In a sense, the number doesn't matter. In another sense, the number is part of what was driven home to me, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the number and the counts of that number helped to drive the message home. There just might have been as many men there as was promised by the title of the occasion. Even the Park Service estimate was reported to be the largest gathering of African-Americans ever. The number was impressive and historically significant, no matter how you slice it, and that is part of the message.
Minimization is evidence of shadow suppression at work.
As I watched and listened, I was fascinated by this image in real time of a major shadow piece of our nation's collective unconscious. We build prisons and populate them principally with black men. It seems to me that a classically typical way of denying our shadow is to refuse to honor its existence. Ignore it and suppress it. In this case, lock it up.