GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — Has it really been that long? Has it really been thirty years since Louis Farrakhan called for a million African-American men to come to Washington, D.C., “for a day of atonement, reconciliation and responsibility?”
Indeed, it has, and Guilford County Commissioner Skip Alston has made good use of those three decades.
Alston was 38 when he went to the march with his then 13-year-old son, and it turned out to be more than he imagined.
“I said, ‘Farrakhan’s going for a million people to come to Washington, D.C.?’ I didn’t think it was happening,” Alston said. “The March on Washington was like 250,000 people. I thought it would get to that stand but never a million. Because, when I looked at that crowd, it was more than million, and they more than accomplished what they set out to do.”
The March on Washington that Alston refers to is the famous one in 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous, “I Have a Dream,” speech. The Million Man March on October 16, 1995, was inspired by the first one, but High Point University historian Paul Ringel said they were definitely not copies of each other.
“We remember the March on Washington in a way that we don’t remember the Million Man March,” Ringel said. “Just like with Woodstock, there’s no major changes that come out of the Million Man March because you need infrastructure to make change and, ahat Farrakhan and others told them was, ‘Go back to your community and make these changes that we’re pledging.’”
Alston said that’s exactly what he and others he knew there did.
“We had a lot of people that went back home deciding to run for office,” Alston said. “It empowered me. I had just been elected county commissioner in 1992, so it empowered me to go back home and make a change.”
And Alston said some of those changes took time to fully root but insists the are very much there.
“Now, I’m more focused, and I’m trying to be more inclusive knowing I can’t do this on my own,” Alston said. “I need to make sure that … I have my base which is my African-American community. Then I got to go outside that base and work with my white colleagues and my white community in order to say, ‘Look, we need to join together. We’re more successful when we’re working together than an us-and-them situation.'”
See more on the Million Man March in this edition of The Buckley Report.
Source: Fox 8 News Channel