Thanks a million: I went to the march, and all I got was this lousy press pass.

• Author: McKissack, Fredrick, Jr.
• Position: Million Man March

The Million Man March could be summed up, really, in a short conversation I had with an Ethiopian-born cabby near the end of the day. "Fuck Oliver North," Ibrahim said in a clipped accent that took seventeen years of living in America to develop. "He don't know what the hell he's talking about."

Apparently Ollie had been dissing the brothers who were at the march, saying on his syndicated radio program that they were nothing more than dupes for that evil, Koran-quoting, violin-playing menace to society: Minister Louis Farrakhan.

"You know, a million people cannot be wrong," lbrahim said. I immediately reminded myself that a couple million people had been wrong about Milli Vanilli, but I understood what the brother was getting at.

"Am I right?" he reiterated. "A million black men cannot be wrong. This time they came in peace. Next time, I tell you, they will not come in peace."

Chuck D, philosopher-frontman for Public Enemy, said in 1988 that the apocalypse for black America was already in effect, and if suckers didn't realize that the bomb had been dropped, then they needed to step off.

My guess is the Enola Gay took flight during the 1980 election and dropped its payload on black America the day Ronald Reagan took office. No mutually assured destruction, just one steadv bombing campaign on colored folks by politicians and policy makers from Reagan to Gingrich, with the Democratic Party looking on like some punk-ass U.N. observer team just hoping to stay alive.

The march, which actually was a stand-around, was the biggest summit on the plight of black folk since the first March on Washington. Farrakhan said it was divine inspiration that got him to call for a march. Without saying it, he sees himself as the Moses that African Americans have been looking for. Megalomania? Maybe, but you saw the pictures; he got them to come.

Unlike the first march, there wasn't any talk of a world where little black boys and girls and little white boys and girls could play in peace and harmony. I didn't hear a single verse of "We Shall Overcome." It was the sounds and philosophy of hip-hop, which, Greg Tate once wrote, is "what happened when the black community became the Bermuda Triangle and lost track of itself on the radar screen of Reaganomics.... Hip-hop is if you can't join 'em, beat 'em; if you can't beat 'em, blunt 'em."

Given that Farrakhan was the drum major for this march, the dream was dead, and even the long-suffering dauphin to King's legacy, Jesse Jackson, was going to take a big-time back seat to the Minister and the program of resegregation, black nationalism, and self-help.

But that was on the platform. Most of what was said on the stage that day was looked on with ambivalence. In the crowd, there was one emotion that I haven't seen too much in the black...