Con/Tradition: Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, the Million Man March, and American Civil Religion

Discussing the Million Man March of October 16, 1995 as a turning point in the history of African American protest, this volume offers five interpretive contexts to demarcate its cultural location: The March is analyzed as a struggle within the African American political establishment (1), as an attempt at unified black action against a new politics of white resentment (2), and as the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) most visible self-dramatization since its founding in the 1930s (3). Relying on these themes, a rhetorical analysis of Louis Farrakhan’s speech at the March uncovers the NOI’s uneasy yet intimate relationship with the rituals of American civil religion (4). Finally, Con/Tradition addresses Farrakhan’s influence on black HipHop culture and academic Afrocentrism (5).