Providence, Patriarchy, Pathology:
Louis Farrakhan's Rise & Decline

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua teaches history at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. Clarence Lang is a graduate student at Southern Illinois University.

ON OCTOBER 16, 1995, MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WATCHED IN AWE as more than a million black men gathered in Washington, D.C. The Million Man March keynote speaker, Minister Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, delivered more than the anxious public could have imagined. On that day, he articulated a new philosophy and program for black America, or more accurately, he recast an old agenda in more militant tones. Clearly, his address reflected a sea change in black politics.

The Million Man March and Louis Farrakhan's address signaled the ascension of the nationalist development strategy and the eclipse of the integrationist strategy. In his "Challenge to Black Men," Farrakhan announced a strategic retreat from substance to symbolism, from contestation to entrepreneurship, from transformative struggles to parallel development, and from demands to obligations. Accordingly, a chief goal of the march was proving to white America that one million black men could gather without incident, as if the essential problem confronting black men was a poor public image. Ironically, Farrakhan's address came exactly 100 years and nearly one month after Booker T. Washington rose to national prominence pronouncing a similar shift in ideology, strategy and tactics. On September 18, 1895 in "The Atlanta Exposition Address," Washington articulated the main themes of the politics of retreat. In suitably accommodating, but dissimulating, language acceptable to the agrarian barons in the South, the emerging Northern industrial capitalist elite, and an evolving Southern-based conservative black elite, Washington announced the shift in African-American strategy and tactics "from politics to economics, from protest to self-help, and from rights to responsibilities."¹

This project surveys the historical continuities and discontinuities between Washington's rise in the 1890s and Farrakhan's ascendancy in the 1990s. Four key understandings shape this analysis: (1) the 1890s and the 1990s transitions to newer systems of racial domination occurred during major restructuring of the American political economy (from commercial to industrial capitalism, and later to multinational corporate capitalism) and accelerating monopolization; (2) both occasioned the rise of white redemptionist movements that shattered previous liberal racial rapprochements and plunged African Americans into a nadir; (3) both revealed the rising black elite's ambivalence toward the more degraded classes of blacks; and (4) during both moments, the black elite created an historic bloc in the black community by uniting the nascent black bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie around the doctrine of "self-help."

History does not repeat itself, nor is history an endless series of recurring cycles, but it is true that similar conditions often produce similar responses. Both Minister Farrakhan's "Challenge to Black Men" and Washington's "Atlanta Exposition Address" were delivered at critical historical moments, during transitions from one stage to another. The "First Redemption," 1868-1900 and the "Second Redemption," 1968-present, have much in common; both periods experienced economic downturns and witnessed unprecedented monopolization of the U. S. economy. Both eras also represented the apex of racist assaults on African Americans and their newly won civil rights.

African-American historian Rayford Logan termed the 1890s the "nadir" of the African-American experience. The origins of the "old nadir" are located in the multidimensional struggle between freed people and former masters, blacks and whites, landlords and tenants, yeomen and barons, and freed people and free people over the meaning of freedom during the Civil War and Emancipation era. Slavery was abolished, but economic exploitation and social discrimination were recast, rationalized, and black people were incorporated directly into market relations via a new system of racial domination.

The "Black Codes" reconstituted white domination, but resistance by African Americans and their anti-racist white allies generated tenancy, the Reconstruction Acts, the Enforcement Acts of 1870-71, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1867 and 1875, thereby eliminating the material conditions for the reinstitutionalization of slave-based social relations. Consequently, Southern economic and political elites sought to nullify the civil rights won by African Americans, especially the Fifteenth Amendment. To this end they initiated a coherent strategy involving two tactics. The first, extralegal violence by white terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, was designed to frighten African Americans into political apathy. The second tactic involved the use of nonviolent political and legal means to repeal African Americans' civil rights.

President Andrew Johnson inaugurated the political counter-reform movement when he vetoed the Reconstruction and Civil Rights Acts of 1866. Johnson considered these acts unconstitutional because they "threatened to do more for negroes than the government had ever done for whites." The radical Republican Congress overrode Johnson's veto of the Reconstruction Act, but between 1876 and 1896 the United States Supreme Court legalized his logic by undermining the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and nullifying the Enforcement Acts of 1870-71 (which safeguarded black people's right to register and vote free of white intimidation and deceit) and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Significantly, the Court erroneously equated protection of African-Americans' equal rights with "special treatment." This logic recalled President Andrew Johnson's opposition to the Reconstruction and Civil Rights Acts of 1866, and presaged President Ronald Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988.

Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Defeat

REELING FROM THE COMBINED ONSLAUGHT OF TERRORISM AND THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL REVERSAL of their constitutional rights, African Americans responded with a variety of strategies. The exodus of 1879 and the black town movement represented one response; the formation of the National Afro-American League and its merger of self-help and protest was another; and accommodation to the new racial rapprochement was a third. African Americans debated the relative merits of these strategic approaches in the black press and at local, state and national conventions.

In the end, those who were willing to exchange constitutional rights for "peace" ascended to preeminence in the black community. Isaiah T. Montgomery, the founder, mayor and wealthiest citizen in the fledgling black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and other black conservatives such as Joseph C. Price and William Hooper Council, paved the way for Booker T. Washington. Montgomery, the only black delegate to Mississippi's 1890 Constitutional Convention, was the first to hoist the white flag. He endorsed a bill to disfranchise black voters. Montgomery's action reflected his belief that he could best protect his embryonic separate community by conceding politics to white men. Mayor Montgomery counterposed business ownership to politics, arguing that after blacks proved themselves in business whites would welcome them into the polity. Montgomery's action prompted the venerable Frederick Douglas to comment that unlike Daniel, men like Isaiah T. Montgomery would make peace with the lion by allowing it to swallow them.

Racist politicians immediately began adopting the "Mississippi Plan" throughout the South. The 1890s also represented an upsurge in racially motivated violence; for instance, during the three-year period between 1892 and 1894 an average 148 African Americans were lynched annually. Building on the foundation laid by Montgomery, Washington ascended to the leadership of black America. In "The Atlanta Exposition Address" Washington, like Montgomery, advocated accommodation and separate, though subordinate development, and economics over politics. He attempted to construct a "parallel economy" from a conservative alliance between an emerging black entrepreneurial elite, resurgent white Southern planters, and rising white Northern industrial monopoly capitalists. Despite Washington's deliberately vague language, his renunciation of politics resounds:

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges.

After declaring that blacks were the most "patient, faithful, law-abiding and unresentful people the world had seen" Washington, in a brilliant, but insidious, metaphor stated, "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."²

Within a year of Washington's strategic retreat, the Supreme Court transformed his perspective into policy, and in Plessey V. Ferguson enshrined segregation as the law of the land. From the "old nadir" until the "Second Reconstruction" black nationalism was trapped within the conservative philosophical prison constructed by Montgomery and Washington.

Black Nationalism: From Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X

EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THE BLACK MASSES HAD REJECTED WASHINGTON'S PROGRAM by his death in 1915. African Americans fled the South in massive numbers for industrial jobs in Northern cities. In part they were pushed from the South by racial repression and economic exploitation, but primarily they were pulled to teeming Northern industrial centers by the prospect of better jobs, housing, education and municipal services. Urbanization, proletarianization, racial confrontations, and the war experience established the material conditions for the militant struggles of the black masses. Though dominated by legal gradualism, protest came to dominate black politics.

In these new conditions, Marcus Garvey attempted to revive Washington's program, but had to adapt it to the 1920s. Garvey made two significant ideological innovations in Washington's program: first, he enveloped it in militant rhetoric, thus masking its essentially conservative character; second, he elevated the submerged nationalist sentiment embedded in the self-help doctrine to prominence. Despite these cosmetic changes, Garvey, like his ideological predecessor, restricted his concept of "self-help" to parallel capitalist development. Therefore, he too opposed the struggle for civil rights and social equality. Garvey declared:

The professional Negro leader and the class who are agitating for social equality feel that it is too much work for them to settle down and to build up a civilization of their own. They feel that it is easier to seize onto the civilization of the white man and under the guise of constitutional rights fight for those things the white man has created. Natural reason suggests that the white man will not yield them to them, hence such leaders are but fools for their pains. Teach the Negro to do for himself, help him the best way possible in that direction.

Blinded by his accommodationist outlook and racialism, Garvey could not conceive of African Americans leading a movement that transformed the United States into an anti-racist political and economic democracy. Through the lens of Garvey's racialist world outlook, "whites" appeared a monolithic bloc without class, ethnic, or gender fissures, united by race and a coherent white supremacist ideology. Unable to conceive of social change in the United States, Garvey substituted the farfetched notion of an African return. This "African Dream" served to mask his accommodation to contemporary racial oppression.³

The Garvey Movement conveyed Washington's emphasis on economic development and opposition to political protest to Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad incorporated Garvey's innovations to Washington's program, but whereas African repatriation was clearly articulated by Garvey, Muhammad left the specific land base vague. Wilson Moses noted that for Muhammad, "Hostility toward whites became an emotional substitute for political activism and a perfect excuse for avoiding confrontation with segregation forces." Further, Muhammad brilliantly wed his capitalist development scheme to a millenarian religion. Whereas Garvey rationalized accommodationist politics via emigrationist fantasies, Muhammad partly justified his apolitical stance via theology. He wrote:

The so-called Negroes will be taken away from the white Christians -- it is binding upon Allah, to fulfill his promise to Abraham that He would return them to their own people . . . Allah has warned us of how He would destroy the world . . . Allah has pointed out to us a dreadful looking plane in the sky that is made like a wheel . . . built for the purpose of destroying the present world.

Muhammad, like all millenarians, believed supernatural forces would bring freedom, and substituted divine intervention for a liberation movement. Shawna Maglanbayan maintained that this apolitical bias characterized black nationalism until Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) intervened during the last year of his life.⁴

Shabazz broke with the Nation of Islam because he had outgrown Elijah Muhammad's mystical pseudo-scientific theology in favor of a political ideology and program. His break with Muhammad freed him to instill progressive nationalist concerns into the civil rights movement. In seeking to restore a political dimension to post-slavery African-American nationalist theory and praxis, Shabazz articulated a dialectical approach that blended and transcended traditional nationalism and integrationism. He advocated supplementing the integrationist-led civil rights movement and mass direct action tactics with a human rights struggle using the nationalist strategy of independent institution- building. In essence, Shabazz sought to integrate his nationalist strategy and embryonic anti-capitalist notions with Martin Luther King's strategy of inclusion and quest for economic justice. The program of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, then, was a transitional program that advocated organizing black people to seize political, economic, social and cultural control of the cities and counties where they were the majority, and to fight for proportional power where they were a minority. Unfortunately, Shabazz's project was derailed by his assassination, and the program he had projected as a unified strategy was adopted piecemeal by the liberal and conservative wings of the Black Power movement. The liberals used his new found emphasis on electoral politics to deliver the movement into the hands of conventional politicians, while the conservatives embraced his emphasis on independent economic development to promote franchise capitalism.

Civil Rights, Black Power and The Second Redemption

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THE REEMERGENCE OF BLACK NATIONALISM and the ascendancy of Louis Farrakhan is found in the transformation of black politics from civil rights to Black Power. Hanes Walton, Jr. suggests that the historical precedent for the Million Man March was the 1966 "March Against Fear," or the Black Power March, because it deftly shifted the black liberation movement's goals, strategies and tactics from transforming local and federal policy toward black self-help. Therefore, as a proto-ideology, Black Power represented another sea change, shifting the focus from integration to black institutional development. Black Power had long-term implications, but it was a transitional stage between the civil rights movement and the current dominance of electoral politics, rather than a definitive period. More than an expression of black national consciousness, unity and independent institution-building, Black Power derived from a complex composite of these conflicting elements. Consequently, like nationalism overall, it had no inherent political character; the political programs advocated by its adherents were shaped by their more fundamental ideological beliefs. So, for example, theorists like James Boggs, and radical collectives as diverse as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Panther Party, attempted to maximize Black Power's revolutionary tendencies; while theorists, such as Maulana Ron Karenga, Haki Maddhubuti, and adherents of Kawaida, provided an alternative culturalist interpretation of Black Power that can best be described as reformist. And CORE leader Roy Innis and Rev. Nathan Wright expressed a reactionary pro-capitalist version of Black Power. Ultimately, Black Power's lack of specificity allowed President Richard M. Nixon and foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, to bolster the position of its most conservative proponents and coopt the movement.⁵

Facilitated by an expanding economy during the 1960s-1970s, America's ruling class instituted a combined strategy of corporate liberalism and judicious repression to eliminate the radical challenges and generate a "new" black elite. Through its policy of "contain and crush" (contain the urban rebellions and crush the radicals), the government decimated the radical tendency. Samuel F. Yette and Robert Allen have provided the best analyses of this strategy. In Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Allen acknowledged the role of political repression, but contended that corporate liberalism was the Euro-American elites' dominant strategy for eliminating black insurgency. In 1970, he alleged that government and corporate transformation of the black middle class facilitated the rise of moderate black politicians and the creation of a new strata of managers, technicians and dependent entrepreneurs. The social transformations brought about by the civil rights and Black Power movements meant that the corporate liberal strategists could not simply recast the old "Negro" middle class or empower the small strata of traditional "Negro" conservatives. Instead, they had to generate a new "black" (petty) bourgeoisie.

In 1967 the Small Business Administration (SBA) enacted Section 8 (a), which authorized the SBA to establish a separate pool for some contracts for which only "disadvantaged" companies could bid. The Nixon Administration established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) and low-cost loans for minority entrepreneurial ventures. Section 8 (a) was augmented in 1977 by the Public Works Employment Act. This legislation mandated federal contractors set aside 10% of all contracts for minority subcontractors. John Sibley Butler reports that in 1987, 47% of African American enterprises listed in Black Enterprise's top 100 black businesses were started in the 1970s and 21% during the 1980s. Lila Ammons considered the period 1970-1979 an era of "remarkable achievement" for black-owned banks. The 34 banks established during this period was greater than during any period except 1888-1928 when 57 black-owned banks were initiated. New opportunities to invest in federal government and municipal bonds was one reason black-owned banks were more prosperous during those years. Federal support was critical in the development of the new black business class, yet black initiative cannot be neglected in its creation. For this strategy to be successful, not only did new businesses have to be created, but the new black elite had to use militant Black Power rhetoric while subscribing to its most moderate and conservative aspects.⁶

By equating "community control" with "black control," the militant members of the elite maneuvered the masses into waging direct action campaigns to facilitate their schemes of capital formation. Having used "old-style" civil rights tactics to accumulate capital for their enterprises, the elite then espoused nationalist-style rhetoric, such as "buy black" campaigns, to generate ideological pressure on black consumers to support their capitalist aspirations. Of course, Black Power could not have resounded throughout the black community had it been just a stratagem of the black elite. Black Power also articulated the demands of the black working class for equal employment, quality housing, health care, and education, and also expressed their desire for community control of the police, and the building of independent black institutions. As a result, African Americans' quality of life improved dramatically between 1960 and 1970. For example, the unemployment rate of black men decreased from 9.6% in 1960 to 5.6% in 1970. In 1959 black family median income was 52% of that of white families; by 1969 it had risen to 61%. The black middle and upper classes benefitted disproportionately from the new opportunities, but some tangible gains, at least temporarily, did accrue to the black working class.⁷

Richard Child Hill concluded that the Black Power era ushered in three important transformations in black-white relations. First, the number of black elected officials exploded, from 280 in 1965 to 3,503 by 1975, which led to the establishment of black-led administrations in several major urban centers. Second, class stratification among African Americans accelerated. Third, black elected officials helped effect an alliance between the new black political-professional-entrepreneurial class and the liberal pragmatic wing of the corporate structure, premised on their facilitation of corporate redevelopment plans for inner cities. For these reasons, Harold Cruse termed Black Power "neo-Booker Tism." The cultural nationalists, perhaps unwittingly, aided the corporate liberal strategy and new black elite ideologically and politically; their simplistic race unity thesis ensured that they would be reduced to junior partners providing rationalizations for the political-professional-entrepreneurial class' acquisition of political power and capital. Contradictorily, the nationalists' "politicization" of black culture implicitly, if not explicitly, accelerated their retreat from electoral and protest politics. As they slid ever more into "traditional" African culture and pan-Africanism, support for African liberation movements became the only political activity in which they engaged. Consequently, Shabazz's effort to return black nationalism to its pre-Booker T strategy of simultaneously working for internal self-development and fighting all manifestations of racial restrictions both succeeded and failed. Nationalism was politicized, but according to Harold Baron, the dominant wings of the Black Power movement "did not pose racial issues clearly in terms of the conditions of advanced capitalism."⁸

The Revocation of Civil Rights

IN THE 1960S, AN EXPANDING ECONOMY ENCOURAGED AMERICA'S CORPORATE AND GOVERNMENTAL elite to emphasize incorporation in response to the civil rights and Black Power movements, but since the mid-1970s' "stagflation" and the multinational extension of corporate capitalism, they have retrenched. According to Robert Reich, current Secretary of Labor, economic growth nearly came to a screeching halt between 1973 and 1983. He calculated that from 1960 to 1973, growth in real gross national product (GNP) per worker averaged 1.8%, but plummeted to only .8% between 1974-1978. Rodney D. Green and Joseph P. Reidy contend corporate leaders transformed the U.S. economy in response to the economic downturn:

The financial elite thus undertook a systematic policy of reorganizing the capital accumulation process in the U.S. During its first phase, the 1970s and early 1980s, they increased the pace of relocating manufacturing facilities from urban centers (and even from the older suburban centers) of the Northeast and the Midwest to rural areas of the South and Southwest, and to maquiladoras in Mexico and sweatshops in East Asia, largely in order to undermine and/or avoid the wage structure in areas where workers had succeeded in unionizing, and hence to stimulate profit rates and the pace of capital accumulation.

African American and other communities of color bore the brunt of these changes. Whereas in 1970 African American male unemployment had dropped to 5.6%, by 1975 it had surged past its 1960 level to 11.7%. According to Reich, the real human cost of a 1% increase in unemployment translated into "920 more suicides, 650 more homicides, 500 more deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, heart, and kidney disease, 4,000 more admissions to state mental hospitals, and 3,300 more people sent to prisons."⁹

Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, symbolized a paradigm shift in American politics and ideology, representing conservative elites' reaction to the United States' economic decline and the white working class' abandonment of the Democratic Party. Reagan's skillful manipulation of racially coded images spurred a political and ideological realignment that propelled the Republicans from the minority to the majority party, and shifted U.S. political ideology toward neo-conservatism. He masked the structural economic basis of declining living standards by scapegoating welfare, crime, and affirmative action programs. Republican conservatives and Democratic neo-liberals responded to the structural crisis of transnational corporate capitalism with deregulation, increased subsidies and tax cuts for the "truly rich," and attempts to dismantle the remaining Great Society programs. That is, their economic policies intensified unemployment, poverty, and homelessness among working people. However, these general deleterious processes and policies have had racially differential effects.

From 1975 to 1993 African-American median real earnings declined 12%, while Euro-Americans' dropped 7%. In 1984, the median white household net worth was $39,135 compared with $3,397 for blacks; by 1990 the gap in median household wealth had increased another $5,584 to $45,740 for whites and $4,418 for blacks. During the recession of 1990-1991, whites, Latinos and Asians gained 186,000 jobs with corporations that held federal government contracts, but African Americans lost 60,000 jobs with those same firms. By refracting their anti-labor and anti-poor policies through the prism of race, the Republicans have managed to cloud their class war policies by coloring them.¹⁰

As the income and wealth gap separating blacks and whites enlarged, the Reagan-Bush administrations ravaged all areas of social welfare programs, including Aid for Families with Dependent Children, Medicare, Medicaid, school nutrition programs and housing subsidies. With this attack, the conservatives launched an executive, judicial and legislative assault on African-Americans' civil rights. Reagan mirrored Andrew Johnson in stigmatizing remedies and mechanisms for ending racial discrimination as reverse discrimination. Subsequently, he gutted civil rights enforcement agencies. The U.S. Supreme Court, packed with conservative Reagan appointees, in a series of decisions, between 1977 and 1989, including Regents of the University of California V. Bakke, City of Mobile V. Bolden, Grove City College V. Bell, Croson V. City of Richmond, Wards Cove Packing Company, V. Antonio, Martin V. Wilks, Patterson V. Credit Union, Jett V. Dallas Independent School District, consistently issued rulings that diluted civil rights protections. During the spring and summer of 1995, the court intensified its attack, issuing four decisions that cut at the heart of the rapprochement reached by the black political-professional-entrepreneurial elite and the corporate liberal establishment.

In May, the high court upheld a lower court's decision ruling race-based scholarships at the University of Maryland unconstitutional. Three June rulings (Adarand Constructors V. Pena, Missouri V. Jenkins and Miller V. Johnson) directly attacked minority set asides, school integration and black political representation. In the first, the Supreme Court reversed a lower court's ruling claiming that ethnic/racial preference had denied Rany Pech, a white contractor, a contract with the Transportation Department. It determined that federal affirmative action programs should be subjected to the same constitutional standards as state programs. In the second, the Court voided a magnet program promoting desegregation. Finally, the Court in Miller V. Johnson invalidated Georgia's 11th Congressional district, drawn to provide a third majority district in that state. In a related action in July, the University of California Regents arbitrarily abolished race-based affirmative action in admissions and employment. Collectively, the Court's decisions, and the ones made since the 1977 Bakke ruling, herald the abolition of the legal accomplishments of the civil rights and Black Power movements, and replicate the nullification of black rights during the "First Redemption." Similarly, the judicial and executive campaigns against African American people have been punctuated by extralegal terror ("hate crimes" committed by modern white supremacists) and police brutality, of which the Rodney King beating is but one celebrated example. The Anti-Defamation League recently reported the increase of hate crimes from a little more than 2,000 in 1991 to nearly 9,000 in 1995. Church burning has emerged as the most visible manifestation of contemporary white terrorism. From January of 1995 until August 7, 1996 there were 74 predominately African-American churches burned, 48 in 1996 alone.

The political and legal assault on African Americans and the multiracial working class intensified after the Republican conquest of Congress in the November 1994 midterm elections. The new majority conservative forces led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich slashed $20 billion from the earned income tax credit for the working poor and attempted to gut the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 by exempting nearly 88% of the banking industry from its provisions.¹¹ The act requires federal regulators to consider a bank's lending record in poor and racial minority communities when determining whether a lender can open new branches, purchase other banks, and participate in interstate commerce. The act also permits community groups to protest a bank's record and receive remuneration.

The black political-professional-entrepreneurial establishment's inability to cope theoretically and politically with this "Second Redemption" created the conditions for the ascendancy of black nationalism. By 1980, the movement was attempting to awaken from a lull that had been partly imposed by governmental repression and partly by the new black elites' acceptance of corporate liberalism. That year, nationalists and progressive forces formed two vehicles to reenergize the black community: the National Black United Front (NBUF) and the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP). Neither NBUF nor NBIPP managed to galvanize the African-American community, but they did succeed in contesting the moderates' and conservatives' hegemony over Malik Shabazz's nationalist-integrationist synthesis. Collectively, they revitalized the strategy of independent development and the tactics of mass direct action and independent politics. Ironically, NBUF and NBIPP's successes in diffusing nationalist thought and militant action helped create a favorable climate for the emergence of the conservative Louis Farrakhan.

Dilemmas of Black Ideology, Strategy and Tactics

IN THE MID-1980S, AFRICAN-AMERICAN YOUTH DEVASTATED BY REAGANOMICS, pulverized by police repression, and disillusioned by vacillating accommodationist leaders, resurrected Malcolm X, although their idealization of Malcolm froze him in his Nation of Islam period. In Malcolm, the preeminent symbol of black militancy, the "hip-hop" generation sought a symbolic figure of resistance. After he broke with the World Community of Al-Islam in the West, Louis Farrakhan renewed his bid for Malcolm's mantle. From 1978 until Jesse Jackson's run for the presidency in 1984, the new "Nation," like the old NOI before Malcolm's release from prison, proselytized at the center of the black community, yet remained on its fringes. However, the Jackson campaign catapulted Farrakhan from the wings onto center stage.

The Jackson-Farrakhan "alliance" was immediately burdened with the weight of history. Black history is brimming with oppositional dyads which embody the major strategic differences of their age: Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany; W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; and Ida B. Wells and Margaret Murray Washington. Because of this history and African Americans' belief that the road to freedom is labeled "UNITY," it is understandable that many saw the Jackson-Farrakhan alliance as the belated coming together of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malik Shabazz. What began with extraordinary hope soon crashed, derailed by the historic burden of black unity and the calculated assault on both Jackson and Farrakhan by Jewish organizations and America's Euro-American corporate and political elites. The Jewish/African-American question is as important as it is difficult, and though it has unique features it also has similar characteristics to other ethnic/national conflicts. Jackson distanced himself from Farrakhan in part because he recognized how he had collapsed class and ethnicity, that is, like Farrakhan he had failed to distinguish the structural-based roles of some Jewish entrepereneurs and landlords from the actions of Jewish people, and in part because he recognized the political strength of Jewish organizations. One result of the Jackson-Farrakhan rupture was that after the 1984 presidential campaign they came to embody the "nationalist-integrationist dialectic" for the "hip-hop" generation, just as Malik and Martin had for the previous generation. Perhaps invoking Karl Marx's famous characterization of tragedy and farce concerning the historic link between great personalities and their imitators is too harsh, but it is closer, rather than further, from the truth. Jackson, at best, has been a dynamic but an inconsistent follower of King's dream of transforming the United States into a multiracial social democracy, while Farrakhan has been a devout disciple of Elijah Muhammad's vision of parallel black capitalist development. Neither is an adherent to the vision of Malik Shabazz.

Perhaps the best illustration of the phenomenal realignment in black ideology and politics marked by the Million Man March is the symbolic reversal of positions between Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan between the 1983 March on Washington and the 1995 Million Man March. In 1983 Jackson was on the threshold of his first run for the presidency, which launched him into the stratosphere of popularity and political influence; in 1984, he was third on the annual Gallup poll of people Americans most admired. In 1983, Farrakhan, barely known outside black America, was one of the few nationalists permitted to speak at the event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, but by 1995, black men attending the Million Man March preferred him to Jackson 44.6% to 28.3%.

Further, the genesis of the Million Man March may be found in Farrakhan's exclusion from the 30th anniversary march in 1993. In the midst of the Republican "counter reformation" a beleaguered civil rights establishment sought to rekindle the movement by calling for a march on Washington for "Jobs, Justice and Peace." Congressman Walter Fauntroy and many conveners, who had invited Minister Farrakhan a decade before, capitulated to white liberal pressure and rescinded their decision to invite him. By the fall of 1994, Euro-American elites had made rejection of Farrakhan the litmus test for responsible black leaders. On December 10, 1994, Farrakhan announced plans for a million black men to converge on Washington to atone for letting black women shoulder the burden of leadership and to rededicate themselves to "take control of their families, homes and communities." The dominance of the atonement theme and the exclusion of women from the "Million Man March" suggests that Farrakhan's ideas parallel those of the Promise Keepers, a conservative Christian men's movement, rather than those of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters or the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

During the Great Depression dispossessed Americans made marching on Washington a tactic in their fight for jobs and justice. Beginning with National Unemployment Day in 1930, and the Bonus and National Hunger Day marches of 1932, marches on Washington were used to protest governmental policy and to extract concessions from the federal government. This tradition, especially African-American-led marches, forms the historic background in which we must evaluate the Million Man March. In the hunger marches, the Communist Party, USA-sponsored Unemployment Councils led multiracial protesters in demanding unemployment insurance and federal relief from joblessness during the Depression. Tens of thousands of African Americans not only demonstrated but played leading roles in those militant protests. In 1941 the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters responded to pervasive black unemployment, particularly the continuing exclusion from employment in the defense industry, by building the March on Washington Movement. The actual march was canceled but it became the inspiration for the 1963 March on Washington for "Jobs and Freedom." In 1972 and 1973, pan-African nationalists under the leadership of the African Liberation Support Committee sponsored marches on Washington to protest U.S. corporate investment in, and political support for, colonialism, and to build support for Southern African liberation movements. Since the 1960s and early 1970s, the tradition of social protest at the nation's capital has continued. In 1983, approximately 300,000 multiracial civil rights, nationalist, women, radical, labor and peace activists prodded by the ravages of Reaganism traveled to Washington to commemorate and revitalize the struggle for "jobs, peace and freedom." A decade later, spurred by ever declining economic conditions and a crisis in black-police relations, between 75,000 and 200,000 demonstrators journeyed to Washington to demand full employment, a single-payer national health care program and an end to other injustices. According to radical scholar-activist Manning Marable, protesters especially wanted to chasten Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president in 12 years, for his retreat from civil rights and progressive initiatives. Offering a trenchant critique of this tactic Marable argued that the "progressive petty bourgeoisie" had used its dominance to cancel the 1941 march and to curtail the "full militant possibilities" of the 1963, 1983, and 1993 marches. He identified three particular weaknesses: (1) authoritarian tendencies among the leader(ship); (2) lack of an integrated radical program; and (3) reliance on the mainstream bourgeois parties for implementation of their demands. Marable deemed the 1983 mobilization the most progressive because of key organizers' stated intention of building "a permanent anti-racist, anti-corporate popular front." Inspired by the 1983 march, Marable speculated that the next march might link the struggle for black liberation with opposition to monopoly capitalism.¹²

Despite the enormous theoretical and political limitations of these mobilizations, marches on Washington were protest vehicles mobilizing African Americans and others to demand governmental responsibility. The Million Man March represented a repudiation of this tradition. Instead of radicalizing this tactic to realize its "full militant possibilities," it presented a decorous display of middle class black men. Contrary to Marable's expectations the Farrakhan-led proceeding not only failed to connect black liberation with anti-capitalism, but actually articulated a procapitalist strategy.

The Class Character of the Million Man March

MOST COMMENTATORS HAVE IDENTIFIED MINISTER FARRAKHAN'S CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY as the explanation for why the Million Man March was a march to Washington rather than a march on Washington. This is true, yet, the class character of the marchers offers a more comprehensive explanation for the apolitical, conservative nature of the million-man gathering. According to the Wellington Group and Howard University 80% of the men who attended the gathering had household incomes above $25,000, 43% made more than $50,000 and 18% more than $75,000. Farrakhan's message of atonement, male supremacy, personal responsibility, voluntarism, and black capitalism was largely successful because it appealed to the black bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, the African-American strata best situated to come to Washington and to benefit from his plans. The Republican assault on affirmative action during the spring and summer generated a crisis that many elite blacks were willing to mobilize around, although not on the terms of traditional black political mobilizations.¹³

Ellis Cose recently warned of the anger raging among privileged blacks. Some of it is directed toward whites for continuing racial discrimination and stigmatizing them as "incompetent" affirmative action hires. Some of their rage is focused on less fortunate blacks whom they despise for their alleged "dependency" on affirmative action programs and governmental subsidies. Many observers have located Farrakhan's appeal to the black elite in his racist rhetoric and entertaining style. However, his appeal to the angry black elite transcends style and is ultimately located in an ensemble of ideological preferences. For example, 34% of the marchers identified themselves as either moderate or conservative, 31% as liberal, 4% as socialist, 11% as nationalist and 21% listed "something else." What is more significant are the reasons marchers gave as "very important" for attending the gathering. Seventy-fivepercent cited "support for independent economic programs" as a significant motivation for their coming to Washington. Since only 4% of the respondents claimed to be socialists, we can surmise that most respondents advocated capitalist entrepreneurship. Undoubtedly, much of the resurgence of interest in independent economic development among the elite results from the current wave of corporate downsizing and their recognition that the future of franchise capitalism is precarious. The narrowing of the layoff gap between white-collar and blue-collar workers has threatened the black technical and managerial sector. Lacking seniority, and especially vulnerable due to racial discrimination, they have been particularly hard hit as corporate restructuring has reached into middle-management. As corporations were severing their traditional contracts with the technical-managerial strata, judicial decisions were nullifying government legislation for minority set asides. For instance, before Richmond V. Croson, minority contractors garnered 40% of the city's total construction dollars; within a year of the decision, the share of city construction contract monies received by minorities plunged to 3%. Steven A. Holmes reported that $4.5 billion in contracts were let to minority-owned firms in 1995. The conservative and neo-liberal repeal of this Black Power rapprochement threatens to cost the black elite dearly. Due to this new environment, the black elite finds Farrakhan's strategy of "taxing" the African- American community to generate capital formation appealing.¹⁴

The Gender Politics of the March

THE MARCH'S GENDER POLITICS WERE RELATED TO ITS CLASS BASIS. Andrea G. Hunter and James Earl Davis found that black men considered their role as patriarch central to their conception of manhood. Another study discovered that conceptions of masculinity were not uniform, but reflected class differences. Working-class black men valued the role of provider most. In contrast, middle class African American men valued most the role of husband. Being the patriarch was significant, and 77% of the marchers responded that the "placement of black men in the forefront of black progress" was "very important" in their decision to join the march. Consequently, the MMM reflected the patriarchal aspirations of black men and the idea of the "endangered black male." The problem with the latter notion is not that black men are not endangered, but that overemphasis on this theme masks the equivalent predicament of black women. Theorists of the "endangered black male" seize on the convergence of incomes between black and white women to construct the myth that black women are doing well, at least, relative to black men. Nevertheless, the "endangered black male" thesis ignores the following facts: in 1992, black women's median income was $19,819, compared to $22,369 for black men; black men 20 and over had an unemployment rate of 12.2%, but black women were unemployed at a comparable rate of 11.5%. Black men composed 48% of all incarcerated men, but black women made up 52% of incarcerated women. The point is, black men and black women are oppressed equally, but differently.¹⁵

Farrakhan characterized his call for black male supremacy as relieving black women of the burden of "carrying" black men. He stated, "We do not feel that we should any longer burden our women with ourselves, but we should accept the responsibility that God himself has imposed on us as heads of families and heads of communities." According to Farrakhan, gender roles have been preordained by a male deity. Despite his attempt to interpret it positively, Farrakhan's patriarchal world view represents an attempt to revive the obsolete "cult of domesticity." Farrakhan's reactionary gender politics appeal to many African-American men because he offers a "socially respectable" way to "put women in their place." Unfortunately, many African-American women also find it appealing because they believe Farrakhan is encouraging black men "finally" to carry their share. In Farrakhan's nation, women would be "respected" -- as mothers and wives -- but not as equal partners in the home, the movement, or civil society.¹⁶

A Coalition of Diverse Nationalist Forces

MINISTER FARRAKHAN ISSUED THE CALL, BUT A MILLION-PLUS BLACK MEN could not have been brought to Washington without the involvement of a broader base of nationalist activist-intellectuals. The National Million Man March and Day of Absence Organizing Committee's executive council represented an array of nationalist thought. Some advocated a partnership with black women; others promoted patriarchy. Some championed capitalism, others opposed it; some practiced an open democratic style of leadership, while others displayed an authoritarian approach. The "Mission Statement," written by Dr. Maulana Karenga, and Minister Farrakhan's keynote address embody many of these differences and contradictions. The mission statement reflects a "rounded view," it challenges individual African-American men and women, black organizations and institutions, and governmental agencies and corporations to change current social conditions. In the "mission statement" Karenga provided both a philosophical position and a specific agenda. He called on the state to cease attempts to privatize public wealth, to enact policies protecting the environment, and to reinvest in social development. Specifically, he demanded passage of H. R. 891, the Conyers Reparations Bill, implementation of universal health care, initiation of programs providing decent affordable housing, and the repeal of the Omnibus Crime Bill. Karenga also criticized corporations for "divestment in social structure, deindustrialization and corporate relocation." He challenged them to adopt humane policies that create safe working conditions, encourage "meaningful" worker participation in corporate decision-making, and abolish racial and gender discrimination. According to Hanes Walton, Jr., a group chaired by Dr. Robert T. Starks, a Chicago-based political scientist and activist, had prepared an even sharper policy manifesto, "The Million Man March Manifesto." Walton said that the report of this document was "bumped" from the MMM/DOA's program. Though often imprecise and moralistic, especially in its challenge to the corporations, the political perspective expressed by Karenga contrasts sharply with Farrakhan's vague, apolitical, request for the United States government to "repent" and his utter silence on corporate responsibility.¹⁷

Farrakhan's Challenge to Black Men

WHEREAS KARENGA STRUGGLED IN THE MISSION STATEMENT to "put some teeth" in an otherwise apolitical theme -- atonement -- Farrakhan in his keynote address unabashedly articulated the most irrational ideas. His coherent, but lengthy jeremiad was idealist, patriarchal, and reactionary. It was rooted in the antebellum doctrine of "Providential Design" and enunciated a pathological view of African Americans.

The "challenge to black men" expressed Farrakhan's metaphysical idealism in four ways. First, it was enveloped in religious mysticism, especially the idea of divine intervention. According to Farrakhan, a male deity, who he variously calls "Allah" or "God," actively guides human affairs. Articulating Nation of Islam orthodoxy, he thanked "Allah" for intervening "in our affairs in the person of Master Fard Muhammad, the Great Mahdi" and for bequeathing "a divine leader," Elijah Muhammad, to African Americans. Second, presenting himself as Muhammad's rightful successor, Farrakhan shrouded himself in messianism. Wilson Moses defined messianism as "the perception of a person or group, by itself or by others, as having a manifest destiny or a God-given role to assert the providential goals of history and to bring about the kingdom of God on earth." Asserting his messianic vision Farrakhan shrewdly stated, "You came not at the call of Louis Farrakhan, but you gathered here at the call of God. . . . Although the call was made through me, many have tried to distance the beauty of this idea from the person through whom the idea and the call was made." After alluding to himself as a prophet, he boldly proclaimed, "So today, whether you like it or not, God brought the idea through me . . . " The speech is littered with similar statements, but messianic visions and religious mysticism are not the only idealist notions expressed by Farrakhan.¹⁸

Third, he articulated a belief in numerology, "the study of the magic meaning of numbers." In a bizarre exegesis, Farrakhan attempted to derive real meaning from the 555-foot height of the Washington Monument by adding a one to make it 1555, the year he erroneously stated as when the first African captives were sold in Jamestown. Of course, Jamestown was not founded until 1607, and the first 20 Africans purchased there were probably indentured servants, rather than slaves. Farrakhan was referring to the aborted Spanish colony destroyed by a combined Indian attack and African revolt. This minor historical error could be dismissed if Farrakhan had not compounded it by quoting the mythical Willie Lynch, who is said to have delivered a speech in 1712 on slave control. William Lynch was not born until 1801. And Charles Lynch, whose name was used for the term lynching, was not born until 1736. The "Willie Lynch" discussed by Farrakhan is probably fiction, though like conspiracy rumors in the black community the Willie Lynch story embodies a symbolic truth. Farrakhan's explication of the Lynch myth preceded his explanation that the heights of the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, 19 feet each, and the number of their presidencies, three and sixteen (which also add up to 19) holds the secret of African influence on the conception of the mall. The African influence on early U.S. symbolism is undeniable, but Farrakhan makes this point in a strange and sterile way. Farrakhan presented mythology as history by substituting superstitious assertions for historical analysis.¹⁹

Farrakhan's selection of "atonement" as the theme guiding the Million Man March has confused and dismayed many, but this motif makes sense considering his belief in "Providential Design," the fourth example of his metaphysical idealism. This doctrine first emerged during slavery as antebellum black writers pondered the question of why Africans had been enslaved. "Providential Design" has both Afrocentric and Eurocentric expressions; that is, it may present either Africans or Europeans as the primary instruments of God's will. For example, a slave era black minister offered an African-centered version of this idealist doctrine. He stated, "God in his inscrutable way, had allowed Africans to be carried off into slavery so that they could be Christianized and civilized and return to uplift their kinsmen in Africa." Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, the nadir era emigrationist, provided a European-centered perspective of Providential Design. Turner claimed, "God seeing the African standing in need of civilization, sanctioned for a while the slave trade . . . as a test of the white man's obedience, and elevation of the Negro." Farrakhan provides both Eurocentric and Afrocentric interpretations.²⁰

Some commentators have interpreted Farrakhan's use of the concept white supremacy rather than the racist epithet "white devil" as evidence of a progressive transformation. They are terribly mistaken. Farrakhan conceptualized white supremacy in idealist terms as a racially specific "sickness." Regarding behavior, especially white racist behavior, African Americans commonly use the phrase "sickness" to connote mental disturbance or evil. Because Farrakhan also contended that white supremacy was the "fulfillment of prophesy" it appears that he is using it in the latter sense. The religious prophesy to which Farrakhan alluded is the Myth of Yacub. According to Farrakhan's mentor, Elijah Muhammad, blacks were "born righteous and turned to unrighteousness," while the white race was "made unrighteous by the god who made them (Mr. Yacub)." The Nation of Islam (NOI) locates the origin of white supremacy in Allah's decision to punish the "Asiatic" black man by granting Yacub's "grafted white devils" six millennia of world domination. Farrakhan uses the ambiguous phrases "white supremacy" and "sickness" to repackage his message, to make it appear compatible with liberal beliefs, but in reality he remains committed to genetic-based racist dogma. On the surface, there appears to be an affinity between his views and certain liberal misconceptions of racism. For instance, Cornel West's claim that "racism is a fundamental form of human evil" shares some epistemological foundations with Farrakhan's beliefs. Though idealist, West's interpretation is part of an ensemble of beliefs that advocate human agency and point toward progressive social change; whereas Farrakhan derives his understanding of white supremacy from the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and it is part of an ideological constellation that believes in divine retribution and envisions the construction of a theocratic world government.²¹

Farrakhan can probably mask the distinctions between his views and certain liberal conceptions of white supremacy, but his biological and religious concept of racism is antithetical to radical conceptions. Radicals view white supremacy as a relationship of domination that includes institutional mechanisms and corresponding ideological beliefs that justify the oppression of people whose physical features and cultural patterns differ from those of the dominant racial group. For radicals, racism or white supremacy is more than the belief that other people are inherently inferior, it is the power to structure the basic institutions of a society so that the rules, policies, and social relations give preference to the privileged "race" and discriminate against the oppressed "race." Farrakhan conceives of white supremacy in idealist, rather than in materialist terms. He locates the origin of racial oppression in prophesy; instead of human history, consequently, his conception of white supremacy remains rooted in the doctrine of "Providential Design."

In his Eurocentric account Farrakhan emphasizes whites as the instruments of God's punishment. In his Afrocentric version he blames blacks for their oppression. Speaking for his god, Farrakhan said: "And so, my children, I caused you to suffer in the furnace of affliction so that I might purify you and resurrect you from a grave of death and ignorance." Undergirding this explanation is the Nation of Islam's belief that the average black person is pathological and immoral -- thus, in need of spiritual "rebirth" and "atonement." Making this explicit Farrakhan admonished, "Clean up, black man, and the world will respect and honor you. But, you have fallen down like the prodigal son and you're husking corn and feeding swine . . . with the filth of degenerate culture." This statement came after a similar pronouncement: "[I]f we start dotting the black community with businesses, opening up factories, challenging ourselves to be better than we are, white folk, instead of driving by, using the N' word, they'll say . . . we can't say they're inferior anymore." Here Farrakhan, like Washington, suggested that black people are oppressed because they have yet to prove themselves worthy of respect. Later he declared, "Brothers and sisters, look at the afflictions that have come upon the black community. Do you know why we're being afflicted? God wants us to humble ourselves to the message that will make us atone and come back to Him and make ourselves whole again." Fusing his voice with that of Allah's, he claimed, "We've had enough distress, enough affliction. We're ready to bow down now. If my people who are called by my name would just humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sins, and heal their land." In this vein, he stated, "Freedom can't come from staying here and petitioning this great government. We're here to make a statement to the great government, but not to beg them. Freedom cannot come from no one but the god who can liberate the soul from the burden of sin." A brilliant orator, Minister Farrakhan succeeded in creating the illusion of a new departure while serving up refried NOI conservative orthodoxy.

Like his ideological great-grandfather, Booker T. Washington, Farrakhan is a master at obscuring his meaning by manipulating language. In three short sentences, he slyly managed to advocate emigrationism, apparently praise the U.S. government, and reject political struggle for collective liberation in favor of personal salvation. Later, he specifically proposed establishing an "Exodus Economic Fund." Thus, Farrakhan's retreat from struggle leads straight back to the repatriation fantasies of Marcus Garvey. According to him, the road to liberation does not come from struggle but from divine intervention. Meanwhile, African Americans are asked to raise money for immediate business development and, eventually, repatriation.

At the end of his sermon, Farrakhan proposed "real" actions. First, he recommended the marchers join religious congregations, and traditional black organizations like the NAACP, SCLC and the Urban League. Second, he proposed registering eight million new voters as either Independents, Democrats or Republicans. He even eschewed condemning the Republican Party; in fact, he placed the Republicans on par with the Democrats ("If you're a Democrat, that's fine. If you're a Republican, that's OK."). Using the donkey, the Democratic Party's symbol, he metaphorically demeaned blacks as "asses" being ridden by their liberal masters. Traditional democratic liberals and the neo-liberal new Democrats have politically abused black people, but Farrakhan failed to mention that blacks were also being trampled by a herd of rampaging G.O.P. elephants. Black people should not have allegiance to either capitalist party, since both have historically led racist, reactionary movements against blacks, however, at this historic moment it is the Republican Party that is leading the assault on our very existence. Farrakhan's token criticism of Newt Gingrich or Bob Dole cannot mask his failure to mobilize African Americans against the Republican Party as a political entity. Third, he called on African Americans to adopt black children and black prisoners; yet, he did not encourage his audience to challenge the concrete conditions and policies that produced increasing black incarceration and orphanage.

Fourth, Farrakhan specifically rejected the formation of a black political party, arguing, "What we want is not necessarily a third party, but a third force." Again, Farrakhan revealed his lack of faith in black self-activity. His major interest is in fundraising. Are the economic development fund and the Exodus fund the same thing? Further, it appears this fund would serve as seed capital for private enterprises. This of course explains why the black (petty) bourgeoisie flocked to Farrakhan; his economic development scheme offers a vehicle for them to acquire capital now that the strategy of franchise capitalism is being rescinded. The passage of California Proposition 209 confirms that their fears were real. Why should African Americans collectively contribute to the creation of private capitalist enterprises? By emphasizing private enterprise, Farrakhan, in the tradition of Washington, ignores that "black self-help" has always required struggling against the state. That is, economic progress is dependent on political struggle. In A Torchlight for America Farrakhan acknowledges this when he asks for a 15% income tax deduction for funds contributed to the NOI's economic development fund. Dorothy Height, a veteran civil rights activist, asserted "black self-help" includes pressuring the government to respect African-Americans' constitutional rights and humanity. In contradiction to Farrakhan, she contended the government has never given black people anything, arguing that the advances black people have made were a result of struggle. In the end, Farrakhan represents a militant racialist version of the conservatism of Clarence Thomas, Robert Woodson, Gwen Richardson and Armstrong Williams.²²

The March Aftermath

ON THE EVE OF THE MILLION MAN MARCH GEORGE CURRY, editor of Emerge, was an enthusiastic supporter of the "message and the messenger." However, by February of 1996 Curry had become skeptical and wondered whether Farrakhan would use his newly achieved influence to "cement his position as the No. 1 leader in black America?"; "use his clout to make other civil rights leaders more responsive?"; or "squander a golden opportunity to unify African Americans?" By the MMM anniversary Curry had concluded, "He will not expand his base and has undermined all the progress achieved by the Million Man March." What happened during the past year to turn George Curry, and middle class black men like him, into critics of "the new black leader?"

The apparent success of the Million Man March stimulated Farrakhan's messianic convictions. Unfortunately, it seems Farrakhan, like much of white and black America, also views black leadership through the prism of the "highlander complex" -- "there can be only one" -- consequently, in the wake of the MMM he pursued Curry's first option and sought to become the African-American national leader. The so-called World Friendship Tour, the Convention of the Oppressed, and the International Day of Atonement were all attempts to secure his position. Immediately after the march differences over strategy, organizational structure, gender equality, the amount of monies collected, and the organizational entity controlling their disbursement began to unravel the nationalist coalition essential in organizing the MMM and any subsequent political movement. Whereas before the MMM Farrakhan was cooperative, after the march, his messianic behavior alienated most of the National Million Man March and Day of Absence Organizing Committee's executive council from the post-MMM process. By the Convention of the Oppressed and the International Day of Atonement the nationalist coalition was in shambles. The nationalist coalition was destroyed by two factors: the previously described differences over strategy, ideology, and money, and opposition to Farrakhan's statements during the World Friendship Tour.

The summit strategy of bringing together leaders to outline a "Black Agenda" has always been a flawed elitist strategy, but for it to work, even symbolically, the participants must treat each other as equals. This, of course, is impossible since Farrakhan considers himself a prophet, and his acolytes in the Nation of Islam, the elect. Questions of financial impropriety combined with Farrakhan's narcissism and the Nation of Islam's political underdevelopment and opportunism to doom the National African American Leadership Summit and the Convention of the Oppressed.

Farrakhan on the World Stage

IN THE SPRING OF 1996 FARRAKHAN EMBARKED ON A WORLD TOUR designed to win him international recognition as the preeminent African-American leader. It is also likely that Malcolm's successful trips through Africa and the Middle East in 1964 served as a negative inspiration. These trips were signal events for both men. Malcolm's trips confirmed his movement away from mystical racialist assertions toward a leftist political analysis. Farrakhan's trip not only revealed his inability to grow beyond his NOI mysticism, but more important, it confirmed his reactionary politics. The geopolitical worlds in which they traveled were very different. Malcolm went to Africa and the Middle East during the early days of anti-imperialist post-colonial governments. He met with revolutionaries like Kwame Nkrumah, Ben Bella, Sekou Touré, Abdul Babu, and representatives of national liberation movements who were trying to construct socialist societies. By the time of Farrakhan's tour these leaders and others like them had been overthrown by reactionaries aligned with the U.S. and multinational corporations. However, the rightward trend in international politics does not totally explain the differences between the positions articulated by Malcolm in 1964 and Farrakhan in 1996.

The trips illuminate the contradictions between Malcolm and Farrakhan. While in Africa Malcolm began to reassess his views on gender, reconsider the causes of racial oppression, and to criticize international capitalism. For instance, after his return to the U.S. Malcolm located white supremacy in structural factors, rather than in mythology, or genetics. In contrast, Farrakhan defended dictators and theocrats, praised the junior partners of international capitalism, and denied the existence of slavery.

For African-American activist-intellectuals perhaps the most troubling of Farrakhan's many controversial positions were his defense of the Nigerian regime of General Sani Abacha and his denial of slavery in the Sudan and Mauritania. The Abacha regime turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to Royal Dutch Shell's devastation of Ogoniland, but viciously repressed Ogoni activism against their joint venture partners. Nigeria accounts for 14% of the giant multinational oil corporations' global profits and controls 47% of Nigeria's oil industry. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) estimates that over the last 40 years Shell has made more than $30 billion dollars from oil extracted from Ogoni territory. The situation in Ogoniland represents the usual combination of capitalist exploitation and racist degradation characteristic of multinational corporations' practices in the third world at home and abroad. British journalist David Wheeler suggests the economic and environmental ravages in Ogoniland have been so acute because Shell does not perform the same environmental, economic and social "impact assessments" they do in western nations. In defending the Abacha dictatorship against charges of human rights violations in their murder of Ogoni nationalist and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others, Farrakhan is objectively supporting Royal Dutch Shell's and other oil corporations' exploitation of the Ogoni people and the despoliation of their farmland and fishing waters. Farrakhan's insensitivity to the brutality inflicted on the Ogoni by a military dictatorship in the service of international capital provides a glimpse into his economic philosophy and how dissidents would fare under a Farrakhan regime. Nevertheless, as revealing as his position on Nigeria, is his defense of the slaveholding Islamic theocracy led by General Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir and Sheik Hassan al-Turabi that best exposes his hypocrisy.²³

Amazingly, the "prophet of truth" who claims to make "blind people see, deaf people hear, and dumb people speak" could not see slaves in the Sudan, nor hear their cries. Perhaps, his silence was purchased by Moammar Qaddafi's promise of $100 million to $1 billion? Maybe he applies the concept of Providential Design to the Sudan and Mauritania and also views slavery in these countries as the fulfillment of prophesies? Or perhaps, Farrakhan sees slavery as an acceptable vehicle for converting Africans to Islam? Yet, in contrast to the Sudan Farrakhan had no trouble finding "slaves" at the National Black Journalists Convention.

Repressing a National Convention

AFTER FARRAKHAN'S INTERNATIONAL TOUR, the National African American Leadership Summit and the Million Man March, Inc., sponsored what his junior partner, Rev. Benjamin Chavis, called a "political convention of the oppressed" in St. Louis, Missouri. During late summer Farrakhan and Chavis's supporters predicted that 70,000 people would flood St. Louis. By late September Chavis was variably predicting 30,000 or 15-20,000 delegates. News sources and participants estimated approximately 400 delegates and observers participated in the convention's opening on September 27. What went wrong? The event was poorly organized. As late as the middle of September local activists in St. Louis knew few specifics about the plans and had not been engaged in mobilization activities. Publicity did not appear until a few weeks before the convention. Jamala Rogers, chairperson of the Organization for Black Struggle, a grassroots revolutionary nationalist collective in St. Louis, expressed concern that "the organizing process was elitist and undemocratic." Before the convention, Rogers, a veteran activist warned, "We must be careful that we don't duplicate a media event similar to the Republican and Democratic Conventions -- all fluff and no substance." Another troubling concern for Rogers was the process of delegate selection. Amazingly, anyone who paid a $100 fee could become a voting delegate! This provision privileged the financially secure, and those willing to trust Farrakhan and Chavis with their money. Finally, Rogers worried about the failure to distribute a draft of the Action Agenda before the convention. Makin Hamzah, a student at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE), claimed he never received nor heard the Action Agenda discussed while at the convention. Hamzah argued "the NPC resembled a rally more than it did a convention."

These problems seriously diminished community participation. According to James Guthrie, another student at SIUE, he attended Farrakhan's closing convention address only after learning that the $10 admission fee had been waived. The decision to waive this fee explains why "convention attendance" rose tenfold from 400 at the start to 4,000 at the end. Embedded in this story is the truth about the Farrakhan phenomena. Large numbers of black people will go hear him speak, but very few will follow him.

The "Action Agenda" produced by the convention was a contradictory document that contained a bizarre array of specific recommendations and vague suggestions, progressive demands and reactionary goals. For instance, it called for an end to sanctions against Cuba and the reactionary dictatorships in Nigeria, Libya, and the Sudan. The convention endorsed reparations, but its main demand was to obliterate the distinction between church and state. Indeed, the convention of the oppressed demanded the creation of "a God-centered government."

In the end, the failure of the Convention of the Oppressed revealed that the Million Man March promised far less than its advocates believed. The MMM mainly attracted a moderate group of middle class black men who believed in private enterprise, male supremacy, and voluntarism. It was always more an historic event than the launching of a movement. Through their narrow authoritarian approach and questionable financial management Farrakhan and Chavis drove many liberal, progressive, and revolutionary activists and intellectuals away from the process. As a result they had no base upon which to build for the convention. Nevertheless, Farrakhan's misreading of his support was also a major factor in the MMM's failure to realize, even, its meager potential. Farrakhan's messianic vision convinced him that he led a nation of millions, rather than several thousand zealots. Consequently, he became comfortable and began to say on national television things he had previously reserved for the mosque, or friendly audiences. For instance, during an appearance on Nightline, on the eve of the anniversary of the Million Man March, Farrakhan admitted to Ted Koppel his belief that a giant wheel, a heavily armed spaceship, was poised to destroy white Americans and blacks who had not joined the Nation of Islam. He said, "This is that wheel that was spoken of by Ezekiel, it is over our heads in North America and soon you will see these wheels over the major cities of America. . . . It is what that movie was about. And if it were gibberish, they made a lot of money, Mr. Koppel, on that movie called Independence Day." The public expression of this and similar views undermined Farrakhan's remaining support among the men who attended and supported the Million Man March.

Militant Black Conservatism

FARRAKHAN IS A MILITANT BLACK CONSERVATIVE. Militant black Conservatism is an idealist theory, and like all idealist philosophies holds that social consciousness precedes social existence. It uses racial essentialism in two ways: to promote black unity and assert intrinsic white evil. The concept of providential design, or God's plan for the purification and deliverance of the "black man," functions as a magnetic force binding Muslims, African spiritualists and Christians in a shared prophetic racial destiny. In this sense, racial essentialism is foundational to militant black conservatism; from this perspective, "races" have fixed traits impervious to social intervention. Accordingly, ideological and political differences rooted in different social experiences, due to class and gender differences, are insignificant when compared with the commonality of blackness. Also, militant black conservatives' essentialist view of race, especially their belief in whites' genetic predisposition for evil, enables them to mask their fundamental conservatism behind vociferous condemnations of white supremacy, something their "moderate" conservative counterparts, such as Clarence Thomas, Gwen Richardson and Alan Keyes, cannot do.

Patriarchy is another essential element in the constellation of ideas composing militant black conservatism. Calls for black men to "take responsibility as men" refer to Islamic, Christian, and capitalist conceptions of manhood that are essentially antiquated. At the core of militant black conservatism is a pathological view of the masses of African Americans. Militant and moderate black conservatives, believe that the masses of black people are "sick" and in need of moral regeneration -- thus, the burden of the black elite. Related to this is the traditional preference for limited government that they share with moderate blacks, and white conservatives. Consequently, militant black conservatives are philosophically opposed to social reproductive expenditures and emphasize individual moral responsibility, entrepreneurship and voluntarism.

Elitism, if not authoritarianism, characterizes their leadership style and approach to decision-making. Militant black conservatism also has proto-fascist elements. It combines racial chauvinism, mysticism, anti-working class petty bourgeois ideology, and idolatry of leaders with an inclination toward intimidation and violence. These embryonic fascist tendencies, coupled with Farrakhan's messianism, the NOI's penchant for cynical moneymaking ventures, and questionable economic management practices, combined to alienate Farrakhan from the nationalist coalition in the period following the march. Criticism of Farrakhan by Haki Madhubuti, Kalamu ya Salaam, Ron Daniels and Conrad Worrill represent this development. Even a few of the black public intellectuals began to distance themselves from their new "brother."

Though he obscures his retreat in militant, mystical language, Farrakhan, like Washington, has capitulated to the current "nadir." Farrakhan is poised to play a similar debilitating role in contemporary black politics. In the 1890s, Washington's deemphasis of political agitation helped to facilitate the revocation of gains made during the First Reconstruction. Today, explaining the present assault on black America as the result of "Providential Design" is equally insidious. Moreover, Farrakhan's failure to condemn the Republican Party, the major vehicle for this retrenchment, implies his tacit philosophical agreement with them. Even more troubling is the specter of an emerging alliance between Farrakhan and Lyndon LaRouche.

The black liberation movement will only be rebuilt through strategies and tactics that mobilize the broadest numbers in the black community. A resurgent movement will require principled ideological debate, collective leadership, and democratic decision-making. A new movement must adopt strategies and tactics that mobilize African Americans around quality-of-life issues, promote multiracial coalition-building, emphasize work-site as well as community-based struggles, and independent institution-building. Finally, while fighting for specific reforms that relieve racial, gender and class oppression, the black liberation movement must advocate multiracial democracy, gender equality and scientific socialism. The Nation of Islam's dogmatic messianism, racialism, male supremacy and bourgeois capitalist approaches are antithetical to such aims. Further, the black liberation movement must break the pattern of authoritarianism characterizing black politics and expand the realm of political activity beyond electoralism. The black liberation movement finds itself at another fork in the road; it can follow either Farrakhan backward, toward the ideas of Elijah Muhammad, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington, or it can take the Malik Shabazz-Martin Luther King road forward. The evolving ideas of Malik Shabazz suggest combining revolutionary socialist ideology and revolutionary nationalist institution-building with the civil rights tactics of mass mobilization, confrontation, and electoral politics.

---

The authors would like to thank Helen Neville, John McLendon, Jamala Rogers and Edwin Marquit for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, "The Divided Mind of Black America," Race and Class, Vol. 36, No. 1, 1994): 61-72. return

2. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro (New York: Collier, 1954): 279-80. return

3. Marcus Garvey, "Negroes who Seek Social Equality," E. David Cronon (ed.), Marcus Garvey: (Englewood, Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973): 56. return

4. Wilson Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982, repr., Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993): 207; Elijah Muhammad, The Supreme Wisdom Vol. 1 (Newport News, Va: United Brothers Communications System): 30, and "The Mother Plane" Final Call July 16, 1996, pp. 18-19; and Shawna Maglangbayan, Garvey, Lumumba, Malcolm: National-Separatists (Chicago: Third World Press, 1972): 93-103. return

5. Hanes Walton, Jr., "Public Policy Responses to the Million Man March," The Black Scholar (Vol. 25, No. 4, 1995): 17-22. return

6. Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969; paperback Anchor Books, 1970): 193-245; Samuel Yette, The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America (New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1971): 161-307; John Sibley Butler, "Myrdal Revisited: The Negro in Business," Daedalus (Vol. 124, No. 1, Winter 1995): 211; and Lila Ammons, "The Evolution of Black-owned Banks in the United States Between the 1880s and 1990s," Journal of Black Studies (Vol. 26, No. 4 March 1996): 467-489. return

7. Adolph Reed Jr., "The Black Revolution' and the Reconstitution of Domination," in Adolph Reed Jr., (ed.), Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s: (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1994): 61-93; and Victor Perlo, "Deterioration of Black Economic Conditions in the 1980s," Review of Radical Political Economics, (Vol. 20: No. 2): 55-60. return

8. Richard Child Hill, "Race, Class and the State: 50; Harold Cruse, Revolution or Rebellion (New York: William and Morrow Company, 1970):195-218; and Harold M. Baron, "Racism Transformed: The Implications of the 1960s," Review of Radical Political Economics (Vol. 17, No. 3, 1985): 23. return

9. Robert B. Reich, "Industrial Evolution," Democracy: A Journal for Political Renewal and Radical Change (Vol. 3, No. 3, Summer 1983): 11-13; Rodney D. Green and Joseph P. Reidy, "Accumulation, Urban Segregation and the Black Role in the U.S. Economy," Review of Radical Political Economics (Vol. 24, No. 2, 1992): 88; and Victor Perlo, "Deterioration of Black Economic Conditions in the 1980s": 55-60. return

10. Marc Breslow, "The Racial Divide Widens": 8-11, 38-9; Victor Perlo, "Deterioration of Black Economic Conditions in the 1980s,": 55-60; Matt Asher, "Witness to the Revelation," Liberty (Vol. 9, No. 3, January 1996): 25; Michael Omi, "Shifting the Blame: Racial Ideology and Politics in the Post-Civil Rights Era," Critical Sociology (Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 1991): 77-98;. The conservative ascension was aided by a liberal retreat. See Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, "Race," The Atlantic Monthly (May, 1991): 53-86. For devastating critiques of neo-liberal ideology and the liberal abandonment of the fight for racial justice see Steve Vieux, "In the Shadow of Neo-Liberal Racism," Race & Class (Vol. 36, No. 1, 1994): 23-32; David Roediger, "The Racial Crisis of American Liberalism," in his Toward the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994): 121-26; and Steven Steinberg, "The Liberal Retreat from Race," New Politics (Vol. 5, No. 1, Summer 1995): 30-51. return

11. Howard Fineman and Vern E. Smith, "An Angry Charmer,'" Newsweek (October 30, 1995): 32-35, 38; and George E. Curry, "After the Million Man March," Emerge (February 1996): 38. return

12. Manning Marable, Black American Politics: 90-97 & 123-24, Race, Reform and Rebellion (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, revised second edition, 1991): 134, and "Memory and Militancy": 21. return

13. George Curry, "After the Million Man March,": 47. return

14. . On March 7, 1996 the Clinton Administration announced a three-year suspension of set-aside programs. President Clinton left the door slightly ajar by granting federal agencies the right to use other criteria, such as price breaks and extra points, to bluster bids by minority and woman contractors, if they can justify it. More importantly the Small Business Administration's Section 8(a) program was left untouched pending a review from the Justice Department to determine whether or not it is a set-aside. See Steven A. Holmes, "White House to Suspend a Program for Minorities," The New York Times (Friday, March 8, 1996): p. A1. See also Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1993): xx; Reginal Stuart, "Time Marches On,": 30; George Curry, "After the March,": 47; John Sibley Butler, "Myrdal Revisited": 211; and Bill Montague, "Restructuring, and Layoffs, Here to Stay," USA Today, February 19, 1996, p. 1. col. 1, return

15. Andrea G. Hunter and James Earl Davis, "Constructing Gender: An Exploration of Afro-American Men's Conceptualization of Manhood," Gender and Society (Vol. 6, No. 2, September 1992): 468, 473; and Sylvester Monroe, "The Black Male: America's Most Feared," Emerge (October 1995): 28. return

16. Patricia J. Williams, "Different Drummer Please, Marchers!" The Nation (October 30, 1995): 493-94; Geneva Smitherman, "A Womanist Looks at the Million Man March," in Haki Madhubuti and Ron Karenga (ed.), Million Man March Day of Atonement: A Commentary (Chicago and Los Angeles: Third World Press and University of Sankore Press, 1996) 104-7; George E. Curry, "After the March,": 44.return

17. Dr. Maulana Kare, "Public Policy": 19 and Minister Louis Farrakhan, "Challenges Black Men": 27. We would like to thank Dr. James Stewart, Vice Provost for Equal Opportunity at Penn State University, for sending us a copy of the unpublished "final draft" of the MMM/DOA Mission Statement and Antonio Sardino, assistant professor of Social Work at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville for the text of Minister Farrakhan's address from the Worldwide Web.return

18. Much of Farrakhan's MMM keynote is a restatement of "A Vision for America" the concluding chapter in his A Torchlight for America (Chicago: FCN Publishing Co., 1993): 151-60. This work is the clearest statement of Farrakhan's socio-politico-economic philosophy. Unless otherwise indicated all subsequent quotes from Minister Farrakhan are from his MMM keynote address. Wilson Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth: 4. return

19. Dumas Malone (ed.), "Charles Lynch" and "William F. Lynch" Dictionary of American Biography Vol. 6, (Charles Scribner and Sons, 1993): 519-20 and 524-25. return

20. St. Clair Drake, The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (Chicago: Third World Press, 1977): 41; and Clarence E. Walker, Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essay and Reappraisals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991): 91-92. return

21. Elijah Muhammad, "The Mother Plane," p. 18. West's comment was made during a "conversation" on affirmative action among a group of African-American public intellectuals moderated by Henry L. Gates. See "Dialogue on Affirmative Action," Emerge, March 1996: 27. return

22. Farrakhan, A Torchlight for America: 87; and Dorothy Height, "Self-Help -- A Black Tradition," Nation (July 24/31, 1989): 136-138. return

23. David Wheeler, "Blood on British Hands," New Statesman & Society (17 November 1995): 14-15; Eghosa E. Osaghae, African Affairs (Vol. 94, No. 376, July 1995): 325-44; and Paul Lewis, "After Nigeria Represses, Shell Defends Its Record," New York Times, February 13, 1996, p. A1. return

Contents of No. 22