SWEPT UP BY MULTITUDES, THE ONCE HOMELESS MAN from Chicago found himself pressed against the transfiguration in Washington: the spectacle of strangers suddenly united as friends. "Like, yes, we're free at last. It was something I kept having dreams about in the days before the march," says Earl Prince, 30, who helped get several dozen homeless Chicagoans on buses to Washington. In the crowd, he agreed to correspond with other black men from Virginia, from Detroit, from San Francisco. "I had no idea it would be as magnificent as it was," says Lieut. Colonel Michael Nelson of Virginia. Trained to recognize chains of command, Nelson nevertheless felt the stirrings of rebellion: "I was out there for white Americans also. If I am the object of some people's scorn, then they need to see me in my physical being." Physical being countless times over, countless times empowered. "The brothers came home, and we're rejuvenated," says Rodney Dailey, the head of a violence-prevention program in Boston. Here are five stories of those who returned:
DWAYNE MARSHALL EMORY UNIVERSITY SENIOR, ATLANTA
"I WAS NOT A CHILD OF CHOICE BUT A child of circumstance," says Marshall. His mother, he says, dropped out of college to have her baby because his father "decided to leave instead of dealing with it as a man. My mother had huge dreams and aspirations, and I put limits on her." At 21 he bears the weight of those aspirations. In less than two semesters, he will become the first in his family, and the first among his childhood friends in Savannah, Georgia, to graduate from college. "It's like I made it for all of us," he says. "That's what really pains me. I feel like I am the only one who had the opportunity to succeed." Active in student government and the N.A.A.C.P., Marshall wears a suit to class every day, always anticipating an impromptu meeting with a school administrator. A mentor to fellow black students and local inner-city youth, he shepherded 50 Emory students to Washington last week.
His mother Evelyn's struggle has been the epic of his life. Determined to avoid welfare, she housed her son with her mother and moved in with friends while holding down two full-time jobs as a waitress. Eventually Evelyn made enough money to rent an apartment, but when she lost her job, she and Marshall had to move to a public-housing project, where they shared an apartment with three other people. With money so scarce, Marshall often joined the long lines for free meals served in Savannah's public parks.
That arrangement was disrupted when he was 14 and two men from the project staged a shoot-out in front of the bedroom Marshall shared with his mother. Fascinated, "like any dumb kid would be," says Marshall, he dashed outside to see the action and narrowly escaped a bullet. His mother, Marshall recalls, was "very, very upset. It was the idea she couldn't keep us safe." For the next two years, Marshall lived with his grandfather, a proud, hardworking janitor for 40 years, who, Marshall says, "taught me more about being a man than any other man I have ever known."