Men on a Mission : Young African Americans See March as Their Place in History

Bright-eyed John Hamilton has imagined the moment a thousand times in his head: The 24-year-old Los Angeles schoolteacher is standing amid a sea of black faces ranging from paper-bag brown to dark chocolate.

The image of black men rallying to snatch back their disenfranchisement--scenes of confrontations from places such as Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery that shaped the civil rights movement--has escaped Hamilton’s twentysomething generation. That is why the fifth-grade teacher at 112th Street School is heading to the Million Man March in Washington on Monday, an attempt by some black leaders to rally black males in a statement of self-reliance and introspection.

To Hamilton, the march is both a generational statement and an effort to seize his piece of black history. That the controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is at the helm of the march, and that its main organizer is embattled ex-NAACP head the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis, is less important to Hamilton than the message of the march.

“The march is a chance for me to reaffirm my promise to myself and the younger generation that I will continue to be a man,” Hamilton said from his cramped classroom near Watts. “We have to go back to what Malcolm X said about keeping your religion with yourself and then get together on one common cause of helping black people.”

Brotherhood Crusade President Danny Bakewell, one of the Los Angeles organizers of the march, said he expects at least 3,000 men from the Southland to attend. Nearly 2,000 have registered with his organization, Bakewell said, with the others organized through the Nation of Islam in Compton, Inglewood and other areas. Local organizers are offering bus, accommodation and meal packages for $299. It’s a rough ride: more than two days of nonstop travel that began Friday night and will not end until dawn Monday.

Few participants expect 1 million men to attend the march. The most famous march on Washington in 1963, highlighted by the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, drew 300,000.

Hamilton says numbers do not matter.

“If there are 100,000 black men there, then that will be something to me,” he said. “When is the last time you got 100,000 black men together? On a slave ship?”

Supporters of the march hope that it will trigger activism on behalf of increased voting power, greater economic mobility and a rebuilding of the black family. The Rev. Jesse Jackson has been traveling the country for weeks publicizing it. Veteran black nationalist Maulana Karenga, a Cal State Long Beach black studies professor, wrote the march’s statement of principles and will unveil them Monday.

Among those principles is the notion that the march should be a gesture of atonement, in which black males confront issues such as black-on-black crime, high incarceration rates and fatherless families, and pledge to make a greater effort to improve their communities. The statements of atonement, organizers say, also represent an attempt to strengthen the relationship between black men and women.

Men such as Hamilton believe their presence at the march will demonstrate their resolve to confront what they describe as a social backlash. Gains forged since the civil rights movement appear to be slipping away, and the racial climate has grown even more tense for black men in the wake of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal, they say.

“There has been a dramatic assault on all the things we accomplished in the last 25 years,” said Roland Pointdexter, 29, the director of programming and development for Fox’s Kid Network in Los Angeles. “It’s like they are all but diminishing or being obliterated. So before we can talk about changing any of that, we have to find our own inner solidarity.”

Days before he traveled to the march, Hamilton was doing nothing close to basking in the thought of 1 million black men assembling in the nation’s capital. Inside his cramped but airy South-Central Los Angeles classroom, he was playing both teacher and parent. Between going over assignments, he nagged 10-year-old Tanisha Shuler, who lives in the nearby Nickerson Gardens housing projects, to wear her glasses, and reminded other students how completing assigned tasks can help in their everyday lives.

“Didn’t I tell you don’t come to my class if you don’t have your homework, Rodrigo?” he asked a student. “Go stand over there until we finish going over the exercise.”

Hamilton is completing a master’s degree at Loyola Marymount in hopes of becoming an education administrator and using education to preserve the future of young black males. He provides books about retired Gen. Colin L. Powell for black boys and lets his students drink water in class “to make sure they get something other than sugary Kool-Aid in their systems.”

National march leaders Farrakhan and Chavis have urged all black Americans to stay home from work Monday. They also want blacks to participate in the day of atonement by not shopping and using the day for bonding with family members or doing community work.

The organizers’ insistence that black women support but not attend the march has angered African American women and some men. Critics charge that a march for the progress of black men cannot exclude black women.

In spite of this exclusion, a number of Los Angeles black women, including Nola Carter of Mothers in Action, a coalition of community volunteers, support the march and have raised money to ensure that younger and less affluent black males attend.

Critics and some supporters of the march worry that because most African Americans cannot afford a trip to Washington and are unable to take a day off from work, the march may consist largely of older, more affluent black men. That would be an embarrassing and frustrating contrast with a major focus of the march: the young black male. The notion of solidarity is highly attractive to participants such as TV executive Pointdexter, who works in a rarefied professional environment.

“I’m a black man in corporate America, but on a daily basis there aren’t that many in my life,” he said. “I love black people. I wish I could be around them all day. So I am hoping the march will be a reminder to me that I am not in this struggle all alone.”

Pointdexter said he hopes the march will not limit itself to symbolic gestures.

“Once the weekend is over, we have to go back to real life,” he said. “And real life for most of us is limited power. We need to apply that energy when we get back to our communities in activities and policies that affect social change.”