]to visualize crime with an African- American face. " (p.
93) The young white man's assumption of criminal "trespass" on
the part of his better dressed, older, and extremely well-heeled black companion
is symbolic of white America's leap to the criminal accusation and treatment
that enrages black men in America in virtually all rounds of their daily
lives-regardless of class, temperament, or bank accounts. The moment of
"rage" closest to the Million Man March was white America's Iynch-mob
response to the verdict in the OJ.Simpson murder trial.
Candle burning mobs of middle-class whites assembled on street corners and
at television studios to call for "real" justice. By which they
meant -- at least -- the incarceration of a wealthy black mega-star who
had named one of their own and moved into their neighborhood. At worst,
they meant: string up the hick hazard!! The divide between whites and blacks
with respect to the O.J. verdict was as decisive an indicator as any black
man could find that white folks are now full of "temerity" and
as ready as the blast of a .38 to prevent "criminal " trespass
by blacks to conditions of decent living in the United States. A white War
on Decency is in full, vigilante effect.
There was, then, a raging Black Man Thing motivating chants of Farrakhan!
Many who assembled on the Mall knew the minister would articulate -- publicly
and at a globally-televised symbolic site -- their own discontent. Such
public articulation they felt was cathartic and necessary, indeed, indispensable
-- because most black men don't have country clubs or country-club estates
in gated communities, or unlicensed authority and secretiveness in which
to batter their wives and desert their children in the name of "job
stress" like so very many white men do. Because most black men don't
have the privilege or luxury of awaking to just another day in which they
can ignore the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and still know like
so many white men that nobody is "coming to get them" in the morning.
"Spindling boys", like the white elevator clerk at the law firm,
look in the mirror any time of day, see white skin, are reassured of their
superiority -- their regal supremacy.
More than a logic of rage and discontent, however, was involved in the chanting
summons for the messenger to appear. In a year when Allen and Albert Hughes's
masterful film Dead Presidents has toured nationally, it would be
shocking if black public spokespersons did not realize that Farrakhan transformed
-- through pure genius and inspiration -- the Washington Mall into a frontline
of symbolic political warfare. Farrakhan clearly understood that such warfare
needs massive troops of black American men, the same race of men who have
served eternally as cannon fodder for American wars against "decency"
e.g., Indian Wars, Spanish-American, World Wars I & II, Korea, Vietnam.
The Minister was proleptic. He knew future story (as opposed to the Toy
Story) of current American symbolic warfare against people of color:
In Mount Pleasant [a neighborhood of the Nation's Capital] a group of
about 50 Latinos gathered yesterday morning at a soccer field on 16th Street
NW and unfurled a banner that said, "Latino Solidarity with the Million
Man March. " . ... " We've never had anything in common with Louis
Farrakhan, but we're in a war and we need allies, " said Pedro Aviles,
executive director of the Latino Civil Rights Task Force, which organized
the contingent.(Washington Post, October 17, l995, P. A 20)
Farrakhan "reappropriated" the Mall as the ideological turf of
American decency that black American men must defend -- in the absence of
historical, and, present-day "decency" on the part of white American
men.
Farrakhan began his overly-long oration by pointing mystically to symbolic
monuments named Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln. He went on to weave
a tapestry of numerical speech acts, focusing his troopers attention on
the monumentality of horror that is the American Founding Fathers' and the
American Presidency's white supremacy. Earlier in the day, Jesse Jackson
had tried to rouse the troops by eliding October 16th with the Birmingham,
Alabama, Civil Rights events of another era. He claimed the march's actual
"messengers were Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. A young black man standing
near me said: "Jesse ought to go platinum with this old school stuff.
We got a pastor just like Jesse at our church. One of those Old Boys. We
have to raise our hands two hours into his sermon and say: Reverend Johnson
you know the Game is on, don't you?'."
Even before Jackson's speech, President Clinton had stood before a mostly
white audience in Texas and invoked Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon
Johnson to talk about previous moments of American racial "divide."
He pontificated about how the American Presidency had worked always toward
national "union." But Clinton did not offer a single American
Presidential dollar, strategy, or promise that might constitute a significant
intervention in today's American War on Decency. Now, as the young brother
said, Jesse may be vintage platinum. But Clinton is strictly, with his nostalgia
for Lincoln and Johnson, a golden oldies man.
Farrakhan's oration was a brilliant stroke of numerology, a masterpiece
of symbolic politics. He spoke in an era of sound-bite anti-black warfare.
An era that has witnessed a remarkable and horrifying angry white voter
turnout. A turnout manipulated to hatred by a politics of blame that cynically
produces images of Willie Horton; white hands crumpling job rejection letters
produced by affirmative action; and a wildly out of control American "crime"
in blackface. In such an era how can a useful black agenda ignore, or reject,
counter-symbolic political warfare? No one has been more effective at such
counter-warfare than Louis Farrakhan.
The Million Man March was not Farrakhan's only, but it was certainly his
most effective campaign to date. Two days after the march, he announced
that the Nation of Islam -- for the first time in that organization's history
-- would be actively involved in American electoral politics. If Ross Perot,
Ralph Reed, and Pat Buchanan, then why not Louis Farrakhan?
However the politics of the Million Man Much were not exclusive. Everybody
- Marxists, Leninists, advocates for black "economic development,"
defenders of Mumia Abu-Jamal, voter registration adherents, Civil Rights
Movement Christians -- everybody had a political and cultural forum on October
16, 1995. Thanks to the Call to the Mall, some black men had their first
acquaintance with political agendas, strategies, and events relevant to
black America unknown before all-night bus trips from Georgia hamlets, Detroit
suburbs, American college and university campuses, and Chicago ghettos.
The men and women who delivered formal addresses from the stage in front
of the Capitol outlined expansive and varied ranges of political, social,
and spiritual programs Hundreds of thousands of black men (and some women)
stood, listened, and paid attention.
What has transpired on local levels since the Washington march? Jesse Jackson
brought to his television show black men who spoke passionately about local,
urban organizations either founded or given additional financial and personnel
resources by the Million Man March. In Philadelphia, young black men have
organized a black economic development agency. On December 30, 1995, hundreds
of black Philadelphians "in the Spirit of the Million Man March"
demonstrated to bring attention to the imperiled state of the last black-owned
supermarket in the city. In North Carolina, black men "in the Spirit
of the Million Man March" campaigned for parents not to celebrate Christmas
by buying elaborate gifts and toys. They urged blacks with financial means
to purchase family health insurance, to invest in black businesses.
Oh, yes, there have been concrete, positive, local results. By the close
of his address, Louis Farrakhan had each member of his symbolically-armed
regiments ready to take an oath: "I,. Houston Baker . . ." Yes,
I was an advocate for and participant in the Million Man March. There was
for me no logical possibility of separating, in a time of war, the message
from the messenger. Louis Farrakhan, chief spokesperson for the most expansive
independent organization of black Americans in these United States, has
managed to stay alive and active. That is a miracle of no small proportions.
I went to the Million Man March with the support of my family. My mother
and mother-in-law sat enthralled all day on October 16th by C-Span's
coverage of the march. My brothers called the night before to convey a single
message: Represent. My son, who is a graduate student on the West
Coast, said: " Dad, you know if I were anywhere near we'd be going
together. " All of this I interpreted to mean: There is a war going
on in these United States. The message and the messenger of the Million
Man March stand in a relationship best captured by the Reverend Joseph Lowery
when he said on the Sunday before the march: "If my house is on fire,
I don't care who brings the water. " As fate and an American politics
of blame would have it, God gave Minister Farrakhan the "rainbow sign."
There is precious little water for the burning house of most of black America.
Unless we take symbolically-armed, forthright, thoughtful local action now
in our own black interests and self-defense, the fire next time of late
capitalism will consume us with the hot intensity of Microsoft glee.
As his last words echoed over the Mall, I turned from Farrakhan and the
group of extraordinary Black American Men with whom I had shared field duty
for a day. I headed for home. I thought about what I had witnessed.
Amazing scenes of young black children sleeping on the warm October ground
at the feet of men who had brought them to the Mall. Teenagers in hoodies
and skull caps and baggy jeans who tipped reverently by these sleeping youngsters,
as though the ground on which they rested were hallowed. I saw single files
of black men, hands on the shoulders of the person in front, zigzag through
crowds of a hundred thousand black men who politely and quietly parted for
them. I heard a young man behind me say: "Excuse me, Sir, do you mind
if I smoke" The "Sir" was me. His was an uncommonly polite
gesture since we were standing in the open air.
On October 16, 1995, I watched black men embrace, weep, listen, stand tall,
feel simply and confidently relaxed in each others presence. We looked at
ourselves, our children, all our brothers on that day. We knew the American
war in which we were engaged, and for that "moment" were not afraid.
Notes
1. Understanding the New Black Poetry (New York; William Morrow,
1973), P. 44.
Bibliography
Brossard, Mario A. and Richard Mann. "Leader Popular Among Marchers'
The Washington Post, October 17, 1995 P. Al.
Brown., Sterling. "Old Lem " In The Collected Poems of Sterling
Brown, ed. Michael S. Harper, New York: Harper & Row, 1980. pp.
170-171.
Cose, Ellis. The Rage of a Privileged Class. New York: Harper Collins,
1 99n.
Fletcher, Michael A. and Hamil R. Harris. "Black Men Jam Mall for a
Day of Atonement." Washington Post, October 17, 1995 pp. A1,A20
Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech
and Black Music as Poetic References. New York; William Morrow, 1973.
Jordan, June. 'Notes of a Barnard Dropout " In Civil Wars: Observations
from the Front Lines of America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
pp. 96-102.