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The Millions More Movement March The Ten Year Anniversary of the Million Man March By Minister Faust For Vue Weekly, October 20, 2005 It's a new millennium. It began with what may have been a stolen election in the mightiest country on Earth; it trundled forth on roads lubricated with blood, before it descended into rumours of plagues, catastrophic storms and earthquakes, and international pillage powered by mortar shells and stealth bombers. Ten years ago last weekend, millennium minus five, I stood shoulder to shoulder with a million Afrikan men at the centre of global power. And last weekend, I returned for a reunion of sorts, a look back and a launching forward, a commemoration of the Million Man March and a call to action to hold back the night by stealing back fire from false gods. The Million Man March, the October 16th, 1995 rally called by controversial Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, echoed with an almost apocalyptic thunder: one million Afrikan men marching on the capital of the world empire, an empire which had consigned around 50 million of their ancestors to shipboard entombment and centuries-long exploitation in a continent-wide slave-labour camp---or consigned them to death by forced marches, disease or violence before reaching the "land of freedom." On that day in 1995, men marched whose kin were exploited not only in centuries past, but in the 20th century. According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, racist discrimination between 1929 and 1969 alone cost Afrikans in America kin about $1.6 trillion, money that could otherwise have been a Jupiter-sized nest-egg towards collective upliftment. Of course, the empire never paid reparations to those men who marched for their so-called "Day of Atonement," nor to their families or their ancestors' countries of origin. Instead, years later, the UK branch plant of the empire offers $40 billion of "debt forgiveness" to the Original World it plundered to make itself rich. Who owes whom? Many people opposed the 1995 march. Some women, while not prevented from attending, were not invited, and thus denounced the event as patriarchal. Anti-Farrakhan commentators condemned the day for its potential to confer "legitimacy" on the man they so despised for often incendiary and divisive speeches. Corporate media attempted to diminish the significance of the event, claiming only 400,000 people had attended, although the only academic study on the topic I've ever heard of said different: as quoted in the book Million Man March, a study from the University of Boston (an institution not known for warping statistics to favour of Black Nationalist causes) said that between 800,000 and 1.1 million people went to "the Mall" that day. No matter the attacks, it was clear that the gathering--whose primary goal was galvanising the consciousness of African men in the US--was a wild success, garnering day-long speech-by-speech telecast on CNN, historic attendance, and substantial donations from participants without a dime of corporate sponsorship. Following the march, adoptions by Black parents, community volunteerism, attendance at churches and mosques and voter registration all increased. But despite Farrakhan's 1995 triumph, corporate media and even US then-president Bill Clinton continued to denounce him as a racist and an anti-Semite, frequently by tearing and re-sewing his remarks into objectionable quilts. Not that Farrakhan hadn't said objectionable remarks--but it was telling how often his opponents chose to misquote him, rather than going after what was genuinely worthy of denunciation. Others criticised the NOI leader for failing to use the gigantic opportunity he himself had created towards pushing an itemised social policy agenda or establishing an umbrella group to achieve such goals. Perhaps combined with the ailing health of the minister--he battled prostate cancer--Farrakhan reportedly fell into a depression. He escaped, apparently, through launching a "World Friendship Tour," which was perhaps intended to establishing him as a diplomat for Africa-America, in the way that Malcolm X had in 1964-65 with governments across Africa and the Middle East, and Jesse Jackson had in the 1980s by freeing American hostages. But while the tour visited took Farrakhan to states as innocuous as Jamaica, he earned no friends in US power for having "cozied up" to dictators during visits to General Sani Abacha's Nigeria and President Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But by 2005, it was clear that whatever gains had been made for Africa-America or the Nation of Islam, they were overshadowed by on-going racial discrimination in housing, health, policing, sentencing and imprisonment, education and employment. Once nature put a mile-high exclamation Hurricane Katrina mark after that sentence, it became clear that a new march--one already called long before Katrina struck and Homeland Security and FEMA abandoned most of Black New Orleans--would be embraced. And so it was that on Saturday, October 15, ten years after the Million Man March, a hundred thousand or more people returned to the Washington "Mall" for commemoration, and to press new demands. Some had worried that Farrakhan's speech would fail to demand specifics of either the government or his people. As it turned out, their worries were groundless. The morning began in darkness and in cold; at 5:30 am, a West African mueddhin sang the Islamic Call to Prayer in front of a Capitol Building glowing like an alabaster statue lit from inside--a startling clash of images during our current "clash of civilisations," to hear the Arabic words "There is no god but Allah" shine like a full moon in a cloudless night over the US Senate and Congress. As the morning swole with light, the NOI's security force, the Fruit of Islam, patrolled the grounds in their nehrus or their suits and bow ties, alongside Washington Capitol Police wearing guns and sometimes shorts. It was clear the crowds were smaller, for reasons I'd later read. I wondered why there weren't more people, given plunging approval ratings for Bush among African-Americans, now down to 3% according to Democracy Now!. But I knew that Republicans weren't the only problem. I asked Cornel West, a major American public intellectual and the cameo "Counsellor West" in The Matrix Reloaded, how the Democratic Party, which has disappointed and even betrayed US Africans so many times, can be seen as a vehicle for social improvement. "We're between a rock and a hard place," he told me. "We've got mean-spirited Republicans; we've got spineless Democrats. What do you do? Well then, you have to be improvisational. That's what Black people have historically had to do. You've got to see where you can get some wiggle room. But you've got to be distrustful of both of them." Russell Means, the co-founder of the American Indian Movement, went even further. As one of dozens of men and women who spoke, he called for the creation of a new American political party, one specifically for the 60 million Americans of African, Asian, Latin and Native descent to form a power bloc. The idea from the accomplished organiser met wild applause--despite the fact that not all of those 60 million are eligible to vote because of youth or incarceration, and many others are soulfully devoted to Democrats (African-Americans) or the Republicans (many Latinos). But as in 1995, the speaker most eagerly anticipated was Louis Farrakhan. It's been stated numerously that no other African-American leader could have mobilised the original march, but it had become clear, based on Saturday's turn-out, that even he had been stymied this time. According to Farrakhan as quoted in the October 11th edition of the NOI newspaper The Final Call, President Bush had previously called a meeting in Dallas with the country's "21 top Black preachers" urging them to ask their congregations to boycott the march. The NOI leader said, "Pastors got calls from President Bush, Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice.... Reverends T.D. Jakes, Eddie Long and Creflo Dollar were given reasons why [the march] shouldn't be supported." Professor Cornel West, said the minister, even went to Dallas to convince Bishop Jakes that it was wrong for Jakes to implore other pastors to boycott the march. But West's mission failed. Speaking on Saturday, Farrakhan opened with his traditional religious invocations thanking God, NOI founders Wallace "Master Farad Muhammad" Fard and Elijah Muhammad, but that was the end of his religious commentary. His speech could hardly have contrasted more greatly from his 1995 sermon--a lengthy address with long mystical passages, fascinating for its many cultural and historical insights, but frustrating for its lack of a call for specific direction. Instead he came out swinging, mounting an attack on the failures of the US government to assist Katrina victims and, citing a report from the Hal Turner Show, charged that a New Orleans levee may have been destroyed intentionally. According to the report, a member of the US Army Corps of Engineers who saw burn marks on the levee's concrete took a sample for analysis to the Armed Forensic Laboratory, which detected military explosives. Whether or not someone deliberately destroyed one of the levees, Farrakhan said that though Katrina victims cannot sue their federal government, the mostly African-American refugees should pursue a class action suit for criminal negligence against the FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security; even a White reporter next to me in the press gallery nodded at that, affirming his agreement out loud. It's a matter of record that the US government underfunded levee maintenance for years, and it's also clear that developers--including Dick Cheney's "former" associates in Halliburton--stand to reap rewards worth potential billions during the reconstruction of New Orleans. And as currently planned, that reconstruction will include so little affordable housing that the majority poor and Black evacuees will not be able to return to their own homeland. Denouncing the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Farrakhan finally explained the meaning of the name "Millions More Movement" by calling for the establishment of several "ministries" for coloured and poor America, to be funded internally, including Ministries of Health, Agriculture (it's easier to buy crack than a salad in many inner cities), Defense, Education, Culture, Trade & Commerce, Justice and Information. Lauding Fidel Castro's offer of medical aid for Katrina victims and free medical school for Black and Hispanic Americans who would practice medicine in their impoverished communities, he called for establishing an African-American national skills bank to assist Africa and Latin America, and to turn the overseas sweatshop economy into a more equitable production supplying products for African-Americans. He demanded that Europe cancel Third World "debt" and finance infrastructure-construction across the African continent as part of its own reparations for centuries of blood and plunder, and concluded with a call for "regime change" in the US, drawing wide applause. With the sun setting behind the Egyptian-inspired Washington Monument, I asked Chuck D., leader of Public Enemy, about his impressions. "Today was almost like a picture-perfect day. If you don't get it, you just won't get it," he enthused, before turning to anger. "All the organisations that are around the country meeting with people of colour, they convened today. And the ones that didn't, that's what I'm pissed about. The church organisations to the far right--there is no excuse for them not to be here. I heard they've got an alternative rally going on in Chicago. That has to be the most ridiculous notion that anybody could ever conceive. Is that not division?" For those who wanted measurable outcomes from the 1995 march, Chuck D. said it was foolish to expect immediate "microwave" results from either the 1995 march or the one last Saturday, that the event was only "step five of sixteen." Later that night at the subway, I overheard the post-march rage of a rough-looking brother loudly telling his friends that, "When this thing is over, them muthafuckas [organisers and speakers] gon get back on they jets, you knawm sayn?", and expressed anger that Farrakhan doesn't want to ask the US government for money, instead seeking financing for the ambitious "ministries" from his own people. But isn't that self-determination? I had to wonder, while wandering among the many Black media personalities who were wearing light brown contact lenses, while ambling down the food kiosk lanes where, despite merchant stereos blasting Malcolm X and Farrakhan speeches, many marchers were buying their lunches from non-African vendors--I had to wonder whether enough of these folks would ever be able to overturn racial self-hatred and follow even the simplest principle of self-determination: spending their money inside their own community. If not on a day like that, then when? After three major marches--including the 2000 Million Family March--Farrakhan and his co-organisers must show concrete results. But that can only happen if enough of those who assemble commit are willing to do more than listen, watch and march. -30- |