March Marred by Skirmish
By Herb Boyd
(From the web newspaper "Black World Today." Boyd was one of the main organizers of the Black Radical Congress.)
Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan reminded the thousands assembled about their glorious African heritage.
Dr. Leonard Jeffries stressed the importance of continuing the struggle for reparations.
Queen Afua brought holistic health advice and said there was "liberation through purification."
Brother Damien, a youth activist, had a special message for his peers, telling them "we are making tomorrow’s future today."
Chief Longwalker of the Dakota Nation said that the Black man and the Red man were "blood brothers" in the struggle for freedom and independence.
The Rev. Al Sharpton spoke of Harlem’s history, invoking the names of Malcolm X, Queen Mother Moore, John Henrik Clarke and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
These were just a few of the speakers who preceded Minister Khallid Abdul Muhammad at Saturday’s Million Youth March in Harlem, but it is a good bet and a sad commentary that their words may be obscured by Muhammad’s incendiary rhetoric which was laced with invective and profanity.
Some participants had quietly hoped that Muhammad would tone down his attack or not be tempted to continue his rift with Mayor Giuliani. But the moment, pregnant with possibilities, was too much of an opportunity to ignore and Muhammad assailed the mayor, who had exhausted all means of stopping the march. Deliberately provoking the provokers, Muhammad took his speech right up to the deadline imposed by the court, inviting an anxious thong to unhitch the barriers and hurl them at the police in self-defense if they were attacked.
The police, amassed like an army, took their cue from a helicopter that buzzed the crowd and moved to disconnect the sound system and occupy the stage. A push quickly became a shove as the police used bodily force to break up the peaceful rally. A garbage can was flung on a phalanx of cops, bottles zipped through the air, and the stronger members of the crowd dislodged the metal barriers and threw them. Reportedly several participants were injured, two of them assaulted with pepper spray, and 16 police officers were hurt.
It could have been worse.
What began as an earnest effort to deal with some of the problems in the community only renewed an old one of excessive police force. Still, some blame must be placed on Muhammad whose defiance could have led to a blood bath. Somehow, some place we must find a more productive use of our anger.
Now Giuliani had the last word. The march was marred, and he could feel vindicated in loosing his occupying army on Harlem. And when Muhammad promised to bring his show to Eastern Parkway next year, it was clear that acrimony between him and the mayor was far from over.
"It was like a rock concert," one spectator said, "and I knew something was going to happen in the end."
But it didn’t have to.
Amid the debris scattered on the Harlem streets, the relentless bullhorns of the peacemakers pleading for people to go home, was the massive disappointment of a family who had traveled all the way from Philadelphia. "All they are going to talk but now is the ruckus at the end, not the beauty of the day," the elder member of the family lamented.
His impressions reminded me of Countee Cullen’s poem "Incident."
Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small And he was no whit bigger And so I smiled, but he poke out His tongue, and called me, ‘N-word.’
I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December Of all the things that happened there That’s all that I remember.
Copyright © 1998.The Black World Today.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)