c. 1998 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ Dennis Rogers and Malik Zulu Shabazz were both born in 1966. Malcolm X was already dead a year, and by their second birthdays, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.
Today, at 31, Rogers and Shabazz are both accomplished black leaders operating on a national scale out of this city, and each is organizing a separate Million Youth march for Labor Day weekend _ Rogers’ in Atlanta and Shabazz’s in New York.
While both were inspired by the Million Man March of three years ago, and each claims its spiritual mantle, Rogers and Shabazz in tone and temperament embody the starkly different qualities of the two upcoming events.
Beyond obvious differences in style, the two also may signify contending strategies among a younger generation of black leaders, separating those like Rogers who quietly seek to bridge and blend historically competing schools of black political thought, from those like Shabazz who loudly seek to sharpen the battle lines pitting black nationalists like himself against the mass of more mainstream black political and civil rights leaders and groups _ not to mention non-black America.
Shabazz, an attorney and chief lieutenant to Khallid Abdul Muhammad _ who was removed as the national spokesman of the Nation of Islam by Minister Louis Farrakhan in 1993 for his vitriolic attacks on Jews and others _ is all incendiary rhetoric and confrontation. His march’s goals are not inclusion in American society, but separation from it _ first through gaining control of the economy, politics and policing of black communities, and ultimately through the creation of a separate nation carved out of America or a return to Africa.
Rogers is the meticulously soft-spoken director of efforts to register young blacks to vote through the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation, located in an office a stone’s throw from the White House in a building that also houses the American Association of Grain Inspection Weighing Agencies and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
Rogers believes the self-help impulse of black nationalism can be a necessary but by no means exclusive road to remedy for the black community. He prefers to talk about more practical means to prepare black youth for a new millennium rather than a new Africa: having each young person develop a 10-year plan for his or her life, or making sure every black youngster has a library card and access to the Internet.
Of the New York march, scheduled for Sept. 5, Shabazz says, “This a black-nationalist-led march and you will be getting more of the feel of a Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad kind of leadership, black people asserting their independence and doing something for themselves, while it’s more of a mainstream march in Atlanta. So you’re dealing with the basic differences that probably existed in the 1960s between the civil rights movement and the nationalist movement.”
But Rogers, whose event will span four days, Sept. 4-7 in Atlanta, views the polarity of Shabazz’s vision as a false choice.
“I don’t see the need to isolate one approach from the other,” says Rogers. “I see the need for a collaboration of strategies.”
Consider, for example, the issue of reparations for slavery.
When Shabazz, dressed in a sky-blue dashiki, was asked at a recent news conference to get specific about the call for reparations, he dived into the following characteristic stream of thought:
“We will demand on Saturday, Sept. 5, full and complete reparations from the United States government and all guilty parties for what we consider to be the greatest human holocaust that has ever existed on the face of the planet Earth and that many of the problems and ills stem from what we call the African holocaust and that not one dime _ as we see now the Jewish community squeezing every dime that they can get out of the banks in Switzerland and they’ll chase an old crippled man down in Argentina, an ex-Nazi or so-called ex-Nazi and they’ll drag him back to court _ but not one dime has been paid to the sons and daughters of Africa displaced in the decadence and diaspora right here in white America and not one Negro leader has ever had the guts or backbone to stand up and call for full and complete reparations and that’s why we stand firmly behind Minister Khallid Abdul Muhammad.”
Asked to roughly quantify the reparations due African-Americans, Shabazz replied, “There has to be land and there has to be untold billions and trillions of dollars.”
By contrast, on the same issue, Rogers, dressed like a lobbyist in a dark suit with shiny black kiltie loafers, mentions a bill in Congress on reparations, and says the issue will be discussed among the plethora of workshops in Atlanta. Of the New York march’s demand, he asks, “What is their strategy for attaining reparations?”
“We’re looking for effectiveness,” says Rogers. “We can miss the loud boom.”
While it remains to be seen how successful the very different strategies will prove, it is already plain that Rogers has succeeded in crafting the far more broadly based effort around his Million Youth Movement.
Without fanfare or controversy, he has gained the endorsement of organizations spanning the spectrum, including the NAACP, the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition, and the AFL-CIO as well, importantly, as Minister Farrakhan.
Nonetheless, Shabazz, the national youth coordinator for the New York march, and his mentor Khallid Abdul Muhammad, its convener, have captured much more national press for their event.
They owe their success in this regard to their provocative careers and tendentious rhetoric, and to their choice of New York _ the nation’s premier media center and the domain of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who makes a perfect enemy for them in his fight to block their choice of Harlem, which the mayor argues is physically impractical, as a rally site.
A federal judge Wednesday (Aug. 26) ruled the city was wrong to try and deny a permit for the march.
Both marches, of course, claim direct descendance from the hugely successful Million Man March on the National Mall in Washington in October 1995, which was organized by Farrakhan.
In predictably telling fashion, Rogers and Shabazz both played significant but very different roles in that march.
Rogers graduated from North Carolina State University in his hometown of Raleigh, where, as a student, he started and ran an Afrocentric book store. He came to Washington and launched the National African American Student Association to link black students at historically black colleges and, like his alma mater, predominantly white institutions.
From there, Rogers was recruited by Benjamin Chavis Jr. (now, Benjamin Muhammad, a convert to the Nation of Islam) to play a lead role in drumming up youth support for the Million Man March.
The day of the march, Rogers was on the stage and behind the scenes.
“Being on stage and seeing that sea of faces, it was an awesome experience, a modern-day miracle,” Rogers recalls.
Shabazz was born in Los Angeles, and says his inculcation in black consciousness began in the womb, feeling and hearing his parents’ activism,their listening to Malcolm X. His grandfather had joined the Nation of Islam in 1955, giving him early entree to Farrakhan and Khallid Abdul Muhammad.
Shabazz came to Washington to attend Howard University and later its law school, where, in 1994, as founder of a group called Unity Nation, he brought to campus Khallid Abdul Muhammad _ who by then had remarkably been censured by both Farrakhan and the U.S. Senate (97-0) _ for a memorable evening of rhetorical attacks on Jews.
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It was Shabazz’s first taste of celebrity, which he renewed on the eve of the Million Man March. In an effort to set the march in a harder-edged context than simply unity or atonement, Shabazz organized the Black Holocaust Nationhood Conference in Washington the weekend before the march.
Much of that event was devoted to denouncing Jews. As Shabazz put it in introducing his mentor at that event, “We want to bring on a man who gives the white man nightmares. We want to bring on a man who makes the Jews pee in their pants at night. My big brother, Dr. Khallid Muhammad.”
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Todd Shaw, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, says a 1993 national black politics survey revealed strong nationalist sentiment among blacks under age 30, especially the men. But, Shaw cautions, that does not mean young black men who say Africa is more their homeland than America don’t simultaneously embrace classic integrationist civil rights values.
Which of the two upcoming marches will strike the more responsive chord is anyone’s guess.
“We know that we run a hard line and that not everybody is going to be pleased with this approach,” says Shabazz. “Minister Farrakhan used to have the same program. He ran a hard line.”
Ron Walters, an expert on black politics at the University of Maryland who headed the Howard political science department during Shabazz’s headline days there, says Khallid Abdul Muhammad and Shabazz “don’t have a following” except, perhaps, in the news media.
But Walters, who backs the Atlanta march, says that event is organized well enough that he doubts it will suffer much from a comparative lack of advance coverage in the mainstream media.
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