KARENGA: Oh, certainly. I helped organize the executive committee for that and I wrote the mission statement for the Million Man March/Day of Abstinence. The Million Man March was led by men without the exclusion of women and the Day of Abstinence was led by women without the exclusion of men and in fact there were more participants in the Day of Absence than in the Million Man March. [OVERLAPPING VOICES]

GATES: --But the women were asked to stay at home.

KARENGA: But they always organized, did voter registration, they did teach ins and they also boycotted business and stayed away from other activities to make a statement and that support was crucial to us and it was also part of a historical statement about how we can organize if we have vision.

GATES: What's the significance of the Million Man March?

KARENGA: One of the most important things is that it reaffirmed our commitment to our social justice tradition which at its minimum requires respect for the rights and dignity of the human person, economic justice, political participation, equality of access and mutual respect for all peoples and constant struggle against those who would deny or diminish these and so I think that's first. Second thing is that it reaffirmed our capacity for operational unity. I put forth in the 60s this principle called operational unity, and what it means is that we don't have to agree on everything but if we agree on fundamental things then we should build institutions that house and advance our aspirations and the Million Man March/Day of Abstinence was a classic example of operational unity.

It also was important because it came at a time when there was a massive silence in America about rising white supremacy and a tendency to return to the old raw racist days of blaming the victims and in the face of that we go to the center of power in this country, an important center in the world, and speak from that critical location, saying what we think is important and what we should be about as a people and what challenges we offer the government and corporations.

We had three sets of challenges. A challenge to ourself to stand up as men and challenge those men who are causing some of the fundamental problems that we talk about, gang crime, absent fathers, all that. We who are capable and committed, we have a moral responsibility to challenge those who are less so and that was what that was about. But it was also a challenge to the government, a challenge to the government to stop supporting racist politics, to stop disinvestment in the community, to stop catering to corporate wish and turning everything into a privatized venture. We challenged the corporations to stop oppressing the worker, stop moving the factories from this country to other countries and destroying people's country and working them for slave labor and at the same time creating a high unemployment process in this country as well as economic deterioration. We challenge the corporations also to stop pretending they're just about money, that given their weight in their world, we say in the statement, they cannot even imagine that they don't have a moral responsibility to act responsibly.

We also said they should stop destroying the environment and come up with a serious environmental policy. We said the government should stop building so many prisons and begin to contribute more to education. We also saidthat the government should pursue a moral foreign policy that respect people of color on an equal basis, that they should stop trying to boycott and penalize a whole people, that they should take a balanced position in the middle east and support the respect for self determination for all peoples and that they should help all the countries in their struggle for democratic development and a sustainable economy. People didn't want to hear that. They wanted to throw pot shots at Minister Farrakhan so they don't read the mission statement and they understand the march only in terms of him. This is wrong.

GATES: A year and a half later, how would you judge its effect?

KARENGA: First of all let's not pretend that marches solve anything. Certainly the march in Washington didn't solve anything. It was a public statement. It's what happens afterwards, you see, that's important and certainly we have built local organizing committees all around the country. We had to build 315 at a minimum in order to bring that many people to Washington. We built personal and organizational respect and cooperation for each other.

As you know black adoptions went up as a result of that, membership in all community organizations from religion to social service to political active. I think that's a good record. People begin to talk about the independent politic. There's still a lot of work to do and I don't expect the march to solve that. All it did was lay out a program by which we could begin to organize ourselves and I think that it also offered, for the first time in a long time, a fundamental document from which all the people who participated defined common ground and some of the things that we argued is what we call continuing challenges.

Number one, the challenge to create an independent politic beyond democratic and republican but to have a politics of possibility, a politics focused on common human good. Second, economic development, investment. Next, the struggle to have fair representation in the media, to stop letting the established order reduce us to mammies, minstrels and mascots, you see, and to actually insist on a different way of projecting ourselves. We've been struggling with that. Anther thing is to support public education and independent education and to insist on quality buildings, quality instructional material, faculty development. We've been struggling with teachers who have 20 year old notes, and we're not talking about African-American teachers only, we're talking about all people who teach black children. A lot of times they're incompetent and so we have to deal with that. We have poor administration in the schools. We have to also talk about creating a new tax base for the inner city.

We also argued for a stronger role for religious institutions, not just the Christian church but the Muslim mosque and the ancient Egyptian and Yoruba temple, to stand up and put forth the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense, to take your own tradition and the broad ancient character of African culture and to speak a new truth and to put forth this moral vision of what this society and our community should look like.

GATES: But Maulana, what you're describing has been commonly called the crisis of black leadership. Right?

KARENGA: Yes.

GATES: How do we break through this logjam that we're in?

KARENGA: We start step by step. One of the things that people keep looking for, even the most intellectual among them, is a miracle. And I say to them only work works. In the final analysis practice.... teaches, practice proves and makes possible everything and so we have to just start and there are a lot of efforts but we keep saying we got a crisis. I don't think it's a crisis. I think that it's a challenge. I want to pose it as a historical challenge to recognize 3.14.30 our weight in history, to recognize our weight in the society and begin to craft this vision that I don't think anybody else can craft in the same way we can. This is not to put any other people down or any other group down, but I think anything that happens good for this country, black people must take a vanguard role in it or it will not work.

GATES: In retrospect, what was the civil rights revolution all about.

KARENGA: Well, first of all I think it's very important for us not to call it civil rights revolution, but to talk about it as a black freedom struggle, which had two dimensions to it. The civil rights dimension, which goes from about 1954 to 1965, and the black power movement, which is from 1965 to 1969, maybe 1970. And so what we have here is a confrontation with America. We are doing what FanLou Hamer said we should do, question America. And the most severe question is always struggle and confrontation. So the civil rights movement concentrated on desegregation. The black power movement concentrated on self determination. How to build community.

GATES: Did we win the revolution?

KARENGA: Well, it really wasn't a revolution, because it was really a revolt. We did that. We actually knocked down the fundamental laws by which the state collaborated in our oppression. We did that.

But we did not build community in the way that we anticipated. And that was due to a lot of factors, of course. One of them is that the civil rights movement, which exhausted itself in its narrow goal of legal desegregation had no plan politically or economically to, in fact, build community. And we're struggling with that whole question of how to build community, and at the same time live effectively in the society of which we are fundamental part. We are the shapers of America. We're the moral vanguard. King told us that. Malcolm told us that. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hammer, Freddy Douglas. In this country other marginalized people, other oppressed people borrowed our moral vocabulary and our moral vision and pulls our struggle of a matter to emulate in Africa, South America, and the Chinese democratic struggle, and the struggle in eastern Europe and in the peace struggle in Palestine and Israel. They sang our songs, borrowed our moral vision, and our moral vocabulary and posed our struggle as a model.

But for some reason the leadership of our movement, especially the black middle class, but also some of the black power advocates, they actually moved away from this. They dismantled the very structures by which they made the achievements and left the community institutionally unable to define, defend, and development this instrument.

GATES: Structures such as what?

KARENGA: Well,the fundamental political organization by which we won the gains that we did. The old institutions, like the church, like the Elks, the Masons, the Eastern Star all of these groups, the fraternities, the sororities they assumed a different attitude. It was no longer an attitude of struggle where they engaged to expand the rim of freedom. They become other than what they were before. They assumed that they had won more than they had won. They didn't understand that the struggle is a long and difficult one and, therefore, as Cabral said given that, we should mask no difficulty, tell no lies, and claim no easy victory. And they claimed easy victory. And then they began to disestablish the very philosophy, the collective vocation we had.

In the '60s, one of the beautiful things about our life and Africa people, we had this collective vocation. It was part moral, part political, but it was, in fact, to expand the rim of freedom. To put forth a model of what it meant to be human. That included living in mutual respect and exchange. And some of our conversation was rough, because the people we were dealing with were rough. I don't apologize that. I talked as a solider, when I was in the sixties as a soldier, if you listen to my old lectures, I'm talking soldier talk, but that was also this long tradition of putting forth a very moral vision of what it meant to be human.

Malcolm, when he talks about the need for us to seek freedom as a fundamental way of being human, he says in his autobiography, freedom is so essential to the human personality, you can't even talk justice or equality until you focus on that, and therefore you have the right and responsibility to pursue that freedom by any means necessary. So we felt a sense of history. And we lost that and became consumers. The whole argument that the middle class leadership made, much of it, not everybody certain. And I'm not one of those, let's trash the middle class.

I think as Cabral told us there are different segments of the middle class. Some are certainly collaboration, some are exhausted, but some, including myself, you, whoever else is out there struggling, they are, in fact, dealing with the question of what is to be done and trying as best they can to put it together. And a leader like Dr. Dorothy Haight that's a monument in the movement. They're doing work and we can't pretend they're not doing work. Our organization, US, doing work. We celebrate our 32nd anniversary. We're doing work. So people are doing work.

But what happened is that people argued you don't have to be black anymore. Well, that's a bad point to make when you're trying to build community. The reason you can't solve the middle class and working class gap, or the permanent poor gap, is that we're phrasing the question wrong. The question is not why the middle class has advanced so far beyond the under class. The question is-- where is the black community? Because in solving that problem, which we are still behind the dominant society, the dominant race class. 57% of their income, not to mention their wealth. One percent of the wealth by 12% of the population versus 95% of the wealth that whites own and they're 80% of the population. Hey, let's be honest.

So the middle class can't get thrown off in self congratulatory announcements of achievement. In fact, the achievement is limited, deceptive, and fragile. And everybody knows that. But what happened is this dis-establishment of a sense of community, a sense of moral collective vocation, the sense that we had a history that we had to play. That's a problem.

I was talking with a major civil rights leader, in this national organization of leadership, and in it one person was complaining that the blacks'middle class did not give as much as they used to give, say like during the '60s. But my argument was that maybe not you, but your organization actually argued that they should not concentrate on blackd.

But you can't build a community if you tell the people they don't belong to it, and that what they must do is have an abstract identity called human. We're all human. There's no need to even discuss that. It's frivolous to even raise that. The question is what kind of human are you? People are culturally bound, that is to say, culture, the being is the most fundamental way of being human, in the world. There is nobody outside of a culture, tell me a person that exists outside of a culture, and I'll tell you a person that does not exist. People don't exist outside of the community.

GATES: Of course not.

KARENGA: So, the question is how do we sustain community and then engage in a mutually beneficial relationship with the rest of the world? And how do we sustain community so that we can sustain the power, the capacity to define, defend, and develop our interests and speak on special culture true to the world.

GATES: But Maulana, one of the things, as you well know, that happened in the late '60s, was that people were told that they were no longer black. They were being told by people in positions like yours, that unless you subscribe to this particular set of values or this mode of being then you're not black. And a lot of those people became alienated from the '60s. A lot of the people who are in the middle class now are the people who were in a position to do tremendous good, feel that they had been marginalized from a main sector of the African-American community.

KARENGA: Right. But I'm sure every middle class had suffered this kind of criticism. I'm in the middle class, I'm not suffering. You can look at me and tell me that. I have made a commitment, I have done what Kubraw said, calls commit class suicide, and identify with my community's interest. Identify with the interests of the community. That doesn't mean I've lost my personality or my uniqueness.

It means that I realize myself in community because I am from an African tradition, not just an abstract individual, but a person in community. And no one can come up to me and tell me I'm not black. Any middle class person that allows someone to tell them they're not black, doesn't want to be black anyhow. They're a fragile and vulnerable in their own self conception.

We have to define ourselves, and there's no way in the world people should be able to tell black people they're not black. It's not just black people that told black people they weren't black, white people told black people, especially when black people started making that a political stance, and they felt this political stance was detrimental to their possession of power as a monopoly, privilege for white people. So I understand that, but I would not let black people off by saying they were alienated.

Yes, they could have been from that group, from those persons that told them. You should criticize them. You have to get into their struggle. People don't want to struggle. Struggle is what our group, what our people are all about.