The Nation of Islam's Pulse/March Madness

...Yet another railed against "these right-wing insane folks that were elected in 1994...

...Farrakhan's new position as a "true leader," especially coming on the heels of the Simpson verdict, seemed further evidence that blacks and whites in America no longer have the ability, or even the willingness, to see eye to eye...

...The way I like it is the way it is, I got mine, Don't worry 'bout his...

...He held out one of the cards for them, and sure enough there was a picture of Farrakhan on it...

...like the others he was neatly attired in a suit, bow tie, and top coat, but his face was that of a hard-lived life...

...The soundtrack was a mite unusual, though, for a day allegedly set aside to make amends to the womenfolk—James Brown's "Sex Machine...

...That's why the primary debate conducted in the media about the march—whether it was possible to separate the messagefrom the messenger—was a bogus one...

...indeed, apart from the Black Muslims who follow him, he seems to hate everybody...

...They need to turn that up...

...I just hope it doesn't spill over...

...Looks like you got yourself a flat tire," he said...

...Then he turned his back on me to address four black men who had walked up on the other side of him: "Brothers, have you had a chance to check out our new telephone calling cards...

...Al Sharpton, the unctuous scandal-mongercum-power-broker...

...I didn't look at him either, turning my head round and round to take in the scene instead...

...And after they coughed up, he exhorted them to dig deep and cough up again...

...On the Mall itself thousands of men were already gathered by the steps of the Capitol, even though the sun was still more than an hour away...

...Reporter: "There really is...

...Black men were milling about everywhere, and the sky was beginning to lighten...

...The fist kept smacking, and his head kept bobbing, and he kept glaring...

...A Washington Post survey found that two out of three marchers had annual incomes of more than $30,000, and one in five more than $75,000...

...Morning," I said as affably as I could...

...On radio and television, all afternoon, that evening, and the following day, that message was repeated ad nauseam...

...Bakewell told the crowd that The American Spectator December 1995 51 Loony Tunes by John Corry they had come to Washington to make a statement to America—and that "the best way to make a statement, brother, is to make sure that dollar leaves your pocket...

...Like sex, hate sells, and few peddle it better than Farrakhan...

...He was wearing a bow tie, and a top coat, and he flashed me a winning ear-to-ear smile...

...The meaning of that moral integrity wasn't lost on George Stallings, a former pastor of the Catholic Church who left amid allegations of child molestation...

...Steve Cokely declared, "Any time we can instigate . . . white-onwhite violence, it is in our interest...

...And some were using the event as an excuse to unleash their own hatreds...

...Another commentator announced, "Newt Gingrich is attempting to accelerate our destruction...

...Over his suit and bowtie he was wearing a long black leather overcoat and black leather gloves...

...gang members got the salute, too, especially the one who announced to the crowd, "Beatin' on the womens—it ain't gonna happen no mo' ." Farrakhan finally took the stage very late in the afternoon, and his mumbo-jumbo about numerology and the freemasons started many marchers away down Pennsylvania Avenue...

...He reckoned that "such a man is worthy of death"—and within two months, Malcolm was slain...

...To phrase the moral problem of the march that way suggested that Farrakhan's essential message was a good one—uphold family values, stay off drugs, have self-respect, get control of your money and your life...

...Being the one true leader takes money, of course, so it was no surprise when a Farrakhan deputy got the crowd start filling the collection boxes...

...H 6 6 ow you doing...

...But that wasn't enoughFarrakhan, after all, maintains a 77-acre country estate in addition to his two posh Chicago residences, though the media didn't mention this, either—and so Brotherhood Crusade President Danny Bakewell came to the stage to get the brothers to cough up yet one more time...

...You heard the numbers...

...tinely manage to exceed it...

...I asked the first Nation of Islam man I came to, affecting my whitest, country-clubbiest, Dick van Dykest tone...

...Instead he looked down at my bike tires, which had been leaking air all morning...

...But what mustn't be ignored when evaluating Farrakhan is that his fix for what's wrong almost always involves getting followers to absorb and adopt his many virulent hatreds—of whites, Jews, homosexuals, Koreans, and on and on...

...As-salaam aleikum, my brothers," he said forcefully anytime new arrivals to the burgeoning crowd walked by him...

...There were at least thirty witnesses to the assault—but the police who arrived on the scene were all black, and they let the black girl go...

...Their brand of Islam offers actual reform to the suffering, real redemption to the wicked...

...Not one of the hundreds of reports of the march I saw thought this worthy of mention...

...So, in the shadow of the Holocaust Museum, between the Washington Monument and the U. S. Capitol, one of the most virulent bigots in American society was acclaimed by a cheering throng as the true leader of nearly a million black Americans...

...Hatred can be a useful motivational tool for a man anxious to clean up his life, and like all demagogues who prey on the wretchedness of others, Farrakhan is adept at cultivating it in those who come to him for help...

...Newt Gingrich has nothing to do with us...

...When they get together," an Arab pushcart vendor told me, "sometimes there is problem...

...His list of prejudices is a long one...

...I went over to him...

...erupted throughout the afternoon...

...But then Jennings cut away from her, too, a minute or two after zapping Franks—leaving the impression that all ABC really wanted was to get Franks's damned negative comments off the air...

...God, he declared, had chosen to speak through him...

...Finally, I spoke: "How you doing this morning...

...Gary Franks (R-Conn...

...Well," I said, "I was just wondering how many people you think are going to be show up for the march...

...He has long maintained that wealthy Jews collaborated with the Nazis to exterminate the poor ones...

...One of his eyes was misshapen and partly closed over, as if it had been mangled in a fight...

...And Lowery complimented the marchers for attaining "a new height of moral integrity...

...Some 50 The American Spectator December 1995 African drummers were playing and you could hear cheers and chants rising up from the throng...

...Two days after the march, I came upon a crowd gathered around a black girl and a white girl having an argument...

...Stallings, reporting on the event for Washington's WPFW-FM, decried "the unmitigated gall of Newt Gingrich to try to tell us what to do...

...Yes, I do," I answered...

...There were voterregistration stations scattered around the Mall, and there was no question that, in the pantheon of the hated, a special place is reserved for Newt Gingrich and all Republicans...

...C'mon," he implored her, "we just had a march about this the other day...

...Farrakhan admitted, at the march, that for some people he was a nightmare, but with the national attention focused on him, he didn't say who or why...

...Do you hate white people...

...And in 1964, not long after he succeeded Malcolm X as a Nation of Islam minister in Harlem, Farrakhan wrote, "Malcolm shall not escape...

...Joseph Lowery, a confidant of Martin Luther King's—and, as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the most venerable and visible figures on the national black stage—said that the march's enormous turnout refuted "those who thought the results of the last election were a mandate for malice...

...The Rev...

...I had gone down to the rally on my bicycle, and I pedaled away...

...A lot of the "reformed" L.A...

...I hope there is no problem, but I think will be problem...

...And it was clear from talking to the brothers in the bow ties that they really are full of hate...

...We on the march...

...But his core message is actually much more of a Faustian bargain: I can give you the discipline to turn your life around, but you must become as I am...

...No major media outlet dared to depart from the official, pre-determined line on the event—that it was a day of atonement, a celebration of unity...

...There was no way you could separate this message from this messenger, and Farrakhan knew it, telling the audience that they couldn't separate Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Newton, and Einstein from their messages, either...

...No sir," he said, though he didn't look at me when he said it...

...That was reason enough for many conservatives to support the march, and for many blacks—the majority of whom were middle class—to attend...

...N obody disputes the fact that the Nation of Islam has been particularly successful at getting men, often the most desperate of the desperate, to straighten out their lives and heed the call of righteousness and clean living...

...By and large, then, the marchers were not the worst-off segment of the black community...

...Several days before the rally, he remarked that Jews were "bloodsuckers," but this was nothing new...

...A million [n-word] in Washington," said one man in an online forum...

...Though the metaphor didn't strike me until much later, the white of his eye was a bloody red...

...Instead, the network preferred the cheerful and utterly banal exchanges Jennings engaged in with his on-scene reporters—Jennings: "Is there a multitude of experiences there...

...What a nightmare...

...At rallies during the weekend before the march, various activists whipped their audiences into a frenzy with racist and separatist bile...

...ABC was hardly alone in its fecklessness and dishonesty...

...But you had to talk to Farrakhan's hardcore followers, the brothers in the bow ties themselves, to know just how bad...

...Sporadic chants of "Newt's Gotta Go...

...THE NATION OF ISLAM'S PULSE t'SZS1.41: March Madness by M. D. Carnegie 1 n the days leading up to Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, people around Washington were quite unabashedly discussing their apprehensions in bars, in offices, on computer networks, in casual conversation...

...He nodded his head—and then spit on the ground at my feet...

...You must put on a bow tie, you must give me your money, and above all you must learn how and why to hate...

...As thousands of black men began gathering in the darkness of a cold, crisp autumn morning, then, you could understand why so many people in Washington were sad and afraid...

...And fight promoter and activist Rock Newman—you had to hear this one to believe it—exhorted 0. J. Simpson and "all the brothers like him" to "return to [their] wives...

...Sampson asked for a second, and when cries came up from the crowd, he declared that the motion had been seconded and adopted...

...I asked him...

...Al Sampson of California took to the podium and declared he was making a motion, as if in parliament—those at the march were to accept Louis Farrakhan as their "one true leader...

...got it from a member of his jury, not on your television, which was pre-set to uplift...

...There was a widespread feeling that what was going to happen on the Mall that day—a million men being brought together by a bigot of the very first order—was a very bad thing...

...Beautiful," he said...

...A white bar owner confided, "Mostly when there's violence they end up hurting themselves...

...The kind of electricity that's in the air before any large crowd event was starting to be felt by everyone...

...His hatreds are venomous and dangerous, in short, yet his acolytes rouM. D. Carnegie is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...All the while his head was bobbing up and down in that just-sacked-the-quarterback kind of way...

...one of the Nation of Islam brethren shouted joyously...

...But then she broke free and smashed the white girl's face repeatedly, cutting her cheek badly and giving her one hell of a black eye...

...They have a picture of the Minister right on the front, and cost just tendollars...

...When Peter Jennings asked Rep...

...I didn't speak at first, but stood near enough to force him, however silently, to acknowledge my presence...

...Nobody in the media seemed particularly interested in this, though, which was why the coverage of the event was so fawning, so happy, and so absolutely untrue...

...Then I came upon an especially sad-looking man...

...You do not want those people running loose around Washington...

...I didn't bother to ask about James Brown...

...f the Hitler connection seems gratuitous, / it's only because news coverage failed to remark upon the event's most obvious quality, apart from the racism: It was at bottom a political rally...

...It was still well before sunrise, and we were on a corner a number of blocks from the Mall proper...

...Forget about atonement—Louis Farrakhan would call that progress...

...I overheard a black truck driver telling a white colleague: "I heard there's going to be maybe 20,000 gang members...

...Commentators repeatedly glossed over the bigotry by saying the march was something larger than just Farrakhan, which was true—but true in the way that German nationalism was larger than just Hitler...

...Few speakers got as many of them as the Rev...

...You seen the news," he said, his smile instantly gone...

...A black man grabbed the black girl, and pulled her aside...

...Just fine, sir" he said, emphasizing the word with a voice damn near choked with hatred...

...If you needed still more confirmation that this was a political rally and not a day of spiritual atonement, you could look out at the sea of clenched fists—the black power salute was visible often and everywhere (though, just as when O.J...

...He looked at me, curled one hand into a fist, and started beating it against the flat palm of his other hand...

...As one of them told me, the march was simply "about fixing what's wrong...

...Before Franks could complete his thoughts, though, Jennings abruptly cut him off, claiming the network had to get back to live coverage of Rosa Parks, who was very badly reading a speech that sounded as if it had been written by a Nation of Islam staffer...

...Yee-uh," he snarled...

...In the strangest and, in some ways, most terrifying moment of the afternoon, the Rev...

...I thought I might as well get right to the point...

...He has called Judaism a "gutter religion," and New York the "capital of the Jews...

...His magnificent oratorical skills made the evil message sound oh so beautiful...

...Giant TV screens had been erected, and a sound system was blasting loud music...

...Freedom ain't free...

...He regularly demonizes the "blue-eyed devil...

...But when he launched in on "white supremacy"—it had a harder edge as he pronounced it supremeacy—many who had been ambling away stopped in their tracks...

...about the event, as it was going on, Franks rightly replied that the Nation of Islam was "very similar to the Ku Klux Klan...

...For decades he has been spewing hate-mongering, divisive, racist claptrap...