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Portraits From the Million Man March
The Washington Post
Tuesday, October 17, 1995
"I Want the Memory"At 4:30 a.m., Ronnie Moseley sat on a bench in Union Station, cradling his 4-year-old son, Brandon, in a white blanket. They hadn't been able to find a hotel room, but Moseley was too full of anticipation to care.
Moseley, 28, quit the circus temporarily to join the march. He is a concessionaire for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus -- a steppingstone, he hopes, to becoming a clown and later a performance artist. He and Brandon live and travel with the circus. Moseley is divorced from Brandon's mother, so it's just the two of them.
They left the Big Top in Boston by train; they'll catch up with it in Indiana. "My mother and father had the opportunity to take part in the legendary civil rights marches," said Moseley, a Memphis native. "I thought it would be fitting for my child to know we did this together."
Until last year, Moseley was an Army Ranger with an airborne infantry regiment based in Italy. Then he was dispatched with the civil war relief effort to Rwanda, where he saw black-on-black violence at its most horrific.
Moseley looked down at Brandon. "Children, God bless their souls, don't see color," he said. "Later in his lifetime . . . some people will try to tell him that color is what counts. When they do, I want the memory of this day to stay with him."
-- Steve Vogel
"Going to March ... Because We're Strong"
As tens of thousands of African American men and young people poured out of the parking lots around Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, they encountered a police officer.
"Metro over there," the officer would shout, pointing to the Stadium-Armory Metro station nearby. Then he would point to East Capitol Street and shout, "You want to march, it's 17 blocks straight ahead."
"We're marching," a father said to his son.
The father's name is Reggie Harris. He is 38 and works in an auto plant. The son is Reggie Jr., 15, a high school freshman. They live in Lansing, Mich., and rode all night in a minivan to get here.
"You know why we're marching?" the father asked. He wore gray slacks and shiny black loafers. The son wore big sneakers and baggy jeans.
" 'Cause it's a march," the son replied.
"Yeah, but do you know why we're going to march, instead of riding that train? . . . Do you know why we're going to walk with all these strong black men over here?" The father gestured to marchers walking 10 and 12 abreast.
"How much does the train cost?" the son asked.
"Don't matter what the train costs," his father told him. "We're going to march with these men here, because we're strong."
-- Paul Duggan
"I Was in It With Both Feet"
Between customers at an auto parts store on 14th Street NW, Allen Bullock looked out the window and counted the minutes till quitting time.
As he does every day, he saw men and women slumped against the wall of the shelter for the homeless across the street. But on this day, he also saw proud black men, walking in pairs and large groups, headed for the Mall.
Bullock, 34, hadn't planned to go. Sure, he's concerned about young black men killing one another. Sure, he liked the idea that a dignified gathering of black men could show youngsters how to live together. But the D.C. native and Coolidge High School graduate didn't think there would be much of a crowd. And he knew his student loan bills and child support for his 12-year-old daughter wouldn't wait.
Then, on his way into work from Silver Spring, Bullock stopped on Georgia Avenue for gas. He saw two carloads of men from New York wearing march sweat shirts. They asked him which way to downtown.
"I said, Follow me.' " When he turned off Georgia, he urged them south with a wave of his hand and knew he would join them later. "I was in it with both feet," Bullock said. "At 5:31 {p.m.}, I'll be down there."
-- Debbi Wilgoren
"I Will Have a Different Outlook"
Derrill L. Johnson Jr., 48, rode 19 hours on a bus from St. Louis and arrived on the Mall at 11 a.m. He got back on a bus to go home while Louis Farrakhan was still speaking. He listened to white truckers call him and his fellow passengers "niggers" on the CB radio, and he figured he'd hear more of the same -- or worse -- on the way home.
But his six hours in Washington left him feeling profoundly changed.
"I will have a different outlook on dealing with kids or womenfolk -- dealing with life in general," said Johnson, a steelworker with 13 children, ages 14 to 33. "I don't know -- there's been a lot of animosity in my heart. Animosity toward white people. And I got a better understanding of why today. I guess you could just sum it up as oppression -- that's a hell of a weight.
"You really would have had to listen to a lot of what the speakers said to understand it -- going to jail for no reason; being given secondhand books in school; not being allowed to get a decent education; not being allowed to get jobs to provide for your family in a decent manner."
What he found so powerful was simply the coming together of so many black men. "We've been derided, segregated, harnessed, harassed," he said. "If you try to uplift yourself, there's always somebody to pull you back down."
Farrakhan's speech "sums up my feelings exactly: Through your white supremacists' attitude, you're all going to go to hell," Johnson said without a trace of outward anger in his soft voice. "The truth hurts everybody -- it enlightens, but it also hurts everybody."
-- Vernon Loeb
Walking a Straighter Path
Christopher Wheeler, 32, stood in the aisle of an Orange Line train with morning commuters and two friends from the Salvation Army Rehabilitation Center in Bladensburg, where he works and gets counseling. He was, he said, a man with much to atone for.
"A lot of us have been out there drugging and doing whatever it is. . . . I am 100 percent better now, and I am thinking about the young people." Wheeler paused, then amended the record: Maybe he was only 75 percent successful in his struggle with crack cocaine. When he decided to march, he said, he was thinking about his 6-year-old daughter, who lives in the Washington area but not with him.
"If the Million Man March had come up when I had a pipe in my mouth, I would never have been a part of it," he said. "Maybe I'm just 50 percent better. But I'm here today."
-- Deirdre M. Childress
A Slow Parade of Tears
"I'd give anything to get outta this wheelchair and walk with my beautiful black brothers," said Malik Edwards, 15, wearing Ray Bans and red sweats under a shade tree on the Mall.
Shot in front of his home in Philadelphia last summer, Edwards knows that his assailant was another black youth, but he does not know whether he was the intended target. The .32-caliber bullet paralyzed him from the neck down.
"Just look at what happened to my life," said Edwards, whose voice has been reduced to a gasping whisper. "That's why I want Louis Farrakhan to tell everybody to stop black-on-black crime. I don't even know my father, so I also want him to tell black men to be fathers to their kids."
He looked down and smiled. His mother, a hospice nurse, manicured his immobile hands Sunday night on the train ride to Washington. Then a group of marchers clad in kente cloth walked by laughing, praising Farrakhan, and tears emerged from under the Ray Bans.
"I wish I could feel what it would be like to . . . walk with pride, black pride," said Edwards, who starts his wheelchair by exhaling into a tube and stops it by inhaling. He can shrug his shoulders and turn his head. He can feel tears on his cheeks, but he can't brush them away.
-- Vincent Young
A Route Not Taken
McKinley Anderson, 43, an appliance salesman who lives in Bowie, paid little attention to those arriving for the march as he strolled through the New Carrollton Metro station.
"I'm a Christian first," said Anderson, who grew up in South Carolina and is a deacon at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in the District. "I already know how to raise my family. I don't need one man to tell me how to raise my family. . . . And I don't need to be reminded that I'm black. I know I'm black."
Anderson said he taught his son, now 22, about the civil rights movement and the marches of the 1960s. This march was different.
"You cannot have a minister teaching racism and separatism and say we have one God," Anderson said. "Those are mixed messages. . . . I can't take that route. If I teach my kids you treat others the way you want to be treated, you have to draw a line. . . . What if David Duke and a militia decided to get a million men together? You can't have it both ways."
-- Anna Borgman
"Are You the Only White Daddy?"
"Are you the only white daddy marching?" asked David Morgan's son, Justin, a cinnamon-colored 5-year-old with a smile for everyone and dreadlocks resting on his wiry shoulders. "Why are people looking at us funny?"
Brown, 42, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital in Boston, grappled with those questions -- and many, many more -- as he and his adopted son trekked around the Mall in denim jackets and new Nikes. "Why didn't Jason come with us?" Justin asked in his megaphone voice, referring to his 14-year-old brother.
Brown looked at Justin intently, then smiled: "You know how you don't like going to the mall because you're often the only black kid there? Well, Jason didn't come to the march because he thought it was uncool to hang with a white father."
Justin looked at his father, puzzled. "But isn't this march happening so that people can learn how to, um, to help themselves? What's the big deal anyway about being black or white when I saw some yellow people near that tall building and they looked like they were hanging okay?"
But Justin cut his father off before he could respond. "C'mon, Dad, tell me the truth," he said, giggling. "Do you think I ask too many questions?"
-- Vincent Young
"I'm Going to Keep at It"
John Edwards, 35, had given up. He had tried for six months to be a mentor to a 10-year-old boy in Southeast Washington but the child was impossible and uncaring. All Edwards wanted to do with his days now, he said, was go to work at the Department of Agriculture, where he is a manager, go home to Cleveland Park and close the door. He hadn't seen the child in six weeks.
That was before the march -- the march he almost didn't attend.
"I was very hesitant to come," he said, because of Louis Farrakhan's negative image. "I took the day off today. I was a little afraid of my own people.
"Now I'm here, I'm energized. I keep hearing people say, Each one teach one.' I'll take that message with me. . . . I'm going to go and find that child. I'll take him to work with me. I'll take him with me where I teach. I will let him see men who are successful. I will let him watch me in action. I'm just going to keep at it and keep at it."
-- Linda Wheeler