Media Advisory: Professors can share insight into 20th anniversary of Million Man March
LAWRENCE – Friday marks the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March. Led by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the event drew thousands of African-American men to Washington, D.C., on Oct. 16, 1995. On Saturday, Farrakhan will again lead a march, this one focused on the relationship between African-American men and the police.
Experts at the University of Kansas are available to talk about the Million Man March, which continues to draw mixed opinions in America.
Jennifer Hamer, professor and chair of the American studies department, was researching African-American fathers, particularly those who never married the mothers of their children, at the time of the Million Man March. In 2001, Hamer wrote “What It Means to Be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away form Their Children,” which was the first book to explore fatherhood from the perspective of that population of fathers.
In 2011, Hamer wrote “Abandoned in the Heartland: Work, Family, and Living in East St. Louis,” which among other areas looked at fathers who parent and attempt to protect their children in abandoned places like East St. Louis.
“What I learned from this work was that black men are better fathers and more involved fathers than popular or even Million Man March rhetoric suggests,” Hamer said.
Unlike other fathers, Hamer said African-American fathers are persistently challenged by aspects of structural violence that surround their children’s lives and their parenthood.
“Twenty years after the Million Man March, we continue to see black men and children disproportionately imprisoned, killed by police and civilians, and living in poverty,” Hamer said. “If the public is seriously concerned about the parenthood of black fathers and the related well-being of their children, then the next 20 years should focus on the responsibilities of the state to create a nation that provides at least the same level of safety and support that has historically been afforded middle class white families.”
Clarence Lang, associate professor and chair of the African and African American studies department, is an expert on the 20th century civil rights movement. In 2015, his “Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics” was published. He also co-edited “Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Phillip Randolph.”
At the time, Lang was among the few black scholars critical of the event. As a graduate student at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Lang co-authored an article in the journal New Politics that took issue with the politics and assumptions underpinning the Million Man March.
Q: How was the Million Man March different than other race-related marches in the nation’s capital?
Lang: Although it powerfully demonstrated the search for answers and restlessness that many black communities were experiencing in the 1990s, the Million Man March diverged dramatically from other mass marches to Washington, D.C., with which it has been compared. Previous events, like the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, had been concerned with making demands on the federal government for policy and reform. The Million Man March, on the other hand, essentially took a blame-the-victim approach by castigating African Americans — particularly African-American males — for their failures as husbands, fathers and role models in their communities. This essentially removed from discussion the deteriorating economic conditions in black communities that had been occurring since the 1970s, the retreat from civil rights protections and social wages, and the phenomenon of mass incarceration that began during the Reagan presidency but accelerated in the 1990s during the Clinton years. This was a dangerous position in the '90s, and with the continuing emphasis on individualism, privatism, punishment and austerity in U.S. national social policy, the ideas that framed the march then are equally dangerous today.
Q: By excluding African-American women, what message did the Million Man March send?
Lang: The male-centered character of the Million Man March buried issues, interests and demands particular to African-American women. This reflected a train of thought, present at least since the 1965 Moynihan Report, that suggested that African-American communities were culturally dysfunctional because of their supposedly matriarchal character and if black men would simply "take charge" or otherwise "restore order" to female-headed households and families, all of the communities' problems would be solved. In effect, the rhetoric surrounding the Million Man March imagined the assertion of black male patriarchy as the cure to all African-American social and economic issues. This legitimized state-level "marriage initiatives" and similar policies that were anchored in the assumption that promoting marriage was the solution to poverty. This viewpoint imposed not only a particular set of gender norms, but also corresponding sexual norms within which same-sex unions were framed as aberrant.
Q: Is there a connection between the ideas raised during the Million Man March in 1995 and today’s “Black Lives Matter” movement?
Lang: The Million Man March ideologically shared far much more in common with the architects of the Republican "Contract with America" than it did with the civil rights movement mobilizations decades earlier. In raising and debating critical questions about gender, sexuality and class, as well as race, "Black Lives Matter" today is light years ahead of the ideas that fueled the Million Man March in 1995. We should certainly reflect on the legacies of the 1995 march, but we absolutely should not return to its guiding principles, which have been a source of continuing misery today.
To set up an interview with Hamer or Lang, contact Christine Metz Howard at 785-864-8852 or cmetzhoward@ku.edu.