The March: What was Said

...This is the prettiest sight I ever seen in my whole life," said Cora Masters Barry, oblivious to her husband, Mayor Marion, in a Daktari suit keeping time to Maya Angelou's "Clap Hands" poem, praying that no one thought that the Rev...

...Damu Smith from Greenpeace said, "[The media] can tell their lies, but there are more than one million black men...

...Maybe not, but it sure helps...

...Two blocks from the dais, a New Jersey contingent observed their day of atonement by draining Foster's Lager oil-cans out of brown paper bags, while many dumped dollars on Korean hot-dog vendors against the orders of Farrakhan's economic embargo...

...This unpleasantness was, contrary to the already-conventional wisdom, mandated from the podium- even though the 8-hour, 60-plus speaker docket saw many a strong black man slumped over a cooler, aching to his dendrites from tedium...

...The Post figures were consistent with my encounters on the march...

...It was still Farrakhan's day...

...We're not here to tear down America," he said before doing so until dusk, referring to his slave home as "this pharaoh and this Egypt...

...Only one death-a stat not usually trumpeted after a Kiwanis convention as an indication of success...

...And before he went out in his "Up with hope, down with dope" blaze, he managed to sneak in these pearls: "Slave masters never retire...

...the prostitute must regain her character...

...Is it behavior or is it the rules...

...Why are there so many blacks in jail...

...Proceedings were largely graded on a curious sliding scale that betrayed everyone's innate fear of what could go wrong...

...But it's no wonder expectations were low, from Farrakhan's hatemongering to the militaristic Fruit of Islam, Farrakhan's soldier unit, hovering around the bullet-proofed podium and lending fascistic mise-en-sc?ne...

...According to the Rev., brothers should sell cocaine in powdered form instead of crack-due to lighter sentencing and all...

...Pimps never retire...

...Cloaked like an Afrocentric pi?ata, former congressman Gus Savage, who at times can make Farrakhan look like Oskar Schindler, added: "Blacks should atone not for our anger, but for not being angry enough" and for not "taking control of our economy in defiance of white power, in defiance of Jewish influence...

...But perhaps Farrakhan has been undervalued as Black America's physician, able to inoculate his people against rising crime, illegitimacy, and poverty rates by throwing a picnic on the Mall complete with smokin' church choirs and some hell-for-leather blame-gaming, all the while solidifying an 87 percent favorability rating with those in attendance...

...But why quibble over numbers...

...When two aspiring documentarians from Louisville, Ky, poked a camera in my face to solicit views on Farrakhan, they defied me to cite specific examples of his hatred...

...Speak on it," amen'd his escort Lana Lang, who repeatedly cautioned me to "write the truth...

...King's '63 "symphony of brotherhood...

...Everything he says I'm in total agreement with...

...today's the black man's day...

...He's a profound brother...

...Even Jesse Jackson, who spent the march as he is spending the 1990s-in Farrakhan's shadow-jacked up the rhetoric and was every bit as divisive as the man who came to fame back in 1984 threatening to "punish with death" anyone who said anything bad about Jesse...

...Every time the audience was ready to slumber, it was roused by one or another trench-mouthed applause line...

...The March: What Was Said by Matt Labash At first glance, Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March was innocuous enough: middle-aged black men with salt-and-pepper beards and Morehouse sweatshirts mixing with Student Union revolutionaries sporting cowrie-shell necklaces that look like Motherland gnocchis-all embracing and dewy-eyed and ushering in a new era of good feeling...

...White dreams have crippled many black children, and white values have maimed many black families because the selfishness and greed of whites do not serve us well...

...You can't take the answer of a Jew for what Minister Farrakhan said, you gotta listen to him yourself, because a Jew could twist anything around-I'm not saying we hate Jews-but any other race outside the Black Muslims, we will not believe...

...Jackson asked...

...As I pulled out a copy of Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind the Nation of Islam's "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews" Harold Brackman's response to the Nation's notorious anti-Semitic tract, Lamont Woods said, "We don't respond to negativity like that...

...If it's not Napoleon blowing the Sphinx's nose off because "it reminded you too much of the black man's majesty," it's Mark Fuhrman saying "that he is like a god," an observation not without irony after Farrakhan equated himself to Jesus, and considering he preaches the gospel of Elijah Muhammad, who explicitly stated, "The white man is the devil, the black man is God...

...That doesn't change the fact that "rich white men are wreaking havoc in our community," according to Smith...

...These sentiments echoed elsewhere, from the companion of a white reporter who was told by a young black gentlemen, "I could take out his fat white ass for you" and from another reporter in line at a lemonade concession, who, when it was her turn, was met by a middle-aged black intercessor who told a teenaged boy behind her, "You're next in line...

...the white-supremacist National Park Service put the number at 400,000...

...Don't take strips of [his message] and try to perpetrate that on people...

...Rock Newman told the crowd it was 1.5 million...

...Black man," he said, "you don't have to bash white people...

...George Stallings's admonition, "Help us to put away our crack, and clean up our act," was directed his way...

...Farrakhan's not a racist," said Ibn Mitchell...

...People have called him a bigot, they've called him a racist, but they've never called him a liar," Lang said, bemoaning a biased media, many of whom were there broadcasting gavel-to-gavel coverage...

...Not all, of course, were Farrakhan supporters, but as a Washington Post survey of 1,047 participants showed, half were there "to send a message to white people," six in ten had an unfavorable impression of whites and four in ten had a bad impression of Jews...

...co-chairmen Farrakhan and Benjamin Chavis said 2 million...

...The real evil in America," he said, "is the idea that undergirds the setup of the Western World, and that idea is called white supremacy...

...Broadcasters and print jockeys waxed euphoric about how peaceful and ecumenical it all was going down, how Farrakhan was perhaps a sideline freak attraction and not at all the impetus for the shebang...

...the slaves have to save their minds...

...If you wanted to pick up oppugnant vibes, all you had to do was take a walk along the march's outlying areas...

...And despite his freshly inspired outreach to the Jewish community, book vendors still sold titles such as Conspiracy to Destroy Black Youth (Parts I-IV) and Jews and Their Lies...

...It was peaceful, but on both the ground and the dais, all was not kosher, and the march's theme in practice was hardly evocative of Dr...

...And these weren't the inner-city disenfranchised- two out of three had household incomes exceeding $30,000 a year, one of five exceeded $75,000, and three out of four had attended at least a year of college...

...That makes you sick . . . you produce a sick society and a sick world" which begets the "poisoned bloodstream of religion, education, politics, jurisprudence, economics, social ethics, and morality...

...The Washington Times even ended a story with "Only one death was reported, from an apparent heart attack...

...Every time I turn on the news, I see a black man getting locked up, but when Jeffrey Dahmer was eating people, you heard maybe a couple hours' worth of stuff...

...When you have a nine, you have a womb that is pregnant, and when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there's something to be unfolded"), and other nut-job bunkum that has left lunatic equals and lessers (David Duke, Lyndon LaRouche) completely discredited...

...His somnambulic oratory contained gems such as the secrets of the Masonic order, how black athletes are drawn out of their culture and asphyxiated by golf and poker with white benefactors all the live-long day, convoluted numerology matrixes ("What is so deep about this number 19...