We're just over a year and a half after the Million Man March. The Million Man March was led by men without the exclusion of women and the Day of Abstinence was led by women without the exclusion of men and in fact there were more participants in the Day of Absence than in the Million Man March. But they always organized, did voter registration, they did teach ins and they also boycotted business and stayed away from other activities to make a statement and that support was crucial to us and it was also part of a historical statement about how we can organize if we have vision.
Second thing is that it reaffirmed our capacity for operational unity.
It also was important because it came at a time when there was a massive silence in America about rising white supremacy and a tendency to return to the old raw racist days of blaming the victims and in the face of that we go to the center of power in this country, an important center in the world, and speak from that critical location, saying what we think is important and what we should be about as a people and what challenges we offer the government and corporations. We had three sets of challenges. A challenge to ourself to stand up as men and challenge those men who are causing some of the fundamental problems that we talk about, gang crime, absent fathers, all that. We who are capable and committed, we have a moral responsibility to challenge those who are less so and that was what that was about. But it was also a challenge to the government, a challenge to the government to stop supporting racist politics, to stop disinvestment in the community, to stop catering to corporate wish and turning everything into a privatized venture.