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On the Streets of Rosedale, Echoes of a Great Stride
Still Resonate

In the struggling Northeast Washington neighborhood of Rosedale, the spirit of the Million Man March still grips many hearts and souls.

Measured in statistics, the changes the march wrought are small. A few more fathers walk their children to school, and a few men went back to church. One church created a children's drill team because of the march. Some men volunteered, though not scores. Crime did not drop in Rosedale, a neighborhood south of bustling Benning Road where boarded-up buildings are sprinkled amid blocks of tidy row houses with chain-link fences.

For many, though, the gathering ladled out lasting spiritual nourishment. It offered a sense of possibility. It left minds seized by the picture of hundreds of thousands of black men hugging one another. It changed the image of black men in much of the white world and sometimes in their own.

This is the third in a series of reports about how the Million Man March affected the Rosedale neighborhood. The day of the march, Rosedale's streets were nearly deserted, and many people in the nearly all-black neighborhood were optimistic that men would heed the march's calls for improvement. Six months later, when massive change had not come, residents and civic leaders had mixed feelings--some bitter, some hopeful.

"It gave me a continued inspiration to stay on the right track," said Ben Bullock, the volunteer football coach at Rosedale Recreation Center, who stopped using drugs nine years ago. "It was scary, like good scary."

Before the march, Sean Golden said, it seemed that among black men, "everybody had a grudge against everybody else." Now, he said, "you go places and instead of people saying, 'What are you looking at?' it's, 'How are you doing?' "

For Golden, the march was a rescue from cynicism. At 28, the Xerox technician, who lives in Rosedale, had thought his generation was "just lost, with no support, no anything." The march made him see that "there are people out there willing to help the younger black generation."

But some in Rosedale say that although the march galvanized black men, it did not do enough to help them translate their inspiration into action.

Last week, two dozen parents of children in the Young Marines program at Gibbs Elementary School talked about the legacies of last October's march. The Young Marines program did not get started because of the march, but there is a waiting list of 50 children--evidence of the hunger for organized activities that encourage discipline and hard work.

"I think a lot of it has lasted," said C.D. Prather, mother of a girl in the program. She said men are more polite now: "The doors were opened for months."

But Bayo Badmus, sitting on a windowsill in the back of the room, played down the march's impact. "If someone is not a responsible parent, just listening to [march organizer Louis] Farrakhan is not going to change [that]. Will people change--just because of one person? No."

Emily Green said: "Nothing changed. Some of them went for the fun of it."

Among the Young Marines, assessments also differed.

"There was a little change," said Darnita Smith, 12, "but most of the black men are kind of doing the same thing."

Her sister, Valencia Tobe, 10, said the march was "good, because a lot of the fathers came with their sons. I saw some fathers change a little."

Leaders of the march wanted the event to inspire people to change themselves. But throughout Rosedale, men expressed a longing for leadership that would help them build on the enthusiasm produced by the march and extend it into action.

"If you're going to have a march, people [should] walk away with a booklet on how to organize these pledges we just made," said Adam Oliphant, who owns a corner grocery store in Rosedale and has contributed to neighborhood causes for years. "When all the firing up is done, you have to settle down to the day-to-day job of organizing it."

Kofi Tyus, an artist, said he is not discouraged by Rosedale's lack of transformation. He said change comes in fits and starts.

"It's like a garden," he said. "It's not realistic to see fruit jumping out of the ground. It's enough that the soil looks all right."

Tyus, 50, said the march helped sales of his greeting cards with African American themes and also shifted the focus of his business. Cards depicting men, especially in family groups, are selling better than before, he said.

Hayward Evans, 42, said the march sent him a message that "I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing." He said it made him more aware of his responsibilities as a father of two and as the soccer coach at Rosedale Recreation Center, a noisy, after-school refuge for neighborhood children. He has been reading about family dynamics and trying to better his communication skills to improve the messages he sends to children.

"As a black man, you are a living, walking figure, not just for your family," he said.

At Pilgrim AME Church, many in the congregation thought they already were doing a lot for children--a tutoring program, a "rites of passage" ministry, a Boy Scout troop. Last summer, partly because of the march, the men's fellowship added a basketball ministry.

"That was a wake-up call for us," said Thomas Shepherd, who is active in the church's men's fellowship. "Maybe we hadn't been doing all that we could have. . . . We already had things we were planning to do, but the march added a little more fuel."