MARCHING TO FARRAKHAN'S TUNE

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

IT MUST HAVE BEEN A MEMORABLE DAY, the one that Louis Farrakhan recalled recently in his newspaper, The Final Call. A bitter day of looking on from the sidelines, a day to hear a proud old man's oath. "I was visiting with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as we watched [Martin Luther King's] 1963 March on Washington," Farrakhan wrote of his now deceased mentor. "He said that he saw too much frivolity, joking and a picnic atmosphere. He said, 'One day, Brother, I will call for a March on Washington.'"

Muhammad never got to hold his somber march. But next Monday Farrakhan, his successor, plans to do it for him. And if the protege's plans are realized, it will be a mighty thing to behold. While King had an audience of more than 200,000 for his "I Have a Dream" speech on the capital's Mall, Farrakhan is inviting 1 million. And not just any million: 1 million black men, who will gather to listen for five hours to such speakers as Jesse Jackson and Rosa Parks, and to engage in an exercise in equal parts humility and pride. Farrakhan calls the gathering (there will be no actual march) a day of atonement. Participants are to repent for their mistreatment of one another and of black women, for their abandonment of positive family values and their failure to put God first. But the Nation of Islam leader also envisions a day of muscle flexing. He and his co-organizer, ex-N.A.A.C.P. head the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, will run a huge voter-registration drive in an attempt to turn one of the country's weaker constituencies into a powerful swing vote. And he has urged black entertainers, black athletes and all black males who cannot attend the march (as well as black women and children) to engage in a one-day work and shopping boycott. "We're closing down on that day," he has said. "We are absenting ourselves for one day from a racist system." Jackson says of the mission, "We have to turn pain to power and power into public policy." If the march draws even 200,000 people, it could turn Farrakhan the outsider into a major mainstream player. Asks Ishmael Muhammad, Elijah's son and now a Farrakhan assistant: "How can you praise a fruit and not the tree that bears it?"

Few would deny the minister's point that the black man could use a redefinition; some might suggest a resurrection. The successful defense of a black male celebrity by a black male lawyer in Los Angeles, cheered as it was by many African Americans, was an exception to a bleak pattern. Last week the Washington-based Sentencing Project, which in 1990 broke the grim news that 1 out of every 4 black men ages 20 to 29 was in jail, paroled or on probation, delivered a chilling update: the estimate now is 1 out of 3.

This communal catastrophe is beginning to breed unconventional and disquieting responses. A forthcoming article in the Yale Law Review by Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University, reports that inner-city juries are increasingly acquitting black men they know to be guilty. "They do a cost/benefit analysis," he says. "They look at this person and decide, 'As a community, we're better off with this person out of jail than in jail.'" The practice is probably legal under a common-law doctrine allowing jurors to override the law if their own sense of justice demands it. But it is a radical act, used historically to undermine an unpopular authority like the British crown in the 1700s. Butler knows this. Of Baltimore, where nearly 60% of young black men are under court supervision, he says, "African Americans perceive that as a police state."

By contrast, the stated purposes of Farrakhan's march seem almost Republican. The complement to the black separatism that has always alienated whites is a philosophy of self-discipline and self-reliance. During a recent speech, Farrakhan told the story of Deletha Word, a black woman who dented the car of another motorist, also black, on the Belle Isle Bridge over the Detroit River. The driver allegedly beat Word with a tire iron, then watched as she flung herself to her death off the bridge. "She wasn't killed by Mark Fuhrman," orated Farrakhan. "She wasn't killed by the oppressor. She was killed by her so-called Brother because he was mad she had bumped into his shiny car."

There may be a market for the minister's messages. In a TIME/CNN poll of 400 African Americans last week, 33% said they regarded him as a "positive force," and only 16% saw him as negative; the rest weren't sure. He enjoys a hard-won legitimacy among otherwise disaffected young men in the inner cities, where his bow-tied adherents are aggressively visible. The Rev. James Demus, pastor of the Park Manor Christian Church on Chicago's South Side, joined Chicago's Million Man March steering committee. Says he of Farrakhan's followers: "I admire their work in cleaning up drugs; I admire their sense of cleanliness and frugal spending." He adds the urban truism, "In this neighborhood, the word is you don't mess with the Muslims."

Farrakhan's problem is that both his rhetoric and his following were developed at the expense of more traditional black church leaders, whom he has called "lying hypocrites." These, along with orthodox American Muslims, who bear him no love, are the very people whose huge followings he needs to fill out the march's ranks. The ministers, perhaps more than their flock members, take issue with Farrakhan's derogation of other ethnic groups, his demotion of black women to a secondary position and his sometime disdain for Christianity itself. Many see the march as a power grab, noting that until Chavis belatedly came on board, it was an all-Muslim enterprise. Said the Rev. Bennett Smith Sr., president of the 2.5 million-member Progressive National Baptist Convention: "If you are going to invite me to ride on your airplane, don't send me a ticket after the plane takes off." The Rev. Henry J. Lyons, of the 8.2 million-member National Baptist Convention, informed his group that to march would be "a violation of the Word of God." Last Tuesday Farrakhan struck an eleventh-hour deal with 20 influential Protestant ministers. They wouldn't endorse the march, but most agreed to stop criticizing it.

It is beginning to look as though that may be encouragement enough for individual pastors and congregants. The Rev. Cecil Murray, minister at Los Angeles' renowned First A.M.E. Church, says he is planning to send a contingent of "several hundred," some of whom may take advantage of a special $299 round-trip plane fare arranged by march organizers. The Rev. Timothy McDonald III, a march supporter and minister at Atlanta's First Iconium Baptist Church, estimates that 50 churches in his area will participate. Travel agents report that flights from Chicago to D.C. on Oct. 15 and 16 are jammed tight. District of Columbia police have agonized publicly over the possibility of dealing with 10,000 buses full of marchers.

Terrence Moore, a forklift operator from Chicago's West Side, will not be going. "I want to work with everyone," he says. "I respect the Nation of Islam, but they just want to divide. There are a lot of black men without access to the good things in life, watching their kids do without, and facing a lot of anger. It's a cycle of rage, and talking about the years of captivity [as he feels the Nation does] just makes more fire for the rage. It's like pumping poison into people."

Mildred Johnson, a retired bookkeeper and a parishioner at St. Sabina's Catholic Church on the South Side, is proud that her husband Odessa is going to the march. She has seen her 31-year-old son search unsuccessfully for work. She has watched the new Cook County jail go up: "a masterpiece; there's not a school in the county that can compare." Black people, she says, "are always in a grieving state; we've been tranquilized by injustice." She is hoping that Farrakhan's march will wake them up. She doesn't care that he won't let her march too.

--Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington, Tom Curry and Richard N. Ostling/New York and James L. Graff/Chicago

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN/WASHINGTON, TOM CURRY AND RICHARD N. OSTLING/NEW YORK AND JAMES L. GRAFF/CHICAGO