Owens arrives at 1:40, ten minutes after the Commons' rally was to have started. Suddenly the crowd appears to be in a great mood. "The people. United, Will never be defeated..." surges out. As it empties out onto Park Drive the march is at last a reality.

WINDING UP Park Drive, the march crosses the Fens and heads into downtown Boston via Boylston Street. The leafleteers scour the sidewalks and pizza parlors, distributing their literature. A little blond boy of about four chants in his mother's arms, "Who's got the money? Who makes the rules? Kids can't learn in racist schools." Suddenly the march halts. It creeps forward. There is a spasmodic jerk back. A spray of placards spumes to the pavement. All is quiet. Then it erupts.

A torrent of screaming black mothers: faces stretched wide in terror, skin dewy in fight, peels back from the front. They have pulled the wings of their coats over their children. From beneath his mother's mantle, a boy whoops with delight.

Oblivious to the sound truck's directive, "Stay calm. Stay quiet..." a disjointed mass of bodies thrashes into the intersection of Mass Ave and Boylston Street. A barrage of over a hundred armed, billy-clubbed, helmeted riot police blocks their path. At their center are seven mounted police. Behind them a fleet of squad cars and paddy wagons jams Boylston Street.

The crowd advances, tossing rocks and cardboard tubes. Behind the closed ranks of the police, a black man is pummeled. A white woman in a beaver coat lunges next to him. She is clubbed on the back and falls face down in the gutter. Owens climbs onto the roof of the sound truck at the front of the column. He asks for attention. The crowd won't listen. His brown color-coordinated coat, pants and tie have the look of Esquire's fashion page. His moustache is definitely in Vogue.

By himself, Owens lacks the force of character to harness this group he has helped to assemble and loves to lead. Owens needs help.

The crowd claws forward, crushing against the police wall. Owens screams for its attention. Voices, cries, Shrieks down him out.

But the front eventually holds back. Boylston Street is not worth a shattered skull. Owens, taking advantage of the calm, offers to go alone to be arrested. He cannot, "in good faith," let others, for whom he feels a responsibility, be arrested or injured. As he talks, two black physicians attend a young man slumped on a car's hood on the far corner. Peter Pogorski is calm and glum and will be taken to the hospital for X-rays and stitches.

At the center of the front line, a group of brown-jacketed people accuses Owens, about whom they are clustered of "selling out," of "betraying the people." If the first group had pressed forward, if they had not been told to stop, everyone else would have made it through untouched. Apparently.

But the October Movement has control of the sound truck "Down Commonwealth Avenue...Don't stop at the intersection..." The police relax their lines. The march swings left, chanting "The people United. Will never be defeated..." The brown jackets fall to the rear. They are the African Unity League and their leader, Imamu Barak is the only one among them who will acknowledge any questions, All Baraks will reply is, "Just write the story."

The march cannot get off Commonwealth Avenue. Riot police block the side-streets. The Irish security man for the Fred Hampton Contingents is "pissed off" at the police, but thinks the change of route was necessary, Indeed you must pretend to ignore the police--but do all they demand. There is a tacit agreement. Don't make a fuss and there will be no split craniums, Quiver.

But the confrontation isn't the police's fault. They are a faceless tool belonging to whomever is in control of the city. The march leaders only precipitated the conflict. They let the march's outcome be inevitable. Go down on road or go down the other, but prepare for the consequences. To have your head opened for no purpose would be damn maddening.

The spectators, however, think the march is O.K.

"The march is a good idea," says an elderly lady from Brookline.

A red-faced man from Hingham bills it as "a splendid action to balance a contrary impression being fostered by other Bostonians."