Masculine Atonement at the Century’s End: The Million Man March and Spike Lee’s Narrative

Abstract

Authored or rather authorized by Louis Farrakhan, the most prominent representative of the Nation of Islam (NOI),118 these sentences proclaim a deep, ongoing crisis and the threat of a powerful attempt to reverse that which is seen as progressing and progressive: time and the political and social gains made along with the movement of time. The words quoted are the opening statement of a document entitled “The Vision for the Million Man March.” calling for a march of African American men in Washington, D.C., on October 16,1995.119 Farrakhan’s “Vision Statement” came at the beginning of a national economic upsurge that appeared, however, to by-pass those African American communites which had been most severely affected by neoliberal policies. Unemployment and poverty in many urban neighborhoods, accompanied by a soaring rate of incarceration of their male and, increasingly, their female population, had come to provide a stark contrast to the affluence of a growing black middle-class. A widening economic rift had started to visibly undermine the coherence implied in the notion of a black community.120 While Farrakhan’s “Vision Statement” stresses the destructive consequences of recent political decisions for African Americans in general, it argues that it is black men who have been most severely affected.