MARCHING HOME

By Jill Smolowe

SWEPT UP BY MULTITUDES, THE ONCE HOMELESS MAN from Chicago found himself pressed against the transfiguration in Washington: the spectacle of strangers suddenly united as friends. "Like, yes, we're free at last. It was something I kept having dreams about in the days before the march," says Earl Prince, 30, who helped get several dozen homeless Chicagoans on buses to Washington. In the crowd, he agreed to correspond with other black men from Virginia, from Detroit, from San Francisco. "I had no idea it would be as magnificent as it was," says Lieut. Colonel Michael Nelson of Virginia. Trained to recognize chains of command, Nelson nevertheless felt the stirrings of rebellion: "I was out there for white Americans also. If I am the object of some people's scorn, then they need to see me in my physical being." Physical being countless times over, countless times empowered. "The brothers came home, and we're rejuvenated," says Rodney Dailey, the head of a violence-prevention program in Boston. Here are five stories of those who returned:

DWAYNE MARSHALL EMORY UNIVERSITY SENIOR, ATLANTA

"I WAS NOT A CHILD OF CHOICE BUT A child of circumstance," says Marshall. His mother, he says, dropped out of college to have her baby because his father "decided to leave instead of dealing with it as a man. My mother had huge dreams and aspirations, and I put limits on her." At 21 he bears the weight of those aspirations. In less than two semesters, he will become the first in his family, and the first among his childhood friends in Savannah, Georgia, to graduate from college. "It's like I made it for all of us," he says. "That's what really pains me. I feel like I am the only one who had the opportunity to succeed." Active in student government and the N.A.A.C.P., Marshall wears a suit to class every day, always anticipating an impromptu meeting with a school administrator. A mentor to fellow black students and local inner-city youth, he shepherded 50 Emory students to Washington last week.

His mother Evelyn's struggle has been the epic of his life. Determined to avoid welfare, she housed her son with her mother and moved in with friends while holding down two full-time jobs as a waitress. Eventually Evelyn made enough money to rent an apartment, but when she lost her job, she and Marshall had to move to a public-housing project, where they shared an apartment with three other people. With money so scarce, Marshall often joined the long lines for free meals served in Savannah's public parks.

That arrangement was disrupted when he was 14 and two men from the project staged a shoot-out in front of the bedroom Marshall shared with his mother. Fascinated, "like any dumb kid would be," says Marshall, he dashed outside to see the action and narrowly escaped a bullet. His mother, Marshall recalls, was "very, very upset. It was the idea she couldn't keep us safe." For the next two years, Marshall lived with his grandfather, a proud, hardworking janitor for 40 years, who, Marshall says, "taught me more about being a man than any other man I have ever known."

At 13 Marshall began hustling at a nearby pool hall, where men would bet on his games, then give him part of the winnings. Sometimes Marshall would place bets as well. "It's not something I am proud of, but it's not something I regret," he says. "I'd take that money home to my mother, and that's how we'd eat that night." While other boys in the project turned to drugs and crime, Marshall pursued better jobs: delivering newspapers, washing dishes, cooking in a local restaurant. All the while he maintained a 3.8 average in Savannah's newly desegregated schools, eventually earning the scholarships that would take him to Emory. There were triumphs--and put-downs. One year Marshall's middle-school Quiz Bowl team won a contest focusing on drugs and alcohol. Says he: "After we won--and believe me, it was sort of amazing we won--some city-council member made a snide remark that we should have won because we knew more about drugs than anyone. It was an attempt to belittle our accomplishment just because we were black."

After Emory, Marshall wants to go home to the coastal slums of Savannah to try to improve the lives of the city's foundering African Americans. He has no delusions that he can wipe out the hunger and poverty that haunted his own youth; his attempt last summer to initiate a modest on-the-job-training program for inner-city youths died in the local Chamber of Commerce. He feels scorn for blacks who flee poverty only to forget those they left behind. "[Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas talks about being from Pinpoint, a really rundown area of Savannah, but to my knowledge he has never been back," says Marshall. "Why doesn't he come back and help make things better?"

Nevertheless, Marshall also foresees attending law school--say, Harvard or Yale--then entering politics. And Marshall entertains one other vision after that--"living in a big, white house on Pennsylvania Avenue." Mother would be proud.

ARMY LIEUTENANT COLONEL, BURKE, VIRGINIA

AS AN ACTIVE-DUTY LIEUTENANT COLONEL who served with the Army in Korea and Germany and side by side with Colin Powell in the first squadron of the 10th U.S. Cavalry, Michael Nelson, 47, is accustomed to being surrounded by men. But the power of standing in the company of only black men moved him deeply. "I went there to support the event, but then I found I was part of the event," he says. "I was taken in, heart and mind and soul." Ever the military man, he was struck by the flags waving in the Mall: the American flag, the black-and-green African-American flag, the Nation of Islam flag. "And all these battlements were just waving and blowing in the wind as the men stood there, ready to do battle within their communities, ready to take back their sons and daughters from the ravages of drugs and alcohol, ready to act to save their women from being battered. And as far as the eye could see--these were black men."

Nelson was already a battle-line warrior before the march. Three years ago, he began tutoring students in his spare time at Tyler Elementary School in southeastern Washington, where he instructs sixth-graders on how to own and operate a business. "If capitalism is the great engine that moves this country, then business is the fuel," he says. "If I show them goals they thought they could never attain, then show them how to get there, then I will have done my small part to help them achieve a better life." But the march has convinced Nelson that he needs to do more. By the end of the school year, he intends to start a program designed to help inner-city children cope with urban pressures.

The lieutenant colonel also leads by quiet example. While many of the march participants had cause to chastise themselves for abandoning their families, Nelson is a single dad. When he and his wife divorced nine years ago, he secured custody of his two sons and two daughters. "I loved the children enough that I thought I was more emotionally and financially able to care for them than my ex-wife," he says. Today his three eldest children have homes of their own, and 13-year-old Morgan still lives with her father. Other Army families and friends have helped out during Army deployments, and occasionally Morgan seeks outside counsel on such matters as hairstyles. "But up to this point," Nelson says with a smile, "I've been able to handle everything.''

While Nelson's sense of mission is clear today, it was not always that way. As a child in Lorraine County, Ohio, he was popular and fun loving, more inclined to hit the party scene than the books. While studying engineering at Ohio State University, he was drafted into the Army. Already a husband and father by then, he had to work two additional jobs to support his family. It was only when a white senior commander suggested Nelson attend the Infantry Officers' Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia, that Nelson began thinking about a military career. In the years that have followed, Nelson says, he has brushed up against racism in the integrated Army. While he thinks overt racism should be challenged, he is often inclined to see more ignorance more malice behind bigotry. "The mental gap between races in America is so great that at times white people are unaware they are discriminating."

Even so, Nelson is convinced America's black citizens are their own worst enemy. "There is nothing much lower our community could get into," he says, then ticks off the problems: drive-by shootings, children killing children, people poisoning themselves on drugs. "I don't think we in the community have come to grips with this," he says. Yet Nelson is an optimist. He believes in his fellow African Americans. "I know how great we can be." He adds, "This is a great nation, but this could be a greater nation if we could only live up to the charter of the U.S. Constitution--that all men are created equal."

MAURICE GRAY BOXER, FORDSVILLE, MARYLAND

"I DON'T HANG AROUND ANYMORE. I JUST train," says Maurice Gray, 28, who dreams of becoming heavyweight boxing champion of the world. "This keeps me out of trouble. I have gotten more hurt in the street than in the ring."

That is not hyperbole; it is an understatement. Gray's 217-lb. body bears five bullet wounds. His psyche bears the scars of multiple murders: his brother Greg was shot dead when he was 19, five of Gray's cousins were killed in their teens, another cousin lost his sight and speech after being hit in the head with an iron club while trying to break up a fight, and the rap band Gray formed with several friends last year has disbanded because three of its members are dead and the lead rapper is in jail. On each of Gray's birthdays, his mother prays her son will live to see another year. "My mother told me God must have a real purpose for me because I'm still living," says Gray. "I have been blessed."

It is an unusual blessing by any yardstick. Gray grew up in Landover, Maryland, with three siblings in a home headed by his mother--and deliberately avoided by his father. "My father ain't no good," says Gray. "When I was 18 or 19, he started trying to get to know me, but it was too late then." Gray slacked off in school. Though he eventually finished high school, he was twice expelled for fighting, and he graduated with only the most rudimentary reading and writing skills.

During those years, Gray got a different kind of education by spending most of his time hanging around the crime-infested streets of southeastern Washington. One prom night when Gray had no suit to wear, some older friends miraculously provided him with not only new threads and shoes but also the loan of a Cadillac to squire his date. Impressed by the ease with which his pals could procure what they wanted, Gray started dealing drugs: first PCP and marijuana, then crack and cocaine. "The money just started flowing in," he says. On his best day he pocketed $9,000. In one drug deal he traded PCP water for an M-16 Army rifle. Gray says he never killed anybody but he did shoot one man in the arm.

Over time, Gray spent a total of three years in prison for assorted drug offenses. Though he never got heavily involved in drug use himself, he says, he was in prison when he first used drugs, occasionally doing cocaine. He says he has been clean since he was last released in 1992. He also says the only time he ever cried was when his mother sent him a picture of herself for his cell. On the back of the photograph were the words "I love you."

Gray rallied 10 of his friends to attend the march last week. His eyes still sparkle as he reels off the list of rap stars he spotted at the Mall, including Ice-T and Ice-Cube. But for Gray, the high point of the day was Louis Farrakhan's speech. "He's right. We need to respect our sisters, quit calling them the 'B' word, stop using drugs, take care of our families. Do right!" he says. He echoed the Nation of Islam leader's preachings about racial inequities. "He speaks the truth," says Gray. When the collection basket came around, Gray tossed in $20.

After the march broke up, he says, "I went running that night, and I ain't never run so fast before." That energy buzz has yet to wear off. At the local barbershop, Gray berates an older man for not attending the march. At the gym, he extends a conciliatory hug to a former enemy. He has begun talking to younger boys in the 'hood about the perils of drugs. "I'm telling them, 'Go out and play basketball--do anything but that. It's not worth it.'"

For a moment, Gray's enthusiasm quiets, and he shakes his head, almost in disbelief. "I've seen a lot of death around me," he says. "The fighting has to stop. It's time for the killing to stop." He cannot articulate his thoughts as eloquently as he wishes, but he is determined to change. He dreams of victories in the boxing ring and a sound home for his girlfriend and their two-year-old son. There have been moments when he was tempted to return to his old ways--"You know, when the bills pile up." But from here on, Gray says, he is determined to keep his fighting in the ring. "They call me the peacemaker now. And I'm proud to be a black man."

DAVID PUGH AUTO-ASSEMBLY WORKER, WAYNE, MICHIGAN

"MUSIC, THAT WAS MY DREAM," SAYS PUGH, "to be a musician." The past tense is both instructive and poignant. In the '60s Pugh was the trombone player of the Citronelle High School band in Alabama. Then, at one rehearsal, he forgot to bring his sheet music. It didn't faze him--he knew the tune by heart. But the band director and the drum major, both white, were certain he couldn't play without the score and humiliated Pugh, who stood alone, undefended, in front of the rest of the band. "The way they jumped on me, it was insulting," he says quietly. The band director, he adds, "made a mark of me so I just gave up music altogether. I just donated my horn to the music department, and I haven't blew a horn since."

In spite of the trials of being bused to the white high school in Citronelle, Pugh isn't willing to admit to having suffered from racism. "I didn't have any real bad experience with the opposite race," he says. "You had to deal with whites all the time in the South," recalls Pugh, now 43. He coped by learning from the poise of his father, a heavy-equipment operator, in such situations. "It was just students that had things instilled in them about what blacks were or what they weren't. You had those that were the die-hard racists. That was just a few. But most of us just got along." After graduating and moving to Michigan to find a job, he was drafted. "You find the same thing in the military. Some people are just die-hard racists, and some people are just people." After his Army service, Pugh went to work for Ford, where he'd had a brief stint before being drafted. He's been there for 24 years. "Almost 24 1/2 years," he points out proudly.

One of eight children, Pugh always wanted lots of kids of his own, but, he says, "God didn't mean for me to have them." He has been married twice. He left his first wife after 14 years together--for many reasons but one in particular. His stepson had become involved with a gang, and the boy's mother refused to acknowledge the problem. One night "gangstas" broke into Pugh's home, pistol-whipped his wife and shot him through both thighs. Soon after, the marriage dissolved. At the end of 1994, Pugh married his second wife Gwen, a training coordinator at Ford. They separated after four months. Marrying was a mistake, Gwen says. But they remain friends and often talk on the phone.

Pugh called Gwen the day after the march. "I told her that I was representing her as well as myself, us." But he told her too that he "wanted to make a stand for the black man. It took a lot for a man to trust that another 999,999 men were going to be there. That's what the whole concept is about. Black men standing up for black men. Learn to love ourself so that we can love our brother. It works back and forth." The march was virtually the culmination of Pugh's own spiritual rebirth. He admits to battling alcohol for the past 10 to 15 years, and now attends weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He is also a born-again Christian. "Black people have always been spiritual people, and that's our backbone, our spirituality. We've got to take it into our homes, take it into our workplaces, into all affairs that we do, even down at the gas station, anywhere." He feels so energized that he has talked to the United Auto Workers' president about taking a more active role in the union. The same kind of spirit possessed fellow marchers on Pugh's bus ride home. Says the former soldier: "One of the young fellows said he had never been in the military but he was coming back as a soldier. Soldiers go out and capture, and we're gonna capture each brother."

That is a new dream. As for the old one, Pugh says he is considering going back to school to study music. As for the high school incident: "You can't change what happened. I was very young and immature, and now that I have matured and grown up, I understand that I should have took that route, because that was my love. So now, here I am."

PHILIP BANKS JR. RETIRED POLICE LIEUTENANT, NEW YORK CITY

PHILIP BANKS DEVELOPED HIS BELIEF IN the "long arm of supervision" while growing up in Harlem and Brooklyn. Even when his father, a truck driver, was away on a trip and his mother was off cleaning other people's homes, neighbors would come over to supervise, scold and soothe. "You always felt like someone was watching," recalls Banks, 53. When he became a father of three boys, he kept close watch and joined the neighborhood block association to help others. His strategy for keeping his children out of trouble: Stick close. "I went to school on PTA night. If there was no homework, I'd get on the phone to the teacher and ask why," he says. "If discipline was necessary, then I disciplined."

"He was pretty tough on us," says his eldest son David. "And thank God he was." While other neighborhood boys in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn saw their futures disintegrate in a haze of drugs, crime and broken homes, the three Banks boys thrived. Today David, 33, is a lawyer who switched careers and became an assistant elementary-school principal; Philip III, 32, has followed his dad into the police force; and Terence, 30, has started a pest-control company. Banks' three sons all live in Queens, not far from their parents' three-bedroom English Tudor home. All four Banks men attended last Monday's march, and all four came away committed to launching a local, house-to-house voter-registration drive. Yet different life experiences led each of the Banks men to Washington.

The eldest Banks says he sympathizes with the economic fears of many black men. Especially during his child-raising years, he felt that his own comfort could evaporate in a moment. "When you're trying to support a home, a car and children, if you miss two paychecks, then where are you?" he says. David, who gave up law when he saw that New York City's schools needed more black male role models, wanted school kids to see a sea of support in Washington. He observes that nearly every troubled boy in his school does not have a father who lives at home. "When you ask, 'Do you miss your father?,' they say, 'Yes,'" explains David, who has three sons and a daughter. "If you say, 'Would you act like this if your father was here?,' they say, 'No.' It breaks your heart." Middle-son Philip, father of a boy and a girl, has a "general fear of being pulled over by the police," despite nine years with the N.Y.P.D. He still bridles when he recalls being stopped by four cops, who ransacked his car and threatened to plant a bag of marijuana on him until Philip showed his badge.

Finally, there is Terence, who feels passionately about set-aside programs for minority entrepreneurs. "For years we've not been privy to some contracts," he says. "[White contractors] don't even understand we've been cheated from the playing field." Terence admits to having smoked marijuana and drunk malt liquor as a teenager; he remembers his father's strong words on the matter. "He found stuff on me and sat me down and explained to me what it could do." He concedes that his father was right. Next month Terence has a court date with Olympia Hester, a woman who claims he is the father of her 10-year-old daughter and says a blood test backs that contention. "If [the child] is mine, I'm not going to contest it," says Terence. "By no means will I run away from my responsibility, but I won't step forward until I know."

All four Banks men have fixed on voter registration because they believe every person can make a difference. "People are looking for another Malcolm or Martin, and they shouldn't," says David, who aspires to become New York City's schools chancellor. "The problem is within us." "We have to become part of the system," Terence says. "I know quite a few brothers who aren't registered, but until you try to do something, you can't keep complaining."

Like many African-American women, Janice Banks encouraged her husband and three sons to attend the march. She packed Philip's lunch for the bus trip and says she wouldn't have allowed him to miss that day. "Most times," she says, "you can call women together. If it's just coming together to iron out differences, women don't have a problem doing that. But men usually hold back. This was a man thing." In Janice Banks' view, the meaning of the march was simple: "Brothers need to stand together."

--Reported by Sharon E. Epperson/New York, Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville, Wendy King and Ann Simmons/Washington

With reporting by SHARON E. EPPERSON/NEW YORK, ELISABETH KAUFFMAN/NASHVILLE, WENDY KING AND ANN SIMMONS/WASHINGTON