Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 18, 1995 TAG: 9510180075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The multitude has headed home. And, as white and black Americans search their souls for the meaning of their march, Rob Hartwell's tale is telling.
Hartwell, a Republican lobbyist, is white. And he was one of a smaller-than-normal number of whites to venture into the city Monday as hundreds of thousands of black men streamed toward the Capitol in their largest gathering ever.
``Many of my friends didn't come in to work,'' Hartwell said. ``They feared it would be violent ... People are scared.''
But the peaceful reality of the march took Hartwell and others in white America by surprise, forcing them to look at blacks with new eyes.
``It was so spiritual in nature. So orderly,'' he said. ``I think any white person would be pleased to see black men talk about uplifting themselves and their communities.''
At a time when relations between blacks and whites in this country are charged with fear, suspicion and anger, Monday's Million Man March may be an opening, some say, not only to energize the black community from within, but to begin a desperately needed dialogue between the races.
The march's huge draw also made clear that Louis Farrakhan, for all his verbal attacks on whites and Jews, would be hard to ignore in that exchange.
Still, Farrakhan or no, lawmakers, marchers, academics and activists said the march should be seen as only a beginning.
``This event is something you HAVE to embroider upon,'' said Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.'s delegate to Congress. ``We've gone from racial segregation to racial isolation.''
``We don't talk to each other. ... We talk around each other,'' said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a longtime civil rights activist who, at 23, was the youngest person to speak at Dr. King's 1963 March on Washington. ``There is no dialogue between blacks and whites.''
Norton and Lewis were joined Tuesday by three white colleagues, two of them Republicans, to call on Clinton to appoint a high-level independent commission to study racism in America, much like the 1968 Kerner Commission report.
That commission determined that ``our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.'' Today, the lawmakers said that menacing prediction still holds true.
Lawmakers said that the very different ways that black and white Americans reacted to the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial helped push them to propose the new study.
``Anger rages in the hearts of too many cities. We seem to talk past one another. Our perceptions are SO different that I fear for the future of our society,'' Rep. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said at the news conference. ``People may ask, `Why a commission? Why don't we just DO something?' Well, nobody knows quite what to do.''
Schumer said that while Clinton has not responded, top White House advisers favored the idea of a Blue Ribbon Commission on Race. And despite Farrakhan's rising tide, moving from the fringes to the mainstream after Monday's march, lawmakers were vague about whether the controversial black leader should have a seat at that table.
``The most impressive aspect of yesterday's march is that there was no great call for government action,'' Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, said at the same news conference. ``It was a statement for personal responsibility. That was the most impressive, the most moving thing about the march. In a way, it's a very conservative precept.''
D.C. talk show host Joe Madison said his phone lines were lit up for eight hours straight during his broadcast from the march. He said that all the white callers told him they had developed a different perspective of Farrakhan - and a newfound respect for the black community.
``We'll never be looked at the same way again,'' Madison said Tuesday. ``We did something that no one in history has ever done before. We didn't come here begging and entreating. We vowed to get whatever we need to heal our communities on our own.''
by CNB