The Million Man March Has Been Wiped From the History Books. Why?
Over a Million Black Men converged on Washington D.C. on October 16, 1995…yet it’s rarely mentioned
I hate making comparisons.
Due to the fact that we live in an either or society, we often neglect how it takes both sides of the scale to keep things balanced.
Thing is, it’s not really a comparison.
On one hand you have a March that is remembered annually, rehashed in movie after TV show, and is used as a litmus test for one’s values in the 60s. While on the other hand you have a momentous event that has been nearly wiped from the books of history.
The answer to the “why” is always going to be controversial. It’s going to be controversial because the man who called the March is considered controversial. It’s going to be controversial because the attendees very presence in this country in most instances is controversial. It’s going to be controversial because more often than not we refuse to believe that a concerted effort has been made to destroy us.
Of course that man is Minister Louis Farrakhan, the March is the aptly named Million Man March, and the concerted effort to wipe the March from the annals of history involves the media, the writers of record, and perhaps…the US Government.
The only way to discuss the Million Man March in the context of history is by contrasting it with one of the most famous Marches — The March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom, headlined by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
We’ll discuss the origin of both, how each is perceived, and who benefits from the narrative of those perceptions. So yeah, I like the word I used in that last paragraph — contrast, because it is more that — a striking difference, and our juxtaposition will demonstrate that.
A person may not know one solitary thing about history. If you ask them what happened on a certain date and a certain time, it is unlikely that they’ll be able to answer (clocking something on the timeline of the world is no easy task). But if you ask them to connect people to events, you might have a higher success rate. You say Watergate, they’ll say Nixon. You say Man on the Moon, they’ll say Neil Armstrong, and if you say Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., most people will immediately mention the March on Washington.
That’s how we were taught about him growing up in the 70s and 80s. They ain’t teach a lick of Black History in February but whenever that month rolled around I was always the shoe in to play MLK. Mostly because I was the only Black kid in my AP classes although I originally believed it was due to my dramatic flare.
Sadly, that’s what Dr. Martin Luther King has been reduced to — that March — but interestingly enough, it didn’t start with him. The idea for the March actually originated with one of the most unsung activist in the Civil Rights Movement, a man 30 years King’s senior, the great A. Philip Randolph who had the idea for the March long before it picked up any steam.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X blew my wig back. Never before in life had a book made sense of the world around me like that Alex Haley assisted tale. Whether it was the chapter Mascot that made me realize that I wasn’t called on to be King because of my oratory skills, or the chapter Saved where Malcolm X illustrates how the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad awakened his curiosity about the world, I was shook.
I picked that book up my Junior year in High School and read it every chance I had; the bus ride to school, during breaks (we had two fifteen minute ones), during lunch, the bus ride to work, and on the ride home, I could be found with the white covered paperback in hand.
I could go on forever about the many things I learned from that book, but for this writing I’ll only talk about one — Malcolm X’s description of The March on Washington which he aptly called “The Farce on Washington.” I’ll include some of those words here:
The idea of a mass of blacks marching on Washington was originally the brainchild of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ A. Philip Randolph. For twenty or more years the March on Washington idea had floated around among Negroes. And, spontaneously, suddenly now, that idea caught on.
Overalled rural Southern Negroes, small town Negroes, Northern ghetto Negroes, even thousands of previously Uncle Tom Negroes began talking “March!”
Nothing since Joe Louis had so coalesced the masses of Negroes. Groups of Negroes were talking of getting to Washington any way they could — in rickety old cars, on buses, hitch-hiking — walking, even, if they had to. They envisioned thousands of black brothers converging together upon Washington — to lie down in the streets, on airport runways, on government lawns — demanding of the Congress and the White House some concrete civil rights action.
This was a national bitterness; militant, unorganized, and leaderless. Predominantly, it was young Negroes, defiant of whatever might be the consequences, sick and tired of the black man’s neck under the white man’s heel.
The white man had plenty of good reasons for nervous worry. The right spark — some unpredictable emotional chemistry — could set off a black uprising. The government knew that thousands of milling, angry blacks not only could completely disrupt Washington — but they could erupt in Washington.
The White House speedily invited in the major civil rights Negro “leaders.” They were asked to stop the planned March. They truthfully said they hadn’t begun it, they had no control over it — the idea was national, spontaneous, unorganized, and leaderless. In other words, it was a black powder keg.
Any student of how “integration” can weaken the black man’s movement was about to observe a master lesson.
Young and naive, I couldn’t believe such a thing. Why would anyone “hijack” a march? Always curious, Malcolm X provided the most important thing for me — a name. That name was A. Philip Randolph and I had never heard of him.
This was before the internet, of course, and my go-to source of information, the encyclopedia did Mr. Randolph no justice either. The only way I could find out about this man that was a complete mystery to me was to go ask a librarian.
Not surprisingly, our high school didn’t have Jervis Anderson’s A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait or any book about him for that matter. What Thomas Jefferson’s library did have was microfilm and this was my first foray into research.
Everything I learned about A. Philip Randolph was through the sparse mentions of him in newspaper articles. What I gleaned from those New York Times articles was that Randolph was an operator — he knew how to get things done.
Having been an organizer decades before the Civil Rights Movement became a thing, Randolph knew how to balance the strong egos and personalities of the time. Randolph had the idea for the March as far back as 41. But in 1962, the right people were in place — Dr. King’s reputation was on the ascendancy and he was a prominent fixture in the media — Baynard Rustin, the great organizer, was by his side, and Civil Rights was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
After the murder of Medgar Evers, President John F. Kennedy called a series of meetings with National Leaders, “clergyman, lawyers, labor leaders, educators, chain-store executives.” The last meeting (Friday, 21 June 1963) included A. Philip Randolph and Dr. King.
Like I said, Randolph was an operator — he knew how to get things done. It was here that Randolph announced the March to Kennedy. Scared the shit out of the President, though he played the “if violence pops off” card as an excuse for not wanting the March to happen. According to that argument, President Kennedy was fast at work to get the Civil Rights Bill passed and anything negative done by Black folk would make it almost an impossible task. As a result, President Kennedy’s Brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy became the de facto organizer of the March.
It was Robert Kennedy who decided that the March would take place on a weekday and not the weekend (in hopes of cutting down the crowd). It was Robert Kennedy who reduced the initial two-day March to one. It was Kennedy that brought in the Catholic clergy to the March. And it was Robert Kennedy who decided to have all of Washington’s bars and liquor stores closed on the day of the March (no, seriously, that happened).
All of this is public record and can be found with minimal research.
That being said, what was seen on that Wednesday, 28 August 1963, was a combination of the original vision of A. Philip Randolph…and the concessions that were necessary to make it happen. Although the March is now remembered as an outpouring of racial harmony, it was still 70 to 80% Black (how the hell do all these liberal “I marched with King” fit into that itty bitty 20%?).
Speeches were edited on the fly, activists jockeyed for position, all of which was done to not cause “problems” and to maximize the use of such a large platform with the highlight being Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s now famous sixteen minute “I Have a Dream” speech. The March was deemed a success. 200,000 Black people (and 50,000 “others”) gathered peacefully, singing, socializing, and listening to speeches.
Congressman John Lewis recalled:
After the March, President Kennedy invited us back down to the White House, he stood in the doorway of the Oval Office and he greeted each one of us, shook each of our hands like a beaming, proud father. You could see it all over him; he was so happy and so pleased that everything had gone so well.
A month later Robert Kennedy would instruct the FBI to begin its investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King.
We didn’t know what to expect.
Beginning with his lecture on Monday, 24 January 1994 at the 369th Armory in NY, NY, Minister Louis Farrakhan began having Men-Only meetings across the country titled “Let Us Make Man” to address the many social ills that were (and still are) affecting Black men.
Crowds of 10 to 20,000 would pack churches, arenas, and halls to hear the Minister and it was at one such a meeting on Monday, 11 April 1994 in Houston, Texas where Minister Farrakhan was inspired to call on a Million Men to March on Washington.
Over the next year, organizing committees, LOCs (Local Organizing Committees) formed all over the country. I discussed those meetings in detail here. But suffice it to say that despite all of that grassroots organizing, there was no way to measure the level of success our messaging was having. It was impossible to discern who would be there, what the environment would be like, etc.
The press leading up to the March was the garden variety type that had surrounded Minister Farrakhan for a decade. You won’t be able to type in any of that slander and have this article come up in your search engine — it’s not worth repeating. What I will say is this — study the media’s depiction of Minister Farrakhan from 26 February 1984 when it was announced that Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam would aid Jesse Jackson and his run for President to 28 October 1985 where the media struggled to understand how Minister Farrakhan packed Madison Square Garden.
Farrakhan went from a mild curiosity to pariah in barely two years. After that 7 October 1985 lecture that electrified Black New Yorkers, the media covered the event and Minister Farrakhan for the next three weeks. Where did he come from? Why were people listening to him? What could be done about it? Finally opinion piece after opinion piece came to the same conclusion (crazy, right?) — the best way to handle Minister Farrakhan was to not cover him or anything that he did.
Again, all of this is public record and can be found with minimum effort.
For the next nine years, the media didn’t cover Minister Farrakhan at all. Little did they know (or care to pay attention to), Minister Farrakhan had spent the time between Thursday 17 November 1977 and Sunday 26 February 1984 building alliances with local organizers and church leaders throughout America. The media may have helped people learn about Minister Farrakhan but a strong base among Black people existed free of the press.
And that’s the base that Minister Farrakhan went to after announcing the Million Man March. That Black solidarity is what confounded the press which is why you’ll find articles pop up like this leading into the March. Check it:
Indeed, while Farrakhan is one of the most controversial figures in the country, criticism by other black leaders and organizations of the march that he conceived has been scant and muted. In much of white America, Farrakhan is seen as a racist and antisemite who does not fit the image of a traditional civil rights leader such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Jesse L. Jackson.
That was the theme as Monday, 16 October 1995 approached.
Nonetheless, the March was a success. It was a March for Black people organized by Black people. And despite all the negative depictions of Black men as hostile and violent, a million plus men gathered on The Mall, stood tightly shoulder to shoulder…for six hours…and after the March was over, left as peacefully as they came, leaving not a spec of litter or bad feelings.
Then the media got to work.
The Million Man March changed the way crowds were counted forever. But what we often fail to realize is that perception is king. When the Park Services estimated the numbers at 400,000, attendees balked at that number. No way was there only 150,000 more people at the Million Man March than the March on Washington. Next time you’re in DC for shits and giggles go stand by the Lincoln Monument and that pool. Look from Lincoln to the street. Then hoof down to where the Capital is. Go up on the steps and look back, back, back.
Pull up a picture from both Marches. You ain’t gotta believe me, you can see it with your own two.
But that’s the thing. The numbers don’t have nothing to do with anything. They’re just numbers. The people handling those numbers on the other hand, that’s a completely different story. You just saw that quote up there on how most of white America views Minister Farrakhan. None of the slander campaigns worked. Now the work would be to DISCREDIT him and what better way than to start with the numbers.
Clark McPhail and John D. McCarthy opined that for a million people to be at the March that they would have to “more or less (stand) perfectly still.” Considering that they weren’t there, wrote their takedown piece some nine years later, and obviously had an agenda, what do they know? Anyone who was actually at the March would tell you that once you found a spot to stand in even a manuever as simple as grabbing something out of your pocket became difficult.
I guess they ain’t like the conclusions drawn by Dr. Farouk EL-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University. Dr. El-Baz rolled in with estimates of 800gs with a 20% room for error…bringing that possible number to…surprise, 1,004,400.
Sticking with numbers, the next tool was to cause DISSENT among the people who had long followed and supported Minister Farrakhan by calling into question the money that was donated during the March. So the Nation of Islam made the independent audit prepared by Bolling & Hill LLP (a Chicago firm lead by Darius Bolling and Howard Hill) public (when has that happened before or since?). Of course that wasn’t enough.
Directly after the March, there were several Op-Eds in all the leading papers and magazines. There were studies in journals. And there were books, my “favorite” of which is the December 1998 released The Farrakhan Factor: African-American Writers on Leadership, Nationhood, and Minister Louis Farrakhan. Many of these writings came to the same conclusion that the media had arrived at a decade earlier. Which brings us to…
…the next step, the one I find most deplorable is the March was made to DISAPPEAR. October 16th comes and goes and were it not for the Nation of Islam mentioning the event, it would hardly be discussed. There’s no mention of the event occuring in the news, history books don’t discuss it, it was as if it never happened.
Two years ago, on that same mall, another million were called. This event, the twentieth anniversary of the Million Man March carried the theme ‘Justice or Else’ and was well organized. There were checkpoints and borders. There were places for children to play. It was different. It was a family gathering unlike the March of 1995 which was more of a State of Emergency (March).
There were no articles calling into question how was it possible that Minister Farrakhan could again call people to Washington and they came. No press coverage at all, really. Seven-hundred thirty days have passed and it’s already a distant memory. Such is the modern news cycle.
But the question has to be…who benefits from painting The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as a success and the Million Man March as…well…a non-event and a failure?
President Kennedy needed the March to be a success as we mentioned above. It happened on his watch. Anything going wrong “would effect the outcome of the Civil Rights Act.” Yeah right. But he wasn’t the one to get the Civil Rights Act passed. He wasn’t an operator. Lyndon B. Johnson was. So that excuse was smoke and mirrors.
The March on Washington became a marketing tool for the potential of America. It was used as a beacon of hope and an event that illustrated the true character of this country. Meanwhile, terrorists were bombing churches (the 16th Street Bombing happened barely three weeks after the March on 15 September 1963), the country was two years away from Bloody Sunday (7 March 1965), and no true change was evident.
Even Dr. Martin Luther King grew skeptical of the March and the message that he became famous for. In an NBC special report titled “After Civil Rights: Black Power” which aired Sunday, 11 June 1967, Dr. King offered these words of reflection to producer Sandy Vancour:
I must confess that, uh, that dream that I had that day has in many points turned into a nightmare. Now I’m not one to lose hope; I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years and I would say over the last few months I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments and I’ve come to see that, uh, that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little bit superficial. And now it must be tempered with a solid realism, and I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go...
That was then. Now, empirical data would show that fifty years later unemployment among Black folk is still disproportionate and don’t get me started on freedom. You’ve seen the hundreds of memes of all the ways that innocent Black men and women have been killed…and the ridiculous response to athletes protesting said murders. If that March was for Jobs and Freedoms, was it truly a success?
I can tell you what was a success — how The March has been MARKETED.
At the end of Minister Farrakhan’s lecture that cool Monday, October 16, 1995, he had us take this pledge:
I PLEDGE that from this day forward I will strive to love my brother as I love myself. I, from this day forward, will strive to improve myself spiritually, morally, mentally, socially, politically and economically for the benefit of myself, my family and my people. I pledge that I will strive to build businesses, build houses, build hospitals, build factories and enter into international trade for the good of myself, my family and my people.
I PLEDGE that from this day forward I will never raise my hand with a knife or a gun to beat, cut, or shoot any member of my family or any human being except in self-defense. I pledge from this day forward I will never abuse my wife by striking her, disrespecting her, for she is the mother of my children and the producer of my future. I pledge that from this day forward I will never engage in the abuse of children, little boys or little girls for sexual gratification. For I will let them grow in peace to be strong men and women for the future of our people.
I WILL never again use the ‘B word’ to describe any female. But particularly my own Black sister. I pledge from this day forward that I will not poison my body with drugs or that which is destructive to my health and my well-being. I pledge from this day forward I will support Black newspapers, Black radio, Black television. I will support Black artists who clean up their acts to show respect for themselves and respect for their people and respect for the ears of the human family. I will do all of this so help me God.
Every time I reread that I get filled with anxiety. Some of those Pledges stuck. Many of us worked the self-improvement angle. But the improving self for community, and allllllll those other Pledges that followed…not so much.
I want to fulfill each and every aspect of that Pledge. Yet, we know that nothing happens in a vacuum. Vast changes in public policies and the world economy has curtailed any chance of many of the above ever becoming reality.
Since YouTube’s inceptions, our community has become overrun with Video Activists. Anyone with an opinion, a camera, and a computer (which is damn near everyone), can now posts their thoughts online and garner acclaim and a following.
Although many of these Video Activists have brought light to several of our issues, they’ve also weakened the impact of learning about the systematic oppression that permeates our world now. People have become fatigued with the rhetoric and terms like ‘School to Prison Pipeline’ have become catch phrases.
A true study of what that term encapsulates, however, is quite alarming. Take Stephen Hoffman’s Zero Benefit: Estimating the Effect of Zero Tolerance Discipline Polices on Racial Disparities in School Discipline which displays mathematically how Blacks suspensions increased by 12% between 1999 and 2007 (while suspension of whites decreased).
Reading through that study may bother you but hearing it may really piss you off. The first time I listened to This American Life, Episode 538: Is This Working had me enraged. Hearing about the suspension of a child in preschool mirrored not only my reality but my middle son’s reality as well.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The must-read book of the past seven years, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, provides jarring evidence that the “War on Drugs” spearheaded by President Ronald Reagan and all of the subsequent laws and bills passed since him, from the “three strikes law” leading up to the privatization of prisons, all of these policies targeted Black men and women.
So ask yourself dear reader, who benefits from the belief that we “overcame” after the 1963 March on Washington? Who benefits from the narrative that the March was a representation of what America is? Dr. King even had to backtrack on that belief.
Ask yourself, who benefits from Black people not building businesses, homes, hospitals, factories and entering into international trade? Who benefits from Black on Black crime and the separation of Black men and women? Who benefits when Black people don’t support their own? I think the answer is quite clear — big business. Whether we’re talking Big Pharma or the NRA, whether we’re talking Entertainment or Incarceration, a large swath of the financial pie can be carved out based on Black dysfunction.
Let the media tell you that the Million Man March (and all of the following Marches) owe their failure to Minister Farrakhan. Let them think of every reason why these marches aren’t deemed a success. All I ask is that you do your due diligence, check some of the sources included in them there hyperlinks above, and come to your own conclusions. After you do all that, you may say along with me, “something is quite fishy.” Fishy indeed.
Again, all of this is public record and can be found with minimal research.
