Twenty-one years ago, on the National Mall, Louis Farrakhan rose to speak to the largest gathering of African Americans in history. Flanked by a crowd of young men in navy-blue uniforms, Farrakhan looked out at the Million Man March, a sea of black humanity that stretched from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. The people had gathered at a time of profound suffering for black America. The fire of the civil-rights movement had burned out; the hope and progress of the 1960s had turned to cynicism and regression. The march had been conceived as part of the great legacy of black protest against injustice. And yet, curiously, when Farrakhan addressed the crowd, he spoke of atonement: that October day, he suggested, was a day to ask forgiveness.
Even now, estimates of the event’s attendance inspire considerable controversy, with figures ranging from 400,000 to more than 800,000. There is little question, however, that in both its origins and its scope, the march was unprecedented in the United States. As the late historian Manning Marable points out in Black Leadership, the 1963 March on Washington, which featured Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, was a coordinated effort in support of civil-rights legislation, and its planning intimately involved the Kennedy Administration. The Million Man March sought no such approval from white leaders. It was organized, after all, in part by the Nation of Islam (N.O.I.), which was led by Farrakhan, who had come to believe that racial reconciliation offered no hope for black Americans. The march was meant to prompt a look inward by black men. (And only black men; as Angela Davis complained at the time, the exclusion of women implied by the event’s title was neither coincidental nor casual.) Farrakhan called on his audience to interrogate their own lives, to stop seeking salvation in white America. With its bootstrapping mentality and narrative of deliverance through personal resolve, the Million Man March appears today to occupy a strange ideological space: part G.O.P. convention, part Black Panther rally.
Some have blamed the march’s conservative, self-criticizing impulse for its failure to develop into a durable black political movement. Adolph Reed, a political scientist and labor activist, has said that the march was “the first protest in history where people gathered ostensibly to protest themselves.” Marable notes that black turnout spiked in the elections immediately following the gathering, but no enduring protest movement developed in the streets of Washington that day; no major third party was organized; no new dedication to unions, or to community activism, or to fusions of religion and politics was born. In a world of entrenched racism, real, lasting victory was too much to ask of any individual protest. Even those impressed by the march, however, recognized its political moment as fleeting.