MISSOURI COMMENTARY: A MARCH OTHERS COULDN'T PRODUCE

There's nothing close to defensible about Louis Farrakhan's racist beliefs. Most politicians or near-politicians from President Bill Clinton to Sen. Bob Dole to Speaker Newt Gingrich to Gen. Colin POwell have condemned him for his repeated anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, homophobic utterances,

Call Farrakhan what you will, he can put on one hell of a rally. Jesse Jackson would have never attracted such a son of humanity to the Mall. The NAACP couldn't have done it. Nor could the Urban League produce such a throng.

The U.S. Park Police cautiously estimated the crowd at 400,000. The rally organizers pegged it at an exaggerated 1.5 million. Either figure greatly eclipses the 250,000 who marched on Washington with Martin Luther King.

After disassociating himself from Farrakhan's prior bursts of hate, Powell wished out loud that someone else had thought of the idea and had carried it out to its peaceful culmination. That was the unspoken hope of most every other political or religious leader in America. Wouldn't it have been great if someone else had done it?

The fact that Farrakhan could do what other couldn't even dream of doing reflects on both the leadership capacity of traditional black spokespersons and on the incapacity of white America to understand the desperation in the black community. Not all that long ago, Farrakhan was viewed as merely a fringe weirdo in a bow tie. For the moment, he has moved mainstream African Americans a bit closer to his side of the street.

What's so frustrating is that, aside from the racist invective, it's impossible to tell for sure where his side is heading. When he talks about black men taking responsibility for their own well-being, accepting responsibility, and caring for their families, he's as conservative as Clarence Thomas. When he talks about God sending the idea of the march to and through him, he is off on a flight of egotistical fancy. When he attacks the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln and the "power and arrogance of white Americans," he puts on his separatist, nationalist hat.

Whatever his philosophy may be at the moment, Farrakhan has jolted the African American consensus. The black cause is no longer simply civil rights legislation and litigation as the NAACP had long characterized it. It is no longer simply voter registration as Jesse Jackson still deems it to be. It is something beyond that - unpredictable and angry.

America has left behind the hallowed memory of Martin Luther King when blacks and whites assembled to share King's vision of all races walking hand in hand. King's "I Have a Dream" speech would have sounded out of place at the Million Man March.

Farrakhan is not the new King. There is no one overwhelmingly dominant figure in black America today. Just as in white America there are a multiplicity of voices speaking out in often discordant tones, so too there is an array of African American viewpoints seeking to be heard. If white people suffered a psychological shock with Farrakhan in a leadership role, think of Jesse Jackson's bruised ego in being reduced to a bit player.The fact that he squandered his oratorical opportunity to show himself at his best by delivering a two hour, rambling discourse does not eliminate him as a force. If nothing else, the rally caused the nation -- blacks and whites -- to think, at least for a day, about race relations in the country.

White America has had two recent shocks: the enthusiastic reception of the Simpson verdict in the black community and Louis Farrakhan successfully orchestrating the largest African American rally in the history of the nation.

Speaker Gingrich stated that "the fact that so many black men had heeded Farrakhan's call amount to a 'wake-up' to the nation that problems remain to be solved in urban America." Did America really need a "wake-up call?' Did anyone who has spent any time in an urban setting really need a "wake-up call?" Do we really need a second Kerner Commission to remind us of what we intentionally ignored from the first?

Needed or not, the call came and Louis Farrakhan, with all of his obvious flaws, made it. The bigoted messenger made a call that was basically one of good will.

The long-term evaluation of the Million Men March will depend on whether the positive hopes and decent motivations of the marchers begin to trigger a response in their home communities. It also will depend on whether white America ignores the wake-up call, turns off the alarm clock and goes back to sleep as if all is serene across the land. President Clinton put it this way: "White America must acknowledge blacks' pain, and black people must understand white fear."

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.