Thanks a million: I went to the march, and all I got was this lousy press pass.

The Million Man March could be summed up, really, in a short conversation I had with an Ethiopian-born cabby near the end of the day. "Fuck Oliver North," Ibrahim said in a clipped accent that took seventeen years of living in America to develop. "He don't know what the hell he's talking about."

Apparently Ollie had been dissing the brothers who were at the march, saying on his syndicated radio program that they were nothing more than dupes for that evil, Koran-quoting, violin-playing menace to society: Minister Louis Farrakhan.

"You know, a million people cannot be wrong," lbrahim said. I immediately reminded myself that a couple million people had been wrong about Milli Vanilli, but I understood what the brother was getting at.

"Am I right?" he reiterated. "A million black men cannot be wrong. This time they came in peace. Next time, I tell you, they will not come in peace."

Chuck D, philosopher-frontman for Public Enemy, said in 1988 that the apocalypse for black America was already in effect, and if suckers didn't realize that the bomb had been dropped, then they needed to step off.

My guess is the Enola Gay took flight during the 1980 election and dropped its payload on black America the day Ronald Reagan took office. No mutually assured destruction, just one steadv bombing campaign on colored folks by politicians and policy makers from Reagan to Gingrich, with the Democratic Party looking on like some punk-ass U.N. observer team just hoping to stay alive.

The march, which actually was a stand-around, was the biggest summit on the plight of black folk since the first March on Washington. Farrakhan said it was divine inspiration that got him to call for a march. Without saying it, he sees himself as the Moses that African Americans have been looking for. Megalomania? Maybe, but you saw the pictures; he got them to come.

Unlike the first march, there wasn't any talk of a world where little black boys and girls and little white boys and girls could play in peace and harmony. I didn't hear a single verse of "We Shall Overcome." It was the sounds and philosophy of hip-hop, which, Greg Tate once wrote, is "what happened when the black community became the Bermuda Triangle and lost track of itself on the radar screen of Reaganomics.... Hip-hop is if you can't join 'em, beat 'em; if you can't beat 'em, blunt 'em."

Given that Farrakhan was the drum major for this march, the dream was dead, and even the long-suffering dauphin to King's legacy, Jesse Jackson, was going to take a big-time back seat to the Minister and the program of resegregation, black nationalism, and self-help.

But that was on the platform. Most of what was said on the stage that day was looked on with ambivalence. In the crowd, there was one emotion that I haven't seen too much in the black community since 1980: hope. Other news sources have touched on this, but if you are not black, then you might not know how it felt to be among a million people experiencing hope as a group for a community that had been desperately short of hope for years.

It wasn't uncommon to see dreadlocked youth, proudly displaying the colors red, black, and green in various forms, talking politics and economics with blue-suited professionals. Kids sporting hip-hop gear rapped with older men, who talked to them about hearing and seeing Malcolm and Martin and being in Selma, Washington, and Watts. Followers of Islam discussed religion with Baptists. Instead of marching, a million men found themselves all day long involved in small discussion groups.

This kind of activity caught several people in the media by surprise. A news reporter from Channel 4 in Washington told the world that there wasn't any fighting or crack smoking. Yeah, no pimping, either.

"There haven't been any disappointments today," said Robert Brown, a thirty-two-year-old student and father of two from Dorchester, Massachusetts. "To be perfectly honest, I think this feeling will continue, and we'll all use that hope when we get back home."

Brown, who was there with four other friends, said this gathering of men was all about hardship. It was about eight-, nine-, and ten-year-old kids in street gangs and deteriorating schools. It was about one-third of black men between eighteen and twenty-five tied up in the criminal-justice system. It was about a country that is pulling back on human services at a time when they are needed most. The world black kids face is hard-core and getting harder each day, and Brown was worried about his sons and what they would have to endure if America doesn't change.

Elder Yehudah, a long-time Garveyite by way of Harlem now living in Washington, used a bullhorn to mock the "leaders" on stage.

"We need action, not rhetoric and demagoguery," Yehudah shouted. The first march was a circus of black clowns and white clowns, he said. This one is "a one-million-man circus that is not dealing with the problem," he yelled pointing toward the platform.

Some younger men laughed at the disheveled Yehudah as he raved on about the struggle. But I understood where he was coming from, and wondered how much respect he would have gotten if he'd been in a suit and bow tie. I'm glad he wasn't, though.

"The struggle is an economic one," he said, his voice strained and coarse from years of shouting. "We didn't have a gang problem until we started having economic problems. We need to stop spending money with people who are trying to ruin our communities. Take the message back home; it is about economics."

Yehudah, along with Herb Williams, president of the National African-American Consumers Association, said the only way to get action is to create something that will generate a reaction. Yehudah called for closing Washington-National and all the roads leading out of the city. That drew a few low moans, and to be honest. I didn't want to stay in D.C. any longer than I had to.

"We are calling for a boycott of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors," said Williams, a former vice president at a now-defunct car dealership in Washington. "We want to punish the biggest corporations in America. We want an apology and reparations for our slave labor."

Rhetoric, yes, and Williams must know the forty acres and a mule ain't coming. But he wants to force those in charge of the private sector to move Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, back away from the terror campaign they're waging on black America.

If Farrakhan could get a million men to come to Washington, could he get a couple million not to buy cars? Maybe, just as long as he didn't say, "Close Washington-National, the bus station, and the train station."

Williams said he wanted this boycott to be part of the march, but he'd been shut out. Grassroots leaders, like himself, had been kept off the platform, so he was doing what he'd been doing all along, taking his message to the people in the streets.

God, Farrakhan said, told him to call this march because God is a wee peeved with everybody and we have to atone in order to get back in His good graces. If you've read or studied the Book of Revelations, then you might take this atonement thing seriously. You don't want to be caught in the fire next time without your get-out-of-hell pass.

Farrakhan jumped from one idea to another in a two-hour-long lesson to the hundreds of thousands in attendance and the millions of people watching the speech on television or listening in on radio. At first, Farrakhan started whipping out numerology theory, the heights of several monuments, the layout of the city, and secret Masonic rituals. I was waiting for the Trilateral Commission to be mentioned, but no such luck.

"Damn, do you know what he's talking about?" a twenty-something brother from Illinois asked me as Farrakhan went on about the significance of the number nineteen. I shrugged my shoulders and told him I flunked algebra and barely passed geometry.

But Farrakhan moved away from his numbers and on to the matter at hand.

"So my beloved brothers and sisters, here's what we'd like you to do," he said. "We must belong to some organization that is working for, and in the interest of, the uplift and the liberation of our people."

It didn't matter which organization, he said. It could be something radical such as the Nation of Islam or the All African People's Revolutionary Party, or it could be such mainstays as the NAACP, the Urban League, and CORE.

"Now, brothers, moral and spiritual renewal is a necessity," he went on. "Every one of you must go back home and join some church, svnagogue, temple, or mosque that is teaching spiritual and moral uplift. ere's no men in the church, in the mosque. They are in the strects, and we have to get back to God." Farrakhan then told religious leaders that they need to be more like Jesus, Muhammad, and Moses and become servants in fulfilling the needs of the people.

"Brothers, when you go home, we got to register eight million eligible but unregistered brothers, sisters," Farrakhan said later. "So you go home and find eight more like yourself. You register and get them."

It didn't matter what party you registered under. Farrakhan said, because the point was that black people needed to become a "third force, which means we're going to collect Democrats, Republicans, and independents around an agenda that is in the best interests of our people."

Farrakhan, as the current "spokesman" for thirty-five million people, said that we were not going to vote for anyone that didn't speak to this agenda--which wasn't clearly stated, but maybe I'm missing the obvious. And we definitely will not vote for a candidate just because that person is black. Slap, slap, General Powell.

My mother never liked the idea of the march. And a whole lot of other women weren't down with it, either. This was no time to have a march against oppression by the Man if it excluded women, they said. And it didn't matter that Louis Farrakhan and Ben Chavis relented and said women wouldn't be turned away if they wanted to come. It was too late.

It wasn't that it was a "members only" event that had mom upset, but it was the take-back-your-family, handle-your-women-and-children routine that didn't settle well with a woman who marched for everything from civil rights to the anti-war movement.

When I got home, Pat was still in rare form. And in the end she asked the same question I pondered as I flew home from the march: what did Farrakhan say that hadn't already been pleaded for by every other "leader" in the community for years?

Am I wrong in thinking that Jesse could have said the same thing, only faster? Indeed, hadn't he been saying go out and vote, find God, join an organization that would help the race, don't abandon your family? Hadn't Ben Chavis, Farrakhan's link to the mainstream, said the same thing for years? What about King, A. Philip Randolph, Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass" I know my father, mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents had said these things to me and my brothers before.

Anticipating that there wouldn't be anything Earth-shattering said by Farrakhan, I asked Robert Brown before the big speech about the freshness of the Minister's rhetoric.

"No, the message isn't new," he said. "But the numbers are new, and this has to tell you something. People are willing to unify and listen and hopefully act, not for Farrakhan, but for themselves. But in this case, you can't separate the message from the messenger."

This time, the message of God, family, activism, and voting was delivered against the backdrop of black nationalism and not multiculturalism, which is often seen as assimilation. The question isn't whether you can separate the message from the messenger, but rather can the messenger separate himself from the message.

In his speech, Farrakhan sort of attempted to offer an olive branch to the Jewish community, even though when I reread that section of the speech recently I noticed that it was a pretty flimsy branch.

"I don't like this squabble with the members of the Jewish community," he said. "The honorable Elijah Muhammad said in one of his writings that he believed that we would work out some kind of accord. The Reverend Jackson [i.e., the one you guys like] has talked to twelve presidents of Jewish organizations, and perhaps in the light of what we see today it's time to sit down and talk--not with preconditions."

As I sat at O'Hare waiting for a commuter flight back to the land of cheese and snow, I thought what a screwed-up world we must be in when grown men are desperately eager to hear--maybe for the first time in their lives--that they matter, they count, and they could succeed.

With all the problems, I'm glad the march happened. Forget the post-march intellectual pissing matches, and jockeying for position to see who gets to play leader in front of the media for the next few months. The march served a great purpose: it gave the hopeless hope; it got people to think and talk about everything else but O.J.; and I got a really cool press pass that said I was one of the million men, which seemed to impress women at the airport.