The Adventures of Muhammad Smith and The Million Man March

Muhammad Charles Smith, complete with Jerry Curl: Negro Extraordinaire, to hear him tell it, but in all reality he was the day manager at the local Fast Food Delite. At the age of 37 this was his success. Far from the success he had seen for years on page five of Ebony Magazine of the ‘First Black…to be a doctor in Three Peaks, Alaska’. He had once been given the gift, by his grandmother, of a five year subscription of “How to be the first Black person in Beaumont, Montana”. Well actually they were copies of Ebony Magazine, the first Black magazine to be White. A magazine he had hated since childhood, but mothers know best.

    It was just after lunch at about 1:30 and the crowd was a little more than the routine 20 orders an hour, far from the surprisingly light but still maddening lunch hour crowd on this Thursday afternoon in Philly PA, in the petite heat of August 1995.

    It was August 1995 and OJ Simpson was on trial for his life. He had assembled an impressive team of lawyers and lurking in the background was an impressive retirement fund. Mr. Simpson was prepared. It was odd that Muhammad felt anything for Mr. OJ: An ex-football star, current movie star and the number one, part time football commentator on Network TV. All that and he had a White woman too. OJ was the kind of smart celebrity who never made waves, stayed completely out of politics, race, and anger. It would have been nice to get the occasional “Right On” during the occasional police shooting or the rare Rodney King, like Jim Brown was so quick to do. Funny, two record holding running backs…

    …different as night and day.

    Meet OJ who’s been most everywhere, from CBS to the NFL

    BUT JIMMY’S ONLY SEEN THE SIGHTS A BOY CAN SEE FROM GHETTO      

    FIGHTS

    ….What a crazy pair!

    But they’re Negroes,

    Identical Negroes and you’ll find

    They eat alike,

    They think alike,

    At times they even stink alike.

    You can lose your mind

    When Negroes are two of a kind.

    Yeah that was Jim Brown and OJ Simpson.

    That airport jumpin’ guy and Jefferson from the Dirty Dozen: A bewitching dichotomy that always existed in Muhammad’s Black World. The classic explanation was the house Nigger and the field hand from slavery days. Two claimed entities. It was claimed that there was the Negro who embraced the European culture of perfection as was the case for our now beloved OJ Simpson. Then there was the Negro who held on to whatever culture they could find in repudiation of all things European, even their theories of perfection, to the point of sacrifice ala Jim Brown. Muhammad Charles Smith often thought that this insidious dichotomy was not a conflict between individuals but a schizophrenia from within.