Louis Farrakhan: Million Man March Pledge

Context

In his prophetic 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, the African American activist, editor, and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois foresaw that one of the central concerns of the twentieth century would be the persisting division of American society along racial lines. He and others soon founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an interracial organization that became instrumental in leading the struggle to break through legal and economic barriers to equality during the twentieth century. However, as decades passed, black activists began to feel as though the call for integration had fallen on deaf ears. Some observers believed that racism in the United States was so deeply rooted that it could be countered only by a more assertive ideology—an ideology that came to be known as black nationalism.

The basic tenets of black nationalism include two beliefs: first, that African Americans are trapped in a white-dominated society that refuses to grant them comparable civil liberties and economic opportunities and, second, that because the power-holding white majority would continue to oppress them, African Americans had to create their own institutions to provide the goods and services necessary for survival. Black nationalist sentiments gave voice to a growing feeling of disillusionment among people of color, who, rather than feeling like Americans, saw themselves as Africans living in the United States. The outgrowth of black nationalist assumptions was that African Americans had to do one of two things in order to survive and flourish: Create either a separate nation-state outside the United States or an independent African American nation within the southern states.

The sociologist Michael O. West describes “four black nationalist moments” in history. The first of these “moments” occurred during the period referred to as the “Decade of Crisis” before the outbreak of the Civil War. From 1850 to 1861, antiblack social and political policies arose in the United States, compounding racial inequities and prompting many free blacks to view emigration to Haiti as an attractive alternative to the troubling turmoil over slavery. For instance, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compelled Americans to assist in the return of runaway slaves to their owners, even if the slaves had made their way to a free state. Seven years later, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case denied the prospect of citizenship to all blacks, whether slaves or freedpeople. Once the Civil War broke out, the nationalists joined the integrationists to support the Union cause, hoping that black emancipation and equal rights would follow.

The second black nationalist “moment” occurred between 1919 and 1925, after the end of World War I and during the Great Migration in the United States, when large numbers of African Americans moved from the South to the North. Racial tensions reached a peak in American culture and politics at this time, as blacks began to compete with whites for scarce job opportunities. In this context, the Jamaican-born black activist Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association gained prominence. Garvey’s slogan, “Africa for Africans, at home and abroad,” called for a renewal of black nationalism and encouraged black capitalism and black pride. Controversy over Garvey’s leadership style and actions ended this movement by 1925, but his efforts set the stage for a new vision of black identity later in the twentieth century.

The third black nationalist “moment” began in 1964, roughly a decade into the modern civil rights movement, and ended in the early 1970s with the decline of political nationalist groups such as the Black Panthers. The Supreme Court’s trailblazing 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka—which stated that “separate” could never be “equal”—energized integrationists to organize and mobilize for full equality for African Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference encouraged nonviolent resistance as the South exploded with racial conflict. Two important pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, brought an end to legal segregation. The nation seemed poised to rise above its racist history; in reality, however, few African Americans saw any real change in their everyday lives. The prolonged discontent among black Americans led to the emergence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad, with a new call for black nationalism. Elijah Muhammad added a religious component to conservative black nationalism while revitalizing the push for black pride and self-sufficiency. Under Muhammad’s leadership, the Nation of Islam taught its members that whites were “devils” who were incapable of overcoming their racial prejudices. Muhammad promoted “black capitalism” through black entrepreneurship as a way for African Americans to prosper, free from the constraints of an oppressive white society.

The charismatic Malcolm X became an influential speaker for the Nation of Islam until he broke with the movement on moral grounds in 1964. Shortly before his assassination in 1965, he underwent a spiritual transformation during a hajj to Mecca. His journey led him to abandon his black separatist views and found the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Malcolm’s desire to look for common ground with the members of the American civil rights movement posed an ideological threat to the Nation of Islam and is believed to have been the motive for his death. As an outspoken critic of Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan quickly stepped in as a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam and ultimately became its leader by 1978, after the death of Elijah Muhammad.

While the black Muslims provided religious support for this third black nationalist “moment,” the Black Panthers added their own style of secular militarism to help impoverished and frustrated African Americans find solutions to their problems. The Watts riot in 1965 uncovered the intensity of the struggles of African Americans in the nation’s urban areas. A predominantly black neighborhood located in south-central Los Angeles, Watts came to embody the long-term effects of unyielding poverty, unemployment, crime, blight, and racial conflict on a community. In the early evening hours of August 11, 1965, a white police officer arrested a black motorist for allegedly driving while intoxicated. This incident ignited deeply held racial tensions and sparked a major riot in Watts marked by six days of violence, looting, and burning.

The California-based Black Power movement, which gained a following in the 1960s and 1970s, offered a divergent, radical approach to black nationalism after this violent event. Appealing mostly to the African American working class and urban youth, the Panthers offered a ten-point plan to improve employment, housing, education, and racial justice. Unlike another Black Power organization called Us, founded by Dr. Maulana Karenga, which included only blacks and called for a cultural rebirth, the Panthers worked with Native Americans, Hispanics, and white antiwar protesters to help alleviate the plight of blacks in America’s urban areas. The Black Panthers’ violent revolutionary nature and open challenges to authority led to the group’s demise by the early 1970s. However, the cultural black nationalists survived this period by utilizing less radical tactics of protest. Their efforts resulted in the establishment of black studies programs in American colleges and universities and the solidifying of black cultural practices into American society (for example, through the creation of Kwanzaa by Karenga in 1966).

The growth of conservative ideology in American politics brought about the fourth black nationalist “moment.” In the early 1980s U.S. president Ronald Reagan and his Republican administration removed many social programs that blacks perceived were working to level the playing field in American society, such as affirmative action. In this vein, black Americans turned to religious leaders for hope, and the popularity of the Nation of Islam swelled. As poverty, unemployment, and civil unrest grew in the 1980s, ethnic and racial connections and nationalist feelings took on renewed importance; the Nation of Islam’s radicalism became more attractive to black Americans who felt the political, social, and economic gaps were widening between the races. In his 1996 book In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, the Swedish religious scholar Mattias Gardell offers insights into Farrakhan’s rise to power in the 1980s. Farrakhan’s charisma and his ability to speak to black America’s youth, along with the emergence of hip-hop culture and rap music as venues for communication within the black community, helped young people gravitate toward his nationalist message. According to Gardell, at a time of declining faith in mainstream American politicians, the actions of the Nation of Islam to combat gang violence, crime, drugs, and poverty were seen as successful attempts to curb the problems affecting blacks in the United States.

It was against this backdrop that Louis Farrakhan initiated the idea for the Million Man March in 1995, when black men were called to Washington, D.C., for atonement and reconciliation around the overall theme of unity. Held on October 16, 1995, on the National Mall in Washington, the Million Man March proved to be the largest black demonstration in the history of black America and, according to Gardell, a turning point for acceptance of the Nation of Islam within mainstream black America. The National Park Service estimated attendance at four hundred thousand, while the Nation of Islam claimed that nearly two million men were present on the Mall that day. An independent group of researchers, led by the director of the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing, estimated the count to be 837,214, with a margin of error of 20 percent.

Farrakhan and the other event planners intended this day of atonement, reconciliation, and responsibility to include both Muslim and Christian black men and to be understood at two levels. As explained by Gardell, first, black men and their leaders needed to atone for “having allowed the community to embark on the path of self-destruction.” Farrakhan asked black men to take responsibility for destroying their families and their communities with antisocial and criminal behaviors. Second, the government, representing white America, needed to “acknowledge the burden of guilt” by atoning for the horrors of slavery and working toward an end to white supremacy. The mission statement for the march explains in detail this challenge to the U.S. government. Included is a request for the government to admit to and apologize for its role in the “Holocaust of African Enslavement,” to more thoroughly teach the appalling truth about slavery, and to pay reparations to African Americans. Also included is a call to fortify gains in voting rights, health care, and housing, along with a request to adopt an “economic bill of rights” with a plan for rebuilding urban areas. With regard to foreign policy, the mission statement urges the government to provide for equal treatment of refugees of color from Africa, the Caribbean, and other developing nations, to forgive foreign debt of former colonies, and to change the way the United States intervenes in the Middle East and around the world to promote other nations’ sense of self-determination.

Part of Farrakhan’s reconciliation message was directed at the Nation of Islam. Although critics, according to West, suggested that behind this rhetoric lurked the twin black nationalist ideas of patriarchy and black capitalism, many who were not supporters of the Nation of Islam and its separatist beliefs still benefited from the energy and camaraderie of this event. Rather than demanding a separate state to promote black nationalism, Farrakhan instead reached out to President Bill Clinton to join a unified black movement. He also spoke about reconciling with groups he had targeted in the past, such as Jews and other—more moderate—organizations such as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had boycotted the march.

The full title of the march included the subheading “The Day of Absence.” Farrakhan and his organizers asked black women to stay at home and organize and mobilize their communities in support of the Million Man March. This controversial request angered many African American women’s groups, which protested their exclusion. Farrakhan also called upon those unable to attend the march to stay away from work, school, businesses, and places of entertainment to help focus the nation on the themes of atonement, reconciliation, and responsibility.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke on the afternoon of the march, delivering a speech that helped to clarify the question, Why march? Jackson cited facts and statistics highlighting the inequities within American society and suggested what the men present must do. He observed, for example, that there were two hundred thousand more blacks in jail than in college, that the media portrayed blacks as unintelligent and violent, that blacks were less able to borrow money in a system built on credit, and that three-strike drug laws unfairly punished smalltime dealers, who were more likely to be black than white, rather than the bigger drug traffickers, who tended to be white. In an article for Maclean’s, Carl Mollins pointed to other researchers who showed “that blacks constitute 13% of drug users, but make up 35% of arrests, 55% of convictions and 74% of imprisonments for drug possession.”

Further statistics from the 1990s demonstrate the differences between white and black America that Jackson and Farrakhan described. According to the Department of Commerce, during that decade blacks fared poorly compared with their white counterparts in a variety of economic and social measures. The unemployment rate among blacks was more than twice the amount found for whites (at 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively), and almost three times the number of blacks compared with whites fell below the poverty level (at 31 percent and 12 percent, respectively). The life expectancy for blacks was sixty-nine years of age, compared with seventy-six years for whites, and blacks were seven times more likely to become homicide victims than were whites. The need for improvement in areas such as these became a rallying cry at the Million Man March. Overall, the march gained historical significance as a prime example of peaceful, well-organized political action in twentieth-century America. Farrakhan’s pledge focused national attention on African American ideals and helped renew black America’s commitment to social change.