Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan. This day, October 16, 1999. African.

This day, October 16, 1995 in Washington, D.C. the Million Man March, organized by Louis Firecon

and the nation of Islam along with a number of other organizations the

gathering was intended to quote convey to the world a vastly different picture of

the black male a million men did not show up for the march and actually we'll get into a little bit of the controversy about how many people actually showed up and how hard it is to count crowd sizes.

But obviously a big massive gathering at a very interesting political moment, so here to discuss it is as always

Nicole Hemmer of Columbia hello Nicky hey Jody and our special guest for this episode

and we'll be on next episode as well Joel Anderson of Slate you hear him on

hang up and listen their sports podcast and he of course was the host of the third

season of Slow Burn which is about Biggie and Tupac. Joel, thank you for doing this.

We've been trying to have you on for a while,

so I really appreciate you coming on.

Oh, thanks for having me on.

It's my pleasure.

Let's paint a little bit of the cultural and political picture

of the moment and then talk about the

March itself but I read that quote Joel to convey to the world a vastly different

picture of the black male what's the flip side of that what is the picture of

the black male that the organizers of the Million Man March are trying to cut against?

Well, I mean, so we're not too long coming off the presidential election where, you know, the Bush campaign was successfully able to use

Willie Horton as an example of like black criminality right and to scare people

...