THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 17, 1995 TAG: 9510170277
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Charlise Lyles
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
Through night as black as their skin, they came. Into a blazing daybreak as full of color as their many faces, they came.
Holding sleeping bags, water bottles, briefcases and the small hands of sons whose sleepy eyes filled with wonder, they came.
From Texas, Florida, Nebraska, California, they came, hundreds of thousands of African-American men, as if emerging from the earth.
Their voices, at first a low rumbling at the foot of the Capitol stairs, rose to thunder that could have awakened ghosts of the old African and the slave.
``Black men!'' they chanted, pressed together back to back, face to face, this time in a joyous passage. ``We are here! We are here! One million strong!''
Lost in this sea of smiling, good-looking, let-me-help-you-sister, gentle, yet muscled masculinity, I heard them. And I knew what I had been missing.
Every day when I come to work and there are only three black men out of dozens in the newsroom.
Every time I try to find a Big Brother for two Park Place boys whose father is in prison.
Every evening when a teenage mother walks by my house with her toddler in tow and no father in sight.
Every morning as I pass the homeless and jobless gathered at Monticello Avenue and Princess Anne Road.
Every time a police car carries away somebody's son in handcuffs or, worse, a hearse hauls him in a body bag.
I had been missing men.
Black men peculiarly absent, yet, too much of the time, painfully present in America. But on Monday, their renewed presence, multiplied by a million, moved deeply through me in a gathering that was at once spiritual ceremony, public therapy and political testimony.
As I stood in the brisk morning air on the muddy monument grounds among a metaphorical million, I knew that it would take more than a march, more than a moment of atonement to bring them back. I needed a million black men to make one promise: To love themselves.
Kenneth Wright of Washington, D.C., promised.
``Shouldn't be brothers killin' brothers. That's what this here is all about,'' said the 31-year-old assistant chef. As a youth, he was seduced into a gang that robbed and stole. He ended up doing five years' hard time. He knows how to rehabilitate. He taught himself.
``I can teach these boys not to be out here making these babies they can't take care of,'' he said. That's what I'm going for when I leave here.''
Michael Rowe of Houston, Texas, promised.
``Buy Black Our Community,'' Rowe's neon-orange sign framed by American flags. ``How?'' asked Rowe. ``First, we've got to start spending more money in our communities. We've got to stop our children from devoting their lives to watching TV and help them take pride in decent, respectable hard work.
``I own a high-rise window-washing business and I have to hire Hispanics and people from the Caribbean because the black children don't respect hard work,'' said Rowe, a thick man in a leather baseball cap. ``I'm working with the churches to train some of these kids.''
Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers promised.
``Voter registration and political action - we have to move fast off the momentum of this march while the feeling is still contagious,'' said Chambers, his face nestled in a silvery gray afro and beard. ``Don't let this march become a blip on the radar screen. We've got to move.
``This will show a lot of people who are of the opinion that we can't come together to do anything.''
And as men stood in the warming sun, Brother Minister Prince X of Savannah, Ga., promised.
``We're trying to do better by you, the black woman, our wives, our mothers, our daughters, our sisters,'' said Prince X, a member of the Nation of Islam. ``We ask your forgiveness for being slovenly, lazy and trifling men. For being stressed-out and frustrated when the white man gives our women jobs, but won't give us any. We promise to lift ourselves up for you.''
You better keep your promise, black men, to yourself, to me, to America, and come back from among the missing.
KEYWORDS: MILLION MAN MARCH by CNB