4. On Malcolm X

How could he sit there and patiently listen to uncomprehending white academics ask him inane questions about his name, his background, his work?  Where did that patience come from? How could he do that time after time and retain the quality of his intellect, without ever losing the sharpness and incisiveness of his speech?  As angry as he claimed to be and had a right to be, was there ever anyone as patient and composed as he was?

Whenever I hear his voice or read something he wrote or said, I go into mourning.  Not even because of the leadership all Americans lost when he was shot down. How many Malcolm X’s are currently in American prisons serving time for trying to fulfill the “American Dream” in about the only way open to African-Americans, or trying to alleviate the pain of living in a society where social support is denied to so many, and most particularly if one is black or Hispanic?  Malcolm knew very well that he was not unique, that generations of African-American men and women were thrown away into jail cells and forgotten while there, disenfranchised when released, and rendered socially unemployable.

The failure of America is not only the failure to right the wrongs of the past but to compound them by never confronting the multiplicity of causes that created the wrongs in the first place.  For African-Americans, this legacy stands in the way of having any chance at all to exist successfully in a racist society. While it is too true that the US government was largely responsible—either directly or by neglect—for assassinating the African-American leadership of the 1960’s, African-Americans certainly know, as all white people should also know, that this is only the most public manifestation of the continuing persecution of black people throughout the nation’s history, consistently targeting black males especially for destruction, whether through literal killing or social ostracism.  No American understood or experienced this more directly than Malcolm X.