Farrakhan: Count Adds Up To Racism

Controversy continued Tuesday over the number of participants in the Million Man March as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan pledged to sue the U.S. Park Police to force it to revise its estimate of 400,000.

Farrakhan and march organizers insisted that the rally drew more than 1 million people to the Mall.

“What would make anyone fail to give us that credit but racism, at the root of it, white supremacy?” Farrakhan said.

Park Police said Tuesday that they stand by their crowd estimate, arrived at by examining aerial photographs and applying techniques used at other mass demonstrations here.

“I expected we would have a controversy,” said Maj. Robert H. Hines, a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police, the law enforcement agency responsible for policing the Mall. “But we think we have a reasonable and objective number.”

In essence, the Park Police counting method involves photographing sections of the Mall, deciding how much of each section is occupied and then determining the density of the crowd occupying the sections, Hines said.

Police said they took photos of the Mall, the Capitol grounds and the surrounding streets at three different times.

“To be a million, the crowd would have had to go all the way back to the Lincoln Memorial with thick density,” Hines said. He said police also photographed buses at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium and factored in the number of people who rode Metro and came to Washington by train.

Abdul Alim Muhammad, a march official who worked with Park Police on its count, said federal officials denied organizers’ request to fly a helicopter over the event to count participants themselves.

“This reminds me of plantation days when we would pick 100 bales of cotton and they would give us credit for 40 bales,” he said.

Despite Park Police experience at the task, Hines said his agency recognizes that estimating crowds “is not an exact science.” He said estimates could err by as much as 20 percent.