Protest marks failed dream of integration ure to end discrimination Black Blacks rally behind banner of man of hate

If Martin Luther King were alive to witness today's ''Million Man March'', he would weep.

The very fact that black men still feel compelled to gather in Washington under the leadership of a man like Louis Farrakhan, who uses hate as his main instrument of political persuasion, reveals how distant King's dream of racial integration remains.

It was King who led the last big civil rights march in Washington in August 1963. Then, 250,000 black and white men and women assembled to hear him deliver his ''I have a dream'' speech. Almost 100 years after the abolition of slavery, he said: "The Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land."

But he urged black people not to drink from "the cup of bitterness and hatred" in pursuing the dream, the dream that one day his children would "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character".

Thirty-two years on, segregation has gone, blacks occupy positions of office around the land; a black man could be elected president of the United States next year.

Yet, most blacks continue to inhabit islands of poverty in America's vast ocean of material prosperity and almost all black Americans, even those who have scaled the social ladder and escaped into the middle class, say they continue to feel the sting of racial prejudice.

What would have saddened King most is that black people, especially black men, have turned their resentment and their low self-esteem against each other. One in three black black men in their twenties is under some form of police supervision.

Mr Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, conceived the idea of today's march following a vision he says he had in a dream of black men coming together in large numbers to atone for their own sins and to make a pledge to rediscover the virtues of self-reliance and social responsibility.

The message has a broader appeal than the messenger. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has disowned the march because of Mr Farrakhan's commitment to black separatism - he has called for "a state of our own" - his constant race-baiting, and his strategy of rallying political support around the idea of a common enemy. In a television interview broadcast on Friday he described "some" Jews, Palestinian Arabs, Koreans and Vietnamese as "bloodsuckers". His organisation's magazine recently proposed a legal prohibition on inter-racial marriages.

Yet, Jesse Jackson, a disciple of King, and other relatively mild black political leaders, as well as doctors, lawyers and other professionals, will join the throng today on Washington's Mall.

In a television interview yesterday Mr Jackson did not disagree that Mr Farrakhan was an anti-Semite but said the cause of the march was bigger than its leader. "The real problem," he said, "is the disgraceful condition of the African-American community."

Two articles by black columnists in yesterday's Washington Post described today's march as an exercise primarily in re- capturing the sense of pride and solidarity of the Sixties' civil-rights movement.

Courtland Molloy wrote that since the call came to participate in the ''Million Man March'' he had begun to see more black men smiling. "'What's up brotherman?' sure has a nicer ring than the ominous, for-whom-the-bell- tolls, 'What you lookin' at?'"

Nathan McCall, author of an autobiography called Makes Me Wanna Holler, wrote that the march represented "a kind of therapy for black men". He said: "It offers a lot of things that we urgently need - a chance to come together and confront our shortcomings and celebrate our strengths; an opportunity for us to take stock of our current plight and plot a better future course; and, on a very basic level, a healthy way for black men to get a little bit of this tension off our chests."

Healthily therapeutic as the event itself may be, questions linger as to what will happen in the aftermath. Black women, for example, want to know whether many of their men's notoriously sexist attitudes will soften, and whether black fathers might start displaying a little more interest in nurturing their children and less, in some case, in pursuing lives of crime.

And the broader question that all America will be pondering is whether the march will serve merely as a springboard for Mr Farrakhan's political career, or whether it might revitalise King's dream of transforming "the jangling discords" of America into "a beautiful symphony of brotherhood".

1865: The Civil War ends and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution is approved, abolishing slavery across the United States.

1954: The Supreme Court declares that racially separate educational facilities are inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.

1963: Martin Luther King leads 250,00 people in the ''March on Washington''.

1964: Lyndon Johnson pushes the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination in employment, through Congress.

1965: The Voting Rights Act removes barriers on registration of black voters.

1968: Civil Rights Act extends guarantees of equal racial opportunity to the property market; Dr King assassinated in Memphis.

1991: Civil Rights Act eases the burden on those suing for racial discrimination in the work place.