One man’s unity is another man’s—or woman’s—repression. Dr. Muhammad castigated the “agnostics and atheists” who said it couldn’t be done, but Allah had given Louis Farrakhan a vision, and the call for the March had come from God Almighty through him. Ben Chavis, the executive director of the Million Man March, said that as a Christian minister he intended to stand with Farrakhan all the days of his life. A baritone was mumbling, “Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.”
There was an almost complete absence of rap, of Public Enemy, the boom-box sound that had done so much to proselytize for Farrakhan and that was also so identified with renegade black youth. We had gotten to the “Sankofa” part of the program, where we were supposed to “go back and fetch it,” go back to the glory of Africa, “the creators of technology and science.” As the African Heritage Drummers and Dancers pounded, I ducked under the yellow police tape that marked lanes on the Capitol grounds and headed into what everyone was calling an ocean of black men.
Everywhere I looked the people were upstaging the speechmakers. And everywhere somebody was hawking something, mostly newspapers: Farrakhan’s The Final Call, John Muhammad’s Muhammad Speaks, Anointed News Journal, StreetWise, or The Five Percenter, the newspaper of a Muslim group devoted to land acquisition. There were self-help manuals, coloring books, and someone was autographing his reproductions of an all-black The Last Supper.
Constitution Avenue had become an immense street fair. Women and children appeared, giving the day a carnival openness. Stalls of Bob Marley posters, jewelry, incense, chicken, flags, artworks, and cassettes stretched as far as the eye could see. “That’s right. I love you.” There were Million Man March candy bars with Farrakhan’s picture on the wrapper and Million Man March official bottled spring water. Million Man March watches were also available by order. There were brochures from African Americans Uniting for Life—a marrow donor group—and from employment agencies; leaflets from video stores and the Information Superhighway for Black Membership Organizations. One could have one’s picture inserted instantly into a souvenir frame with a Million Man March poem on the cover, and the ground was littered with order forms from the African American Archives.
We heard from international representatives, radio personalities, CEOs, figures from the black revolutionary nationalist past, and preachers, preachers. Poor Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, perhaps under an obligation to Farrakhan after he came to her daughter’s defense when she became a victim of entrapment last summer, stuck to the safe subject of self-determination. Two cute children recited with great earnestness something impossible to identify, and Maya Angelou moved herself to tears. A great accolade went up to Rosa Parks, the heroine of the Montgomery bus boycott. Miss Parks was mugged not long ago in Detroit. When her neighbors found the culprits, they beat them up before handing them over.
Nobody invented the statistics about single-parent households, about whom the victims of black criminals are, about which segment of the population is most likely to die of gunshot wounds, but there was a troubling capitulation in the exhortations that black men accept responsibility for their families, swear as black men not to beat their wives, promise as black men not to abuse their children, vow as black men to give up guns, drugs, and violence, as if in order to project the news of the decent Black Man the assembled had first to humble themselves before an indictment, as if domestic violence and poverty were not also white problems. But we were supposed to concentrate on ourselves. We were made to hold up our hands if we had ever done wrong. We were told that most black children had never seen a black man at a computer, when the question should have been, what kind of equipment do these children have at the sorts of schools they attend.
Moral imperatives fell over us like tuna nets. The language about black religion and black pride was similar to that of twelve-step programs: we have surrendered to a power greater than ourselves. It is easy to abstain on Monday, and backsliding usually follows rebirth, but the speechmakers were preaching to the converted. Gang leaders stepped up to pledge themselves to a truce, but how different the day would have been had they been made to say, “We are not criminals,” rather than, “We will be good from now on,” because no one is more self-righteous than a drug dealer, white or black.
Most of the speechmakers offered lofty theology and therapy, but Al Sharpton’s hope was explicit: if the political story of 1994 was that of the angry white man, then get ready for the story of 1996, when the enlightened black man votes in a new Congress. No one was more eloquent in his concreteness than Jesse Jackson, who perhaps has been set free by Colin Powell’s visibility. Jails were the number-one growth industry in America, Jackson claimed. The annual budget for them had risen from $4 billion to $32 billion. For possession of five grams of crack an offender could get five years. Young black men comprised 94 percent of that category. For possession of five grams of cocaine powder an offender usually received probation. Eighty percent of such offenders were white males. To get five years for possession of marijuana, one had to have been caught with forty-five thousand dollars’ worth; to get five years for possession of cocaine in powder form, eight thousand dollars’ worth; to get five years for possession of crack, twenty-nine dollars’ worth. There are eight hundred thousand black men in jail and five hundred thousand in college, Jackson reminded us. Prison labor produces nine billion dollars a year in goods. “If it’s wrong in China, it’s wrong in Alabama.” He said that among the investors in new jails were American Express and General Electric, and that maybe the next march should be about them. “Clarence Thomas and Gingrich organized this march,” he finished to a storm of applause.
“Jesse turned it out,” the men around me were saying. Think of the number of black men who insisted when Clarence Thomas was nominated that we had to support him because he was black. Before Jackson spoke, the sentiment around me was that he was past his sell-by date. By the time he walked off, he’d come back a ways in Mall credibility. His short lesson had resonance with the crowd, as Stevie Wonder’s voice had moved them earlier in the day, but they were really just opening acts for the main event. By four o’clock people chanting “Farrakhan, Farrakhan” were being praised for their patience. His son, a militaristic figure, Assistant Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, was drowned out by the tumult when he finally introduced his father a few speechmakers later.
Three years ago Farrakhan drew a larger crowd in Atlanta than the World Series, but that same year Wallace Deen Muhammad spoke at the Pentagon and then addressed the U.S. Senate. In 1993 Farrakhan tried very hard to get on the roster of speechmakers for the thirtieth-anniversary observances of the March on Washington, attended by more than had gone to the original march, but he was refused. The Million Man March was his one-upmanship for having been excluded, as well as the fulfillment of his dream. After all, the Mall is where the coronation is held, even if King had been down at the Lincoln Memorial end. Audiences segregated by gender used to be common at Nation of Islam happenings. But the former calypso singer, the narcissist who launched a line of skin-care products in 1986, has been selling wolf tickets for so long that he was ill-prepared to play the benevolent patriarch. His debut in the sun was an anticlimax, like a tedious riverboat ride tourists regret after they’ve made such an effort to get to a place they’ve heard was so spectacular.
Farrakhan struck the pose of a history decoder and decipherer, the one who would break it all down for us. He added up 16 and 3, because this had to do with the date slaves landed at Jamestown, the height of the Lincoln Memorial, and the fact that Jefferson was the third president. It added up to the height of the Washington Monument, that obelisk shape, he interrupted pedagogically, lifted from black Egypt. Washington, a grand master of the Masonic order, and Jefferson both owned slaves; Lincoln had been ambivalent about emancipation. Hardly Masonic secrets. “What is so deep about number 19? When you have a 9 you have a woman that is pregnant. One means something secret that has to be unfolded.” That w
e were looking where he told us to look and listening to what he was telling us revealed only that we were less confident as citizens than he was as a self-promoter.
Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America has been retired to the cultural vaults, rather like certain founding Mormon texts that have become an inconvenience, and we don’t hear much these days about Yacub, the mad scientist back in time who was expelled from Mecca and then invented white people. Farrakhan’s address contained little straight Nation of Islam doctrine and not much orthodox Muslim belief either, apart from some liturgical phrases suitably provocative because they came from him. His knowing smile as he went on about Nebuchadnezzar and Josephus, and master builders getting hit on the head, reminded me of a story a friend told me about Farrakhan showing up at The Washington Post, where he talked a great deal about spaceships. The spaceships were left out of the published interview. Thomas Jefferson believed in the existence of extraterrestrials, but that’s not what concerns us about him, not what he’s famous for. We tend to listen to Farrakhan from a predisposition, either a determination or a refusal to find the lunatic riches, ready to engage in a war of contexts. But Farrakhan was convinced by the sheer presence of so many that he was adored, and this provided all the context for his words that anyone needed to understand him.
Farrakhan’s scarcely unusual rhetorical strategy is to declare himself the outsider persecuted for his outspoken truthfulness. Believing in him proves the bravery of his audience. In the end, only what works to his advantage reflects credit on his audience. This may come from habit, from the experience of having navigated the higher echelons of the Nation of Islam. Much is made of his shrewdness as a publicist, but what he has most clearly demonstrated is an ability to wait, to outlast everyone in the field. The reason he is under threat, his strategy goes, is that he has something important to tell his audience, something his enemies don’t want them to hear.
Farrakhan pretended to quote from a letter written in 1612 by one Willie Lynch, a slave master. “In my bag I have a foolproof method for controlling the slaves.” The words Farrakhan attributed to Lynch were not in the style of the seventeenth century. No doubt he assumed that everyone understood the letter was apocryphal, a parable about fear, envy, and distrust, the means by which blacks are kept disunited. Lynch was made to say that he pitted older males against younger males, men against women, and so on. “I take these differences and I make them bigger.… The black slave after receiving this indoctrination shall carry it on.” That, Farrakhan explained, is why black pastors and educators remained under the “control mechanism of former slave masters and their children.” In other words, the black leaders most likely to oppose him have a heritage of being brainwashed. However, in spite of all the divisiveness, he said, black people had survived, as if the sacred purpose of the sons of Garvey had been to endure and one day make a pilgrimage to Washington, where he, Farrakhan, would expose his light.
There is often just enough historical truth in Farrakhan’s uses of history. Slaves were separated from other slaves who spoke the same language; educated blacks were trained up to bourgeois ways. But the import of the history lesson was in its application to himself. The Lynch letter served Farrakhan by dignifying his warnings about division. By locating disunity in the historical conspiracy of whites against blacks, he showed that acclaiming him was not a personal but a collective triumph over those who did not want to see blacks united. “We are a wounded people, but we are being healed.”
The elaborate process by which blacks could heal themselves involved coming into “a state of recognition that you are in the wrong.” The aim of confession, forgiveness, and atonement was a more perfect union with God. But his prophecy, his healing, turned out to be a rehash of personal reform—black pride as inner peace, black pride as the foundation of domestic order—mixed with black capitalism, as if he were addressing a population of small retailers rather than low-wage earners. Once again, everything referred immediately back to him. “When you’re sick, you want the doctor to make the correct diagnosis. You don’t smack the doctor.” However, the person who points out what is wrong with us as social beings is hated and misunderstood, especially by those who have become “entrenched in evil” and been made arrogant by power. He has been mistreated for our sake. The difference between his message and the same message from others in the past was that he was not a false prophet.
The atmosphere was like that of those concerts where nostalgic fans, waiting to embrace the electrified Greatest Hits, concede the new, wobbly, acoustical tunes. The crowd relished the showmanship in Farrakhan asking each of us to take out a dollar bill, to hold it up, to wave it in the air, a display of our potential economic power, and to keep it there until his officials arrived with slit cartons for us to jam the money into. But some two hours later, when he was searching for yet another way to tell us why we were afflicted and why we were ready to come out of the furnace, I noticed men packing up their coolers and walking away.
Farrakhan directed to the appropriate sign-up booth those who were willing to adopt some of the thousands of black children in the United States who needed homes. He announced his voter registration drive, as if such drives had not been the main activity of black groups for the past thirty years. But he was the seer who could also get things done. He promised to get an outside accounting firm to scrutinize every dollar he’d collected, saying that he wanted to “open the coat” to show he did not have a hidden agenda. In the distance I saw people leaving in droves, rather like the rush for the parking lot at a sports event when the outcome is assured before the end of play. Farrakhan’s voice followed us down to the sidewalk. It ambushed us from car radios, from hotel televisions.
3
On a day supposedly devoted to self-criticism Farrakhan did not offer much of an apology for his uses of anti-Semitism. He claimed that he pointed out the evil in black people as no other black leader did and that black people didn’t call him anti-black or “a purveyor of malice” for it. “They know I must love them.” He left out that he tends to paint those blacks who don’t acknowledge his leadership as anti-black. He was trying to imply that he was no harder on Jews than he was on blacks. He expressed gratitude for Moses and the Torah among “the servants of Allah” and said he did not want to “squabble” with Jewish leaders anymore. Farrakhan’s olive branch was so tentative because, having set up a refusal to back down as the litmus test, he couldn’t be seen to be doing so.
A key to unity these days is a group’s perception of itself as being disliked and surrounded. Fear is a part of fund-raising for Jewish groups and Jewish charities. Exploiting that fear has been a part of Farrakhan’s career. It was clear, for instance, that the Anti-Defamation League would not let his baiting remarks over the years go unchallenged, but had Farrakhan gone on about white people in general all this time, he would not have gotten half the attention. He wanted a way to inject himself into public consciousness. He could then advertise the reactions as evidence of his dynamism.
Most white men find it hard to imagine that a black man could think of himself as using them, just as few black people can admit that a black man who comes on as so rebellious could be using them. Because of historical pieties and griefs, many people assume that a black man is telling the truth if he sounds harsh enough, just as many assume that someone willing to express anti-Semitism in public is being honest. There are, of course, black anti-Semites, Jewish anti-Semites, and white anti-Semites, just as there are blacks, Jews, and whites who don’t like blacks. Some familiar anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been circulated by whites prominent in the Christian Right, which has put Jewish neoconservatives in an awkward position.
But the liberal coalition of blacks and Jews in electoral politics has suffered most. Maybe the coalition was falling apart anyway, but Farrakhan has never wrecked a Jewish politician. He has caused problems for a few black ones. James Forman, the executive director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the
1960s and now president of the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee in Washington, pointed out that three days before the last mayoral election in New York City, Farrakhan applied for a permit to hold a rally that he later called off. David Dinkins was thus embroiled in a dispute over Farrakhan’s right to the permit. If it didn’t cost him votes, Forman said, it diverted some of his energies. Farrakhan has touched several bases and tainted them all in the process.
Farrakhan’s leadership seems fresh because it is untried. He seems like a truth teller because he can pretend to candor. As Murray Kempton once said, there must be a little of Malcolm X in every black, and that is what Farrakhan finds and goads. He can appear to let go and to let loose in a manner that many who come to hear him can’t when on the job or in the street. Other black figures seem ineffectual because they are circumspect in public or bogged down in consensus politics while not much changes for the majority of blacks. Farrakhan can remain as unapologetic as Jesse Helms. But the troops toward whom Farrakhan behaved as though he were pacifying them may find him no different as a spokesman in the wider world than other blacks already there. In a way Farrakhan is in a position similar to that of Malcolm X when he left the Nation of Islam and complained that his followers wouldn’t let him turn a corner.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 4