USA TODAY International Edition
25 years later, legacy of first Million Man March
Four men look back on power, unity of ’ 95 event
After the long ride from Jackson, Mississippi, Kenneth Stokes stepped off the bus wearing his favorite brown cowboy boots and a twopiece suit, much like the civil rights activists of the 1960s dressed in their Sunday best.
He shivered in the chilly autumn morning as he joined thousands of other men heading down the streets of Washington, D. C. Two miles through low- income housing and million- dollar row houses until, up ahead, a majestic view: the U. S. Capitol, seat of American power, built by slaves in large part when the nation was only a few decades old.
Stokes looked out over the National Mall, amazed at this ocean of Black men. Most were elbow to elbow. Some perched on monuments or in trees. Kids sat on dads’ shoulders. All there for an event called the Million Man March.
“It was packed, packed, packed,”
Stokes recalls. “There were people everywhere – from everywhere.”
Charles Hicks reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a folded paper scrawled with his handwriting. A union leader in Washington, Hicks studied the speech he’d written the night before.
From his vantage on stage at the west front of the Capitol, Hicks took in the sight of Black faces stretching a mile to the Washington Monument. This was the heart of America, home of the brave, land of the free. And they were repeating his chant: “We are here!”
Virgil Killebrew, a street poet from Chicago, arrived early enough to stand directly in front of the stage. But the amplifiers were so loud, and the crowd so suffocating, he retreated to the fringes.
There were signs and flags. Music blared between speeches. Black hands clenched together in prayer against a blue sky, clouds scudding overhead.
“I lost my mind,” recalls Killebrew, now 71. “It wasn’t the speeches. It was the excitement. ... You felt the truth of all these people saying, ‘ Black Power.’”
He realized, “This is bigger than us.”
A chant arose with the introduction of Rosa Parks, a diminutive Black woman who in 1955 refused to sit at the back of an Alabama bus.
As she stepped to the microphone, hundreds of thousands of voices chimed in. “Rosa! Rosa! Rosa!”
For Kokayi Nosakhere, then a 21year- old college student from Anchorage, it was the apex of a sublime experience. He and 15 other Alaskans had traveled more than 4,000 miles to join the Million Man March, which occurred 25 years ago Friday.
Now a community organizer for social justice, Nosakhere’s online bio says “his attendance at the Million Man March set the course of his life.”
An activist. A union leader. A city councilman. A poet.
That day in October 1995 has stayed with these four men, though not necessarily as an inflection point. Life is more complicated than that.
‘ I don’t back down’
The Million Man March was Nosakhere’s first political demonstration. Twenty- five years later, he’s still at it.
After returning to Alaska, he became a community worker for the NAACP, staged a hunger strike for school nutrition funding and “played politics” to achieve social justice.
When Black Lives Matter marched through Eugene, Oregon, this summer to protest police brutality, he was there.
Those who think the Million Man March was supposed to change America got it wrong, Nosakhere says: “The goal was to change us. I raised my hand on Oct. 16, 1995, and I have not taken it down. I’ve fulfilled my oath to go back to my community and make it a better place.
“I’m still here,” he says. “I don’t back down from white supremacy.”
Black pain, power and humanity
In overhead photos, they were four pixels in a panoply of African American men.
There were 837,000 in all, or 400,000, or 1.9 million. Even the number of attendees remains in dispute, like so many things about one of the largest demonstrations ever to hit America’s capital.
They chanted, laughed, danced, listened to speeches, sang, cried and made vows. Despite stereotypes and predictions, there was no violence, looting or arrests. Just an outpouring of heart and an intaking of hope.
The goals and leadership were controversial and divisive even then – not just to white Americans, but to African Americans watching on television and even there.
Some did not want to be affiliated with the Nation of Islam or its leader, Louis Farrakhan, whose preaching includes Black nationalism and antiSemitism.
Some saw the stated purpose – “A Day of Atonement” – as an acceptance of guilt by Black men for conditions that are a legacy of slavery, discrimination and white supremacy.
Some believed it was an affront, or politically shortsighted, not to invite women and non- Black sympathizers.
And yet the idea of uniting in a declaration of African American pain, power and humanity caught fire.
There were many declarations that day, perhaps a million takeaways. And then, after a long speech by Farrakhan, it was over.
Men went home, full of energy and ideas.
In the 25 years since, America has elected an African American as president, seen diversity become a workplace buzzword and watched NBA players wear jerseys emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter.”
We’ve also witnessed videos of police killing unarmed Black men, demonstrations veering into rioting and a president who urged a group critics say has ties to white supremacy to “stand back and stand by.”
Hicks, 75, says nationwide protests against police abuses are a “new birth” of the Million Man March and the civil rights movement’s spirit and purpose.
“If I was 30 years younger, I’d be out there,” he says. “I’m not young enough to run and to dodge tear gas.”
‘ We had to represent’
Killebrew started writing poetry long after the drugs, lost jobs and prison terms. He was in Chicago, asking for a bed in a Salvation Army shelter. The gatekeeper wanted him to fill out a form explaining his circumstances.
He could have mentioned his experiences with racism or three stints in prison.
Instead, when Killebrew filled out the form, he impulsively wrote a poem — the first of his life. He titled it, “Powerless and Insane,” the way he felt after he was introduced to heroin. He had found a vocation.
Killebrew was living in a transient hotel in 1995 when a local radio host heard about his poetry and invited him on the show. Lu Palmer, considered the godfather of Black activism in Chicago, asked the guest to recite a poem titled, “True Black Man.”
“Call- in lines were ringing and lights were blinking,” Killebrew recalls. Palmer acted like his guest had won a prize, declaring, “You’re going to the Million Man March!”
Nosakhere had never been to a demonstration, but he was steeped in Black politics and culture. His dad, an NAACP leader in Alaska, presided over Kwanzaa and Juneteenth celebrations and had brought Farrakhan to Anchorage.
“I grew up Blackety- Black- Black,” Nosakhere says.
Still, it is one thing for a boy to inherit views, another to adopt them. During his senior year in high school, Nosakhere spent $ 5.99 at Waldenbooks for a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”
Nosakhere abandoned his birth name and adopted a Swahili moniker
that he says means, “Summon the people, old messenger, because God is on his way.” When he learned about Farrakhan’s call for Black males to converge on the nation’s capital, he was all in.
Stokes, now 65, was on the Jackson City Council then, as now, and felt a duty to join the march. He and others started scrounging for money to charter buses, going to funeral homes and other Black businesses.
“We got out there and started begging,” he recalls. “We had to represent.”
Hicks, the union leader in Washington, had a legacy to consider when he was asked to join a news conference about the march. He hailed from Bogalusa, Louisiana, where his father, Robert, founded a chapter of Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed group of Black men who defended against attacks by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s.
Hicks remembers one night in 1965, when friends showed up to protect his family after the sheriff warned a lynch mob planned to burn down their home. Police wouldn’t help, Hicks recalls. “If we didn’t protect ourselves, we were sitting ducks.”
Ben Chavis, one of the march organizers, attended that news conference. Chavis asked Hicks who his father was and, in a nod to the legendary civil rights activist, invited Hicks to speak on the big day.
The journeys begin
Stokes says fear was palpable as his group boarded a bus in Jackson. There was talk of possible violence. “You didn’t know if you’d make it back home,” he says.
They prayed when the bus took off and at every stop along the nearly 1,000mile ride. “The only way these trips are going to be successful,” Stokes says, “is you’ve got to put God first.”
Nosakhere’s flight from Anchorage landed in Boston, where he spent a few days at the home of a family friend before driving to Washington.
Church vans and buses were literally rocking down the interstate, Nosakhere recalls, full of brothers charged with anticipation – and with fear of an attack by law enforcement or haters. “All of ’ em were singing,” he says. “We were fortifying ourselves. We thought we were going to die that day.”
Different things for different people
Farrakhan’s original idea was essentially religious. Black men of all faiths would gather for preaching, prayers and promises. But amid the publicity of a yearlong run- up, politics elbowed its way onto the agenda and the Million
Man March morphed into different things for different people.
Nosakhere saw police on horseback with nothing to do. “We told them, ‘ You aren’t needed today, homey.’ There was not one fight, no weed being smoked, no liquor. … It was one of the few times in my life I actually felt safe.”
There were food tents, first- aid centers and voter registration booths. Eight hours of speechifying and preaching with musical interludes.
On stage, the comedian- activist Dick Gregory kept shouting into the microphone, “I love you!” Just about everyone sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black national anthem.
Clarence Lang, now a professor of African American studies at Penn State University and dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, was not among them. Instead, the 22- year- old grad student was back in Edwardsville, Illinois, because in his mind the messaging of the Million Man March was ill- considered.
What are Black men supposed to atone for, he wondered? It was like blaming victims – telling people who had been beaten down for centuries they needed to make amends.
Lang saw a different path to racial justice, one that didn’t adhere to the march’s “fundamentally patriarchal” message. So he was home that day, watching on TV.
After a six- hour program, Farrakhan came to the mike wearing his signature bowtie. He spoke for nearly two and a half hours. At one point,
he led the masses in an oath that began, “I pledge that from this day forward I will strive to love my brother as I love myself.”
Stokes remembers Farrakhan’s speech being “long- winded,” but fiery and powerful. His eyes overflowed a few times that day, and he wasn’t the only one. “You feel so blessed to see so many Black people together for a positive thing.”
An indelible event
Back in Alaska after the march, Nosakhere wrote a column declaring, “I was blessed to witness what countless others have died to promote: a display of perfect unity among African Americans.”
In retrospect, he believes the march bumped Black activism for a few years, but he doesn’t see it as transformative.
Killibrew, the poet, was mesmerized but not galvanized. The overpowering emotions of the Million Man March turned out to be a “sugar high,” he says, with no apparent follow- through on the glorious rhetoric.
“Everybody went back to what they were doing,” he says.
Including him. He made $ 700 selling poems that day, then returned to his rounds in Chicago. Even a poem inspired by the march was lost years ago.
Killebrew is retired from street sales. But he’s still writing, and is looking to publish an epic poem for kids about the African slave trade.
Stokes introduced a resolution this year to name a street in Jackson after George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer pinned his neck to the ground.
“Because of the death of Mr. Floyd, people’s hearts changed enough that Mississippi got rid of the Confederate flag,” Stokes says, referring to the former state flag with the Confederate emblem in the design. “I’m talking about some die- hard racists.”
Progress may be slow, Stokes adds, but there has been change. He tells his grandkids about the march in 1995 – not just how it affected those who attended, but folks they touched afterward.
“Every time Black people get out there and unite and do something positive,” he says, “it helps the people at the bottom. And when it helps the people on the bottom it has a ripple effect.”
For Hicks, Oct. 16, 1995, will always be triumphant. Family members near the stage, including his father, didn’t know he was scheduled to speak. When the announcer called his name, Hicks recalls, “It was like I had given them a million dollars. … There will probably never be anything as exciting as that.”
This year, on Father’s Day, he organized a Black Fathers Matter motorcade. About 90 cars, decked out with balloons and signs, cruised from the African American Civil War Museum through Black neighborhoods.
From the days of slavery through today, Hicks says, Black men have been targets: “We’ve been lynched. We’ve been castrated. We’ve been killed. We’ve been imprisoned. ... So it’s important on Father’s Day that we say to Black men that you matter.”