Not A Million, Not A March
The Million Youth March turned briefly violent Saturday afternoon when Khallid Abdul Muhammad riled up the audience at the close of the rally with anti-Semitic and anti-police speech. But, in the end, he implored participants to leave peacefully.
As the speech wrapped up around 4 p.m., the rally's mandatory end time as designated by a court order, Muhammad left the stage, and a police helicopter flew in low, angering some of the participants.
At the beginning, the atmosphere at the event was almost festive, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston. But a small army of police saturated the area, for a crowd of fewer than 30,000.
In the end, some angered participants threw chairs, barricades, and garbage at police.
About 20 people suffered minor injuries, according to emergency service personnel.
Police in riot gear quickly move to quell the violence, taking the stage. Mounted police and motorcycle cops soon occupied the rally area.
In a vitriolic speech, Muhammad criticized Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and police for attempting to quash the rally.
"You no-good bastards," Muhammad said of the police. "Giuliani, you have sent your troops. We have a right, a God-given right, a constitutional right, to defend ourselves against anyone who attacks us."
"Beat the hell out of them with the railing if they so much as touch you!" Muhammad shouted. "Look the bastards in the eye. Take their guns and use it on them."
A rally organizer took the stage with a megaphone and asked everyone to leave peacefully.
"The instructions from Khallid Muhammad is for you to go home," the unidentified man said. "Brothers and sisters, please leave in an orderly fashion. All of the men, get your women out of the line of fire. Go home."
Two police helicopters flew very low over the crowd and hovered nearby to watch for anymore trouble. Mounted police and motorcycle cops gathered quickly and cleared people out of the area. By 4:30 p.m., everyone had been moved out of the area, but the side streets were clogged with people.
Participants reacted with disgust at how the rally ended.
"This is a disgrace, this is a disgrace, how they treat black people," Bob Franklin, 41, of Harlem, said of the police.
More than 3,000 police officers were crowded into a few blocks in Harlem for the four-hour rally. It was confined to a six-block area of Malcolm X Boulevard, from 118th to 124th streets. The scaled-back rally was the result of a court order after the city balked at issuing a permit to organizers, who had initially boasted of an event attracting millions.
The event, fashioned after the Million Man March held in Washington, D.C., in 1995, was organized to promote unity among young blacks, as well as endorse issues ranging from an end to gang violence to reparations for descendants of slaves.
Initially, organizers had predicted that uto 3 million young people from as far away as Los Angeles would attend.
But the event competed for attention this weekend with the Million Youth Movement in Atlanta which will culminate Monday with a major gathering along Auburn Avenue.
Atlanta's Million Youth Movement is backed by a coalition of civil rights advocates including the NAACP, the Nation of Islam and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition.