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A Powerful Message for White America : The march: Participants were wiser than commentators who focus on would-be leaders and lose sight of the story.

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<i> Virginia I. Postrel is editor of Los Angeles-based Reason magazine</i>

I was in Washington, quite by accident, for the “Million Man March.” And it was great.

It was supposed to be awful, of course. Terrifying. Hate-filled. Outright dangerous to the likes of me. Something to be condemned and avoided.

Most of my Monday appointments canceled or asked that I meet them a safe distance from our office, just a few blocks from the main event. The building’s doors were locked well into the work day, an extraordinary precaution.

Those of us who dared show our lily-white faces on the sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue or in the subways and airport shuttle buses packed with black men did indeed find a city transformed. But it wasn’t the city we’d been warned against.

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Washington was happier than usual, friendlier, upbeat. People smiled at one another across subway cars. Older white women gave solicitous directions to polite young black men. Strangers engaged in significant small talk. It felt like an old-fashioned holiday--festive and patriotic, meaningful and fun.

My seatmate on the bus to Dulles Airport was a young attorney flying back to Columbus, Ohio, from an exhausting but exhilarating day. “Everybody was really friendly,” he said. He didn’t approve of excluding women, or (he muttered, more to himself than to me) of Louis Farrakhan. “Mistakes,” he said. But the march had become something much bigger than Farrakhan, something that emerged from the community of men.

Fred Peavy, a Chicago public relations man, told me the march was the greatest thing African Americans had ever done. It was a tremendous event, an important proclamation of responsibility--for family, for community, for personal destiny.

Why, then, did the press have to portray it so negatively? Why did reporters and commentators describe it as divisive?

I have no good answer. There is a lot of paranoia among both blacks and whites. Neither group is as scary or as hostile as the other thinks. But those perceptions shape the news stories.

And, watching speeches on C-SPAN, hearing Farrakhan and some of his radical followers resonate with the rhetoric of white evil and black anger, I can see why some reporters tell the negative story, why some commentators worry. I’d worry too if I hadn’t been there.

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Reporters focus on center stage, on “leaders” and official spokespeople. And often they miss the real story, whether the leaders in question are Fortune 500 CEOs speaking for “business” or Farrakhans speaking for “black America.” The complex patterns that emerge from individual thoughts and actions are less predictable than the simple stories leaders tell. And it is in such complexity that community strength is born.

The marchers were wiser than the commentators and more powerful than their would-be leaders. They took the event from its organizers, made it their own, turned it into a grass-roots affirmation of the strength, dignity and hope of African American men. They neither repudiated Farrakhan nor embraced him. They simply swamped him, made him a tiny piece of their much larger story.

The huge assembly sent two powerful messages to the rest of America: that it is dangerous to associate strength with irresponsibility and that it is deeply wrong to cast black men in general as malicious, antisocial or criminal.

It would be a tragedy if the overheated rhetoric of the march’s “leaders” drowns out the positive message of the men whose presence made the march happen. And it would be a betrayal of these fellow Americans if whites insist on making the marchers bad guys, insist on seeing hostility where it does not exist, insist on making the Million Man March a story about us.

“What did you find?” Peavy asked me in the airport. “What story will you tell?”

Simply this: that the march was bigger than any person, however demagogic; that it was a positive day for America; that I saw no angry faces on the streets of Washington, and that I was never, for one minute, afraid.

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