ENI: I can come back with a confidence that I'm not the only one with this struggle, and I'm not the only one who feels that we can make a difference in our community, in our country and furthermore, in our world.
How did being Harvard/Radcliffe undergraduate women inform your experience?
OJB: It felt great...to let other women out there know that there are sisters at Ivy League universities who care about the same things that you care about. You may be a working-class mother in Bedford Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, NY, and you may be working your butt off...but we care.... We're Harvard-Radcliffe women, but we care about the same things you care about because...we are all together in the same struggle...no matter what level [we're] at.
ENI: I didn't really feel the impact of being a Harvard/Radcliffe woman. I sort of threw off my shell. I was just a woman, a black woman.
Do you have any criticisms of the March?
ENI: I wish a few more figures would have been there. I really, really looked forward to seeing someone like Maya Angelou or Oprah Winfrey; those two people, I felt, really should have been there.
Maybe you can describe the feeling you had while you were there.
ENI: We were [at the front]...and we were standing jam-packed, touching other women, we had no idea who they were, but they felt like aunties and cousins; these were my kin.... [While we sang the official Million Woman March song], we held hands.... And the feeling of...an intense togetherness, of a shared experience even though we all came from different walks of life just went through every single person; joined by our hands, it just ran through us like a current. And, when I left that place, I felt, that I am not alone.
OJB: We were able to speak with people from Philadelphia, Detroit, Oklahoma...Young and old, middle-class, working-class, upper-class, we were all there for one common purpose.... We all looked different; people had dreads, braids, weaves; everyone looked so different, but yet, we were the same.... I wouldn't miss it for the world.... It's something I can tell my children about.
Does a single-sex show of solidarity have to be highly controversial in order to be extensively covered by the media? The Promise Keepers gathered in Washington last month and the press could not get enough of the potentially dangerous fundamentalist Christians; prior to the Million Man March, Farrakan had often been associated with a threatening militarism.
Why, because black women have been stable family and community leaders, whose determination has carried them through slavery, blatant and latent racism and the disintegration of the black nuclear family, do they not deserve applause and recognizance of their strength? The only explanation for the American people's and the media's neglect is that determination, resilience and steadfastness are traits that humble and humiliate those who do not possess them. The Million Woman March is an event that Americans--black, white, Chinese, Christian, Jewish--can learn from and should credit for helping to provide the hope of a better America.
Daniel M. Suleiman's column appears on alternate Mondays.