As black marchers returned to their homes Tuesday and race re-emerged as a volatile topic in American politics and society, a bipartisan group of House members urged President Clinton to create a national commission on race relations.
With the Million Man March and discord over the O.J. Simpson verdict fresh in the public mind, the lawmakers said the commission’s goal would be to foster “a healthy discussion and a new era of progress between the races.”
But the spirit and substance of Monday’s gathering of an estimated 400,000 black men on the Mall suggest that the time may have passed when commissions or task forces can effectively address the vexing issue of race.
Speaker after speaker asserted that the answer to society’s ills is to be found by looking within, not toward any specific institution. The message underscored a growing sense that public and private institutions-schools and churches, unions and political parties-have failed to address the deeper problems.
Large groups of people coalesce around a set of ideas or values-whether those of the Christian Coalition, Nation of Islam or Ross Perot’s United We Stand America-but with little expectation that any single politician or religious leader will bring those ideas to fruition.
Most Americans have believed that political parties and individual politicians, from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, could represent their political interests.
Few groups believed this more avidly than blacks, as they traditionally have offered all but monolithic support to Democrats. But as Monday’s rally underscored, another view appears to be emerging.
Much of the rhetoric at the march was similar to what is heard at the religious rallies of predominantly white men called the Promise Keepers and in the homilies of William Bennett’s best-selling “Book of Virtues.”
Good marriages, good schools, safe streets, the message goes-all Americans have to do is reach out for it, commit to it, make it happen. The answer, those gathered at the Mall said, is not in America’s institutions, but in themselves.
That was the understanding Talmadge Hancock, 50, a lithographer from Washington, took away from the rally. “It was one central theme all the way through: Family,” he said.
Thomas Williams, 60, a retired postal worker, traveled to Monday’s demonstration from Jersey City with his two sons, and their sons.
As his sons and grandsons grew up, Williams said, he witnessed with dismay “a gradual deterioration of black neighborhoods.” Even while he held his own family together, he said, “I’ve seen other families and how they were torn apart.”
His son, Thomas Williams Jr., a stockbroker, said “there has been a lack of a spiritual line of defense.” The march, he said, “is about black men coming together, saying we have been lost, we have been grappling, we have been soul-searching. . . . So that we can define what a black man is.”
“We need knowledge of ourselves before we can progress,” said his brother, Darrell Williams. Even Darrell’s 11-year-old son, Anthony, said it’s time for a man to “prove he’s worth something.”
“The march was an expression of the dignity and worth of African-Americans and a challenge to those outside this community to recognize this,” said Anthony Tambasco, chairman of the theology department at Georgetown University.
In the view of Tambasco and others, the march raised many issues of basic equity. These include blacks’ disadvantage in securing jobs and housing, the prejudice against them and their exclusion from society’s benefits, he said.
But justice, Tambasco said, includes being responsible for one’s own life. Whether the messenger is Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, or former Vice President Dan Quayle, whose exhortations on declining family values brought headlines, the message often is resented.
Nonetheless, there are signs throughout America that taking individual responsibility is on the rise.
Nine million people listen to radio’s “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger advising them on old-fashioned morals and the value of hard work. Meanwhile, a black presidential candidate, Republican Alan Keyes, rails eloquently against abortion and government handouts, bringing the recent Christian Coalition convention to its feet.
The GOP freshman class in Congress calls for sacrifice to reduce the national budget deficit. And George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni, leader of the communitarian movement, preaches it is time for the “Me” generation to become the “We” generation.
For all the rhetoric, however, the solutions to America’s racial problems remain difficult and elusive.
The longing for better race relations and spiritual renewal has been present for a long time, certainly since the last time the federal government formally studied the subject-in 1968 with the Kerner Commission, headed by the late Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner.
“It definitely occurs during moments of strain and tension within a society,” said David Daniels, an associate professor at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago.
An unusual biracial, bipartisan group of House members urged Clinton to appoint a new commission on race: Republican Reps. Jim Leach of Iowa and Bill McCollum of Florida joined with Democratic Reps. John Lewis of Georgia, Charles Rangel and Charles Schumer of New York, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the delegate from the District of Columbia.
Clinton, who came under attack from GOP front-runner Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas for not being more forceful in his denunciation of Farrakhan’s racist remarks, might be tempted to follow the time-tested tradition of creating such a blue-ribbon panel and then ignoring it.
Regardless of the work of any commission, churches and local community groups across the country likely will end up assuming a more activist role, especially given the budget-cutting under way in Congress. But it is still left to individual communities to discover what works.
In one sense, that has been part of the appeal of Farrakhan, who said Tuesday he will sue the federal government and contest the U.S. Park Service’s official crowd estimate of 400,000. His message is one of independence, refusing to be beholden to a white-dominated government.
“Those men who were there (at the march) must go back to their community and offer hope, healing and help,” said Rev. Kenneth Walker, pastor of Abyssinian African Baptist Church in Atlanta.
“Farrakhan brought us to the mountain, now we must go to the valley to work. The march will really be measured by what we do after, in the valley.”
