Farrakhan and an urban myth...

Stanley Crouch exposes a lie that Farrakhan keeps perpetuating.

The lies are supposed to be behind the Nation of Islam now. But I am not so sure. Whenever its current leader, Louis Farrakhan, takes to the podium, something like the truth and its cousin, logic, head for the hills.

The "Willie Lynch" story that Farrakhan delivered at the Million Man March became part of the unquestioned "folk wisdom" of the sidewalk, barbershop, beauty parlor and student "understanding" of the black predicament.

The talk was about a supposed speech given in 1712 by William Lynch, a slaveholder who was lecturing his fellow chattel owners in the best ways to keep the slaves divided. It is a perfect example of the "big lie" theory. Tell a big enough lie and it will become its own truth. At the Million Man March, Farrakhan presented a piece of "truth" that had been hidden from black people.

Now it's 10 years later, and after a Millions More Movement, the Lynch lie maintains its position as potted history passed off as fact. It has ingrained itself so much into our culture's consciousness that Prof. William Jelani Cobb of Spelman College had to sweep away this rhetorical piece of dung on his Web site jelanicobb.com. Cobb was disturbed by how deeply this has penetrated the thought of black Americans across classes and professions. A decade later, people repeat it over and over. The rapper Talib Kweli has even cited it in his material. According to Cobb's Web site, it has taken on the life of a factoid, something that seems true but is not.

The only problem is that Farrakhan's talk was no more than a historical bean pie in the sky. A trumped up example of paranoid "insight," it revealed nothing.