Thirty years ago, the Million Man March gave Black men new hope and affirmation. It’s still there.
Columnist Mark McCormick covered the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C., as a journalist for the Wichita Eagle. The day helped many Black men define themselves by their aspirations, he writes, rather than by their circumstances. (Photo by Mark McCormick/Wichita Eagle)
For many of the men who caravanned for hours in buses and cars to Washington, D.C., for the 1995 Million Man March, the event marked an attempt toward a modern Harlem Renaissance, also known as “the New Negro Movement.”
To view the renaissance only as an intellectual and cultural cause misses the point. It meant to burnish a new image for African Americans, a pivot from the vagabonds, pickaninny gator bait and washerwomen common in post-Reconstruction America. The 1990s produced new grotesqueries like the criminological theory of “super predators,” a small but growing population of Black youths supposedly committing violent acts without remorse. They joined the absent father and the incorrigible criminal in urban lore.
The nation ignored the swaths of Black men who tried lifting their quiet lives above the noisy images. They got married, raised children and worshipped on Sunday. Some were “neighborhood dads,” whom kids begged to play catch or join sandlot football games.
Thirty years ago this month, many of these upright men booked trips to D.C. in hopes of changing a narrative so powerful that despite their lives of uplift, doubt often overshadowed their belief in themselves.
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan dreamed up the march, but Christian organizers helped. The event drew Christian men with little knowledge of Islam. I covered the event for the Wichita Eagle, following a group of local men making the voyage. They seemed cautiously optimistic that they would make history and introduce their true selves to the nation, and there on the National Mall, they found safe harbor.
An entire day free of the hideous images that had long defined them.
Literary icon Maya Angelou offered a poignant new etching of Black men with a verse from her “Million Man March Poem,” saying: “I look through the posture and past your disguise / And see your love for family in your big brown eyes.”
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move from her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and who helped move segregation off its axis 1955, spoke. So did Martin Luther King III, some 27 years after his father’s towering words elevated civil rights to a moral endeavor. A boy with an afro and wearing a daishiki spoke powerfully, as did representatives from Africa and the Caribbean. Ivy League professor Cornel West also spoke.
The program lasted for more than 12 hours and included pledges of personal responsibility, protecting women and children, and building and supporting Black businesses back home.
The event likely remains the largest gathering of Black men in the history of this nation, a day of affirmation that inspired future President Barack Obama as well as generations of community advocates and political officials.
Professor Ron Walters, a native Wichitan and architect of the Congressional Black Caucus, attended and sat with event dignitaries.
“The real test of the success of this march is going to be what the people do when they get home,” said Walters, then the head of Howard University’s political science department, to CNN.
Washington, D.C., authorities recorded no acts of violence, drunkenness, drugs, physical fights or acts of destruction. The love and brotherhood on the mall that day overwhelmed many of the participants, surpassing their fondest hopes.
Leaving, however, meant a return to the usual.
It began for a Wichita contingent the morning after the march. The bus buzzed about the experience. The men regarded the trip as a pilgrimage to self-acceptance and as a pivotal moment in their lives. But stopping in Ohio for a newspaper, eager to see their historic day memorialized, the gleeful chatter slid into silence as paper after paper reported a crowd of 400,000. A subsequent study by Boston University placed the count between 670,000 and 1.1 million, but the initial count took some sheen off the event.
Did the officials use the Three-Fifths Compromise to count the men on the mall? The National Park Service stopped issuing crowd counts after the criticism.
The low count plunged participants into the lives they had before the trip, but this felt different. The march had given them jolts of resolve. Undaunted, they returned to their communities. They joined existing organizations and started new ones. Nearly 2 million African American men registered to vote the year after the march.
Some of those new organizations withered. Some of the men who had traveled from Wichita, like Cyrel Foote Sr., my dear friend Jihad Muqtasid and Dr. Walters, have joined the ancestors. Yet that day helped many Black men achieve a measure of asset framing, defining themselves by their aspirations rather than by their circumstances.
Memories of the march linger, but under layers of time, like smudges on a nearly forgotten hand mirror.
The shiny image from that day slumbers under the years, but with scrubbing, the person we always knew existed surfaces again, gazing at us with big, brown eyes.
Mark McCormick is the former executive director of the Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.