Photo by AP/ Burhan Ozbilici

Two Years Later,
1Viarch Slows To A Crawl

JAMES D. BESSER
Washington Correspondent

ast week marked the two-year
anniversary of Nation of
Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's
Million Man March. The
huge gathering on Washington's Mall
provoked dire predictions from Jewish
leaders, but few proved accurate.
For a variety of reasons, not least of
which were his own bizarre activities
since the controversial march; Mr.
Farrakhan has become more of a foot-
note than a headline story. His call last
week for another African-American
"day of atonement" and h _ is promise to
marry 10,000 couples in front of the
Capitol in the year 2000 sounded like
the desperate pleas of a media hound
who knows he's become stale news.
That doesn't mean that black anti-
Semitism is no longer a threat, or that
Mr. Farrakhan has become .a benign -
presence on the national scene. The
bitterness of an African-American
F"---) community that sees inequality as per-
vasive and the white establishment as
indifferent continues to create fertile
soil for raging demagogues...
But black-Jewish relations have not
c' deteriorated as a result of the Million
Man March, as many Jewish leaders
feared, and Mr. Farrakhan wasn't able
to use the positive message underlying
the event to mainstream his racist,
anti-Semitic views. In fact, efforts by
black and Jewish leaders to find com-
mon ground may be growing —
aided, in a way, by Mr. Farrakhan' ,
un altered -marginal
evicience.
Million Man March was a
media triumph, but it did little to
boost Mr. Farrakhan as a legitimate
national leader.
"He was the force who created the
march, and it was a brilliant concept,"
said Arthur Magida, author of Prophet
of Rage, a revealing Farrakhan biogra-
phy. "What blew this marvelous
opportunity was his long, tortured,
confusing speech replete with
numerology and conspiracy theories.
What further ruined it was his failure

Oa

-

Louis Farrakhan smiles during a news conference.

that day to do what he was asking
people to do: atone.".-----
In a way, Mr. farrakhan became
incidental to the event even as it was
occurring. Even on the-Mall, --th-e-aildi-
ence was far less attentive during his
zany talk than during any of the other
speeches.
Mr. Farrakhan added to the
- world
a few months later with
,,places like Iran,
friends,hui
R.n. and Libya. Whatever
legitimacy he gained from the march
was sapped by his happy hobnobbing
with some of the world's most brutal
dictators and human rights abusers.
True, the black Muslim leader still
has the ability to grab headlines — as
when he put together a march against
racism in Philadelphia that drew sup-
port from that city's Jewish-mayor. - - -
But two years after the event, Mr.
Farrakhan is what he was before the
march: a firebrand whose appeal even
among alienated African-Americans is
limited because of his oddball conspir-
acy theories, his unsavory foreign
friends and the bigoted elements of his

political theology.
Mr. Farrakhan has been unable to
turn the positive ideas that drove the
- Million Man March — a greatercoix , -
mitment to family respatIgis was
— into an ongo
at the top ofthe,44 : -
in ,
or social movement.
5 irie Promise Keepers, a mostly
white Christian group that brought
almost as many men to the Mall a few
weeks ago, are using their event to
boost local activity in churches around
the country.
. Mr. Farrakhan, in contrast, seemed
to believe that the brief flare of public-
ity created by his march would sponta-
neously ignite organized activity at the
grass-roots level. It didn't — another
missed opportunity.
Mr. Farrakhan, with promised
- financial backing from Libya, suggest-
ed the possibility of a new African-
American political movement, but
that, too, fizzled. Mr. Farrakhan is still
a political outsider, without the ability
to influence elections except in a few
isolated strongholds.
More and more, the Million Man

March looks like a media stunt exist-
1`•fi•
ing in total isolati,
like someone who
have the ability to translate the
public attention he gained into con-
crete grass-roots action------
That was evident in last week's "day
of atonement" meetings around the
country, which drew only handfuls of
participants.
Black anti-Semitism did not soar in
response to the march's success.
"The problem continues to be
worrisome, but there wasn't the big
surge that many people expected after
the Million Man March," said an
official with a major Jewish commu- •
nity relations agency. "Farrakhan's
reprehensible views apparently didn't
gain wider currency because of the
attention he received. There's no evi-
dence he was able to market those
ideas to a broader audience because
of the march."
Black Americans seem perfectly
able to draw distinctions between the
sensible parts of Mr. Farrakhan's mes-
sage and the sheer lunacy. 0

10/24
1997

39