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.