Editor's Note

The Million Man March remains an articulate and positive sign, a self-illuminating text. And as sign made text that 1995 event, like the 1963 March on Washington, is one the most self-affirming—and in context and content—one of the most profound self-reflexive statements that an oppressed group has ever made in the Americas. The black men, who—on October 16,1995—gathered on The Mall facing the Nation’s Capitol, spoke to themselves and their communities, and to the myriad other communities of which the United States is composed. The gathering of these black men—young and old, poor and middle class, believer and nonbeliever, straight and gay, employed and unemployed—was itself a grand statement, perhaps larger and more profound than any of the words uttered there; what that gathering of men did there was more important, for me, than what they said there. Collective and individual self-respect, self-affirmation, self-determination—these and many other positive words reflect what they did there: those million black men came from all corners of the United States to atone, an act which ultimately reads and interrogates this nation, past and present. Not only will we, a nation with a short memory, long remember their gathering on The Mall; our global community will also, for those million black men spoke to us and to the world in an urgent voice—a voice articulating the violence which visits us from White America, a voice declaring the harm we do to each other and to women and children in our communities, a voice fashioning corrective strategies designed to heal self-inflicted as well as other world-imposed wounds. Their great numbers gathered on The Mall underscored the urgency of their collective voice.

Why did they gather on The Mall? To atone, yes; but also to speak to the world about the conditions black men have been—and continue to be—forced to endure in this so-called democracy of material wealth aplenty; about how—as a result of political, social and economic conditions rooted in the legacy of the Middle Passage and enslavement, Jim Crow laws and economic deprivation, exclusion and imprisonment—black men have begun to turn upon themselves, their families, and their communities. Instead of identifying and addressing, for example, the root causes responsible for the criminal activities for which numerous black males are commonly charged, local, state, and national white politicians—chanting, with the President of the United States, “Three strikes and you’re out”—continue to call for the construction of more jails and the imprisonment of more black men. Exclude and deprive—these are the continuing responses white men and white women make to African-American men in general. Exclude, deprive, arrest and contain—these are the continuing European-American responses to black men, even to the young and “lost” ones. “Three strikes and you’re out” was what white slavers chanted in some other trope when as they snatched black bodies from the coasts of West Africa and sold them to white buyers in the Americas. It is as if that white voice, that white gaze, that white self—both male and female—cannot fully exist in self-appreciation or self-affirmation without maintaining the black male body as scapegoat with a political economy that White America denigrates, manipulates, exploits, and contains at will. That is also why these men gathered on The Mall: Without ever having read a word of it, they knew the truth of John Edgar Wideman’s startling revelation that, if you are a black male in late 20th-century U.S. America, “One minute you’re a person, the next moment somebody starts treating you as if you were not. Often it happens just that way, just that suddenly. Particularly if you are a black man in America.” Horrific circumstances in urgent words.

That same urgency is echoed in these two special issues of Callaloo (Winter & Spring, 1998) which, like the Million Man March, appears at a time when black men are still under the institutionalized siege which set in motion the first rebellions of enslaved Africans on their...