The Enemy’s Attack on the 'Spirit' of the Million Man March

By Dr. Ridgely A. Mu’min Muhammad -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: Sep 20, 2012 - 5:18:26 PM

'While the administration was hypocritically getting “tough on crime,” they were also kicking out the Nation of Islam Security forces that were stopping crime in the drug-infested federal housing projects that later investigations proved were being supplied drugs by undercover cops.'

“Spirit,” according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “an animating or vital principle held to give life to physical organisms.” The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan mentioned in his address to us in Philadelphia on the occasion of the 16^th anniversary of the Million Man March that our chanting of “Long Live the Spirit of the Million Man March” sounded weak. How can we explain this seeming loss of “spirit,” considering the tremendous effect of the “march” on the men that attended?

Many have pointed out numerous positive effects of the March, including more Black men registering to vote, Black men joining churches and organizations, Black men taking better care of their families and more Black orphans being adopted by Black families. The crime rate has gone down in a lot of our major cities even though the number of Black people being incarcerated has increased.

“Come let us deal wisely with them” is what the Pharaoh of the Bible said to his advisors out of fear of the growth and power of the Children of Israel. Part of that dealing wisely is to not let Black people know that the MMM instilled fear in the modern Pharaoh. The MMM began to have an effect on the government of America the very night that Minister Farrakhan announced it at the first Men’s Only meeting held in New York City at the 149^th Street Armory. That very night, January 24, 1994, the U.S. Senate went into special session and declared that when 5 or more young Black men were hanging together they could be labeled as a “street gang.”

President Bill Clinton in his State of the Union Address on January 25, 1994, the day after the announcement of the MMM, introduced his 1994 Omnibus Crime Control Act, which was supported by two-thirds of the congressional Democrats. This $33 billion monstrosity expanded the use of the federal death penalty to 60 crimes, appropriated $10 billion for a vast expansion of prison building, and offered money to localities to hire 100,000 police officers. The Clinton administration pressed the Congressional Black Caucus to drop from the 1994 crime bill a “Racial Justice Act” that required assurances that the death penalty wouldn’t be administered in a racially discriminatory way. And the administration refused to change federal drug sentencing laws on crack cocaine that overwhelmingly discriminate against Black offenders.

While the administration was hypocritically getting “tough on crime,” they were also kicking out the Nation of Islam Security forces that were stopping crime in the drug-infested federal housing projects that later investigations proved were being supplied drugs by undercover cops. In the spring of 1994 the federal government ordered the city of Baltimore to sever its contract with the Nation of Islam’s Security Agency. This one-year contract was worth $4.6 million and covered 16 high-rise public housing projects in Baltimore. Other cities followed Baltimore’s lead and severed contracts with NOI security companies, greatly crippling a growing business, taking jobs from many young Black men with families.

The next year Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development Department in 1995 announced a “one-strike-and-you’re-out” policy of expelling whole families from public housing on the mere suspicion that one family member was using drugs. Clinton’s 1996 welfare “reform” bill imposed a five-year lifetime limit and a two-year continuous limit on benefits. It barred immigrants from receiving welfare and cut $24 billion from the federal food-stamp program. It marked the first time that a program of the 1935 Social Security Act was repealed.

This 1996 welfare reform law required women to disclose the identity of their children’s fathers under penalty of losing benefits. This dovetailed nicely with the Bill Clinton-Al Gore crusade against “deadbeat” dads. Clinton’s own Health and Human Services Department estimated that the bill would throw at least 1.1 million children into poverty. Other experts produced estimates three times higher. Federal and state governments spent $10.6 billion less on welfare benefits in 2001 than they did in 1994.

In 1996, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act asserted that certain crimes, such as robbing tourists, committed by street gangs in the ghettos of America, may be classified as terrorism. This bill also gave the FBI the authority to investigate political groups at will, similar to its covert action against American citizens, COINTELPRO. On Clinton’s watch, the U.S. prison population nearly doubled: more Blacks went to prison than they did during the administrations of Reagan and Bush Sr. combined.

In 1996 Congress passed a new Telecommunications Act that allowed the monopolization of the airways by a few companies. Clear Channel went from owning 40 stations in 1996 to 1,240 in 2003 and it effectively standardized programming throughout the industry, eliminating positive political rap while promoting “gangsta-rap.” The street T-shirt industry went from producing positive messages like “2 Black 2 Crack” to filling the minds of our youth with “Don’t Ask Me 4 S**t.”

When conservatives and the Supreme Court attacked affirmative action programs, Clinton-Gore again retreated. While claiming a posture of wanting to “mend” rather than “end” affirmative action, Clinton ordered the end of dozens of federal affirmative action “set-aside” programs. At the same time Clinton slashed the federal workforce by 17 percent (377,000 workers).

At the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the Clinton-Gore administration announced its intention for a trade deal with China. In that deal America promised to open her markets to Chinese-manufactured consumer goods, if China would reduce her farm population by 20 million over the next 10 years. This move effectively destroyed the remaining manufacturing sector of America while at the same time forcing China to be dependent on American industrial-farm products.

As 2 million Black men descended on the DC Mall and the NOI bought farmland to potentially feed this “army,” the government went to work to destroy this prospect. Since the Nation of Islam started farming in 1995 and had expertise that could access government programs, the government decided to wipe out all the programs that the NOI could qualify for, even though it would destroy most of the White family farmers as well. Major agricultural commodity prices plummeted after the “Freedom to Farm” bill was passed in 1996. The prices for corn, soybeans, cotton, peanuts and wheat fell from their highs in 1995 and 1996 to almost half these amounts by the year 2001.

In June of 2003 President George W. Bush signed two landmark pieces of legislation: one authorized a $350 billion tax cut and the other increased the debt ceiling for the deficit. The combination of these two moves would ensure a growing deficit and the slow bloodletting of a once great nation. According to the Census Bureau, by 2046 whites will not be the majority ethnic population in America. Whites will be outnumbered by the Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos and Asians. In addition, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that at the rate the government is going, by 2021 it will spend $1.1 trillion in interest payments annually, and by 2042 the CBO says all tax revenue collected will be required just to pay the interest on the national debt, not the principal, leaving no money for education, transportation, agriculture, human services, national security or defense. Add to this that the nation most likely to hold most of that debt will be the same China that America got economically in bed with starting in 2000— we now have a formula to ignite World War III.

Thanks to the fear generated by the tragic events of “9/11,” the government has instituted the new “Patriot Act” and has developed the new language of “terroristic threat,” which gives the police the authority to put a Black man in jail for just looking at a policeman in a “threatening” manner. The USA PATRIOT Act also allowed any person suspected of being a Muslim to be treated like a suspected terrorist, frightening Black people from joining or supporting the Nation of Islam. There is mounting evidence that those planes could not have taken down those two towers of the World Trade Center. The fact that Building 7 in the World Trade Center complex fell on the same day in the same way without the aid of a plane indicates to me that the fear of the “spirit” of the MMM was so strong that elements in the government had to “shoot themselves in the foot” to stop our rise and break the “Spirit” of the Million Man March.

(Dr. Ridgely A. Mu’min Muhammad, Agricultural Economist, National Student Minister of Agriculture, Manager of Muhammad Farms. He can be reached at [email protected]).

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