Biggest Black march: Million Man demonstration opens new era

Ebony, Dec, 1995 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

One thing they cannot prohibit--The strong men...coming on

The strong men gittin' stronger.

Strong men....

Stronger....

All night long, the strong men kept coming on, laying siege to the Capitol and the Lincoln and Washington monuments, bringing with them their sons, symbolic and real, and their hope and their anger. By the first light of dawn, they were at least 100,000 strong and gaining strength by the hour.

When, at 5:30 or thereabouts, a technician with the soul of a poet opened the day by playing Marvin Gaye on the PA system, everybody there knew it was going to be all right.

Brother, brother, brother. . .

You know we've got to find

a way to bring some loving

here today...

What's going on?

Truth was going on.

And hope. And a new thing never before seen in the Republic, a million-man army marching on the government to say, among other things, that they weren't going to take it anymore, not from racists, not from gang-bangers, not even from themselves.

There they were--Muslims and Christians, nationalists and integrationists, socialists and capitalists and hundreds of thousands of Black men who were none of these things and all of them. They had come from all over the United States by bus, by plane, by train, at the call of the Honorable Louis Farrakhan and a coalition that included Christians and atheists, university professors and former convicts. Armanied, jeaned and kente-clothed, praising Allah and Jesus and Du Bois and Malcolm and King and Rosa Parks they hugged and shouted and cried, vowing to fight racism and to take unity and responsibility back to their communities.

Learned men and women tried unsuccessfully and futilely to put a handle on the thing and to give an ideology to an event that transcended ideology and created a new ideology. But the longest march of this day was the long march in the spirit and in the heart, and it included not only the million on the Mall but a long line of Black men stretching back to the pyramids who never ceased to believe that a red black and green day would come when Black men would abandon all labels and stand together in unity and tell us once again that they can defame us and deny us jobs and create Uncle Toms and mystify us with crack and Aristotle but one thing they cannot prohibit is the strong men, the Nat Turners, the Douglasses, the Du Boises, the Robesons, the Malcolms, the Kings and their million-man sons, coming on, gittin' stronger.

Strong men....

Stronger....