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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."