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Nelson was already a battle-line warrior before the march. Three years ago, he began tutoring students in his spare time at Tyler Elementary School in southeastern Washington, where he instructs sixth-graders on how to own and operate a business. "If capitalism is the great engine that moves this country, then business is the fuel," he says. "If I show them goals they thought they could never attain, then show them how to get there, then I will have done my small part to help them achieve a better life." But the march has convinced Nelson that he needs to do more. By the end of the school year, he intends to start a program designed to help inner-city children cope with urban pressures.
The lieutenant colonel also leads by quiet example. While many of the march participants had cause to chastise themselves for abandoning their families, Nelson is a single dad. When he and his wife divorced nine years ago, he secured custody of his two sons and two daughters. "I loved the children enough that I thought I was more emotionally and financially able to care for them than my ex-wife," he says. Today his three eldest children have homes of their own, and 13-year-old Morgan still lives with her father. Other Army families and friends have helped out during Army deployments, and occasionally Morgan seeks outside counsel on such matters as hairstyles. "But up to this point," Nelson says with a smile, "I've been able to handle everything.''
While Nelson's sense of mission is clear today, it was not always that way. As a child in Lorraine County, Ohio, he was popular and fun loving, more inclined to hit the party scene than the books. While studying engineering at Ohio State University, he was drafted into the Army. Already a husband and father by then, he had to work two additional jobs to support his family. It was only when a white senior commander suggested Nelson attend the Infantry Officers' Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia, that Nelson began thinking about a military career. In the years that have followed, Nelson says, he has brushed up against racism in the integrated Army. While he thinks overt racism should be challenged, he is often inclined to see more ignorance more malice behind bigotry. "The mental gap between races in America is so great that at times white people are unaware they are discriminating."
Even so, Nelson is convinced America's black citizens are their own worst enemy. "There is nothing much lower our community could get into," he says, then ticks off the problems: drive-by shootings, children killing children, people poisoning themselves on drugs. "I don't think we in the community have come to grips with this," he says. Yet Nelson is an optimist. He believes in his fellow African Americans. "I know how great we can be." He adds, "This is a great nation, but this could be a greater nation if we could only live up to the charter of the U.S. Constitution--that all men are created equal."
MAURICE GRAY BOXER, FORDSVILLE, MARYLAND
"I DON'T HANG AROUND ANYMORE. I JUST train," says Maurice Gray, 28, who dreams of becoming heavyweight boxing champion of the world. "This keeps me out of trouble. I have gotten more hurt in the street than in the ring."