THE MILLION YOUTH MARCH @ 20!

THE MILLION YOUTH MARCH @ 20!

It was a beautiful early Fall day that Saturday, September 5th, 1998 in our beloved Harlem!

Thousands, I would dare say hundreds of thousands, based on aerial footage from the day, of the most militant Black Youth in the country converged for an empowering afternoon of Unity, Solidarity and a Renewed Call for Black Nationalist based Community Organizing to come forth!...

One of the most unheard and abandoned segments of the Black Community, the so called 'Lost Generation', stood up to New York's most racist and facist Mayor in decades, stood up to a pathetic throng of Black 'Mis-Leadership', using Glen Ford's language,that denounced the gathering and would not even have the decency to engage its organizers, and stood up to a Media hostility so pronounced that to this day it is hard to find a single media item from the socalled mainstream media that in any reflects the narrative of the generation that made it happen!

Yet in the end, 'we' made it happen!

'We' even physically stood down an unprovoked physical attack from the NYPD at the end!

In the words of one alternative press account:
"And so a police riot began sharply at 4:01.
"In his news conference after the precisely orchestrated psychological warfare, humiliation and violence against thousands of peacefully assembled Black people, the mayor called for the arrest of Khalid Muhammad for inciting a riot.
"But it was Giuliani who incited a police riot. And it was not the first time."

That is 'Perspective'!

That came from activist reporter Vanessa Lewis of Workers World, and it sure as hell is not your daddy's mainstream media coverage of Black Young people speaking up and standing up for themselves.

To be sure, according to 'their' statistics, 17 of theirs went to the Hospital and only one of ours did. That lone casualty on our side, let it be known, stopped a NY Police officer who would had his gun drawn as they attacked they stage from the rear!

I will militarily take those numbers any day!

More should be said however.

The March took place just weeks after a lynching in Texas that saw an emerging New Black Panther Party confront the KKK with force of arms!...That action compelled the pathetic Bill Clinton's Justice Department to step up its game in prosecuting the Terrorists responsible, something Khallid Abdul Muhammad will never get credit for pathetically! Prior to that they were conspicuously quiet let the record reflect.
That bold stand in that hot Texas sun would not only be the first moment in the sun for the much maligned New Panthers, it would be the beginning of the end of the organizing legacy of the late Khallid Abdul Muhammad!

So after the fearless epic gathering that indeed was the Million Youth March, many of those same abandoned young people stepped up their own local organizing efforts and many expanded the growth of the New Black Panther Party under Khallid!

Put it this way, when Khallid came into the New Black Panther Party, they only had two fully functional chapters. After the March, they would have three dozen all over the country!

He would be gone less than three years later, but many who he touched, taught and trained are still n the language of unsung poet A Wanjiku H Reynolds.'trying to make time and trying to make a difference.'

Never give up!
Hold the line! Cover Down!
Freedom or Death!
Black Power!
"We gotta fight the powers that be..."
-Public Enemy

Baba Zayid Muhammad
(c)2018