It often takes not one, but many perspectives to create an event that fully encapsulates the significance of Malcolm X's life and legacy. A recent commemoration of the great leader's furious passage that took place at the Malcom X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center more than touched on this multifaceted legacy.
The opening invocation by Educational Center board member Imam Talib Abdur Rashid set the solemn tone for reflection on the 48th year since Malcolm (El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) was assassinated. Vocalist and poet Karen Taylor extended the worshipful moments with "Night Fire," a song and poetry piece that spoke to the leader's courage and determination in his fight for freedom and liberation.
Malcolm wasn't his usual self on that fateful Sunday in 1965, recalled A. Peter Bailey, one of only a few audience members who were present at the Audubon when Malcolm was gunned down. "He looked as though something was bothering him," he began. "This was the first time I had ever seen him like this."
Bailey was outside waiting for the guest speaker to arrive when the actual shooting occurred, but rushed back inside the auditorium to see what had happened. "When I arrived at the stage and saw him, I didn't know what to do," Bailey continued. It would take years before Bailey could summon the courage to return to the tragic scene.
He had returned mainly at the coaxing of the late Gil Noble, and later at the insistence of Malcolm's daughters, two of whom, Ilyasah and Malaak, followed Bailey to the podium. Ilyasah delivered the longest statement, informing the packed audience of the ways in which "a place of tragedy has been transformed into a place of triumph."
The young poet Autum Ashante was born decades after Malcolm was taken from us, but she invoked his spirit in a poem that was originally dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "I have a dream," she recited several times, but immediately followed with the Malcolm X allusion, "but I'm living a nightmare."
There were other comments from Mark Harding, the center's interim executive director, and Zead Ramadan, center's chairman of the board, who introduced the keynote speaker of no relationship, Tariq Ramadan.
Ramadan, a noted scholar of Islamic history and religion and a professor at Oxford University, entitled his address "The Transformations of Malcolm X." Many of the more informed members of the audience were pleased to hear the word "transformation" as it stood in contrast to "reinvention," a word that the late Manning Marable used in the subtitle of his biography of Malcolm X.
They were enthralled for more than an hour as Ramadan, whose father was a confidant of Malcolm's, meticulously detailed Malcolm's steady transformation from Malcolm Little to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. "What Malcolm understood," he began, "was that to be free of the oppressor requires resistance. Your resistance is determined by the way you are pushed."
Resistance would prove be a recurrent theme as he thoughtfully traced Malcolm's journey from prison to the Nation of Islam.
Having failed to reconcile his oppression through the use of white values, "Malcolm decided he didn't want to be accepted, but respected," Ramadan said.
Much of Ramadan's comments on Malcolm were very similar to his remarks last year in London on panel, though at that time he was equally concerned with Malcolm's spiritual growth and maturity. Ramadan touched on this subject this time around, but Malcolm's universality was his dominant narrative, particularly after his pilgrimage to Mecca and the pursuit of orthodox Islam.
Even so, Ramadan also emphasized Malcolm's resistance: "His determination to stand up against injustice, this was his message.
"But the real struggle is for all people to struggle for the liberation of all oppressed people," Ramadan continued, once again returning to Malcolm's international outlook, the antithesis of narrow nationalism. "We are not struggling just for ourselves, but for the whole of humanity."
These points were reemphasized during Dr. Ron Daniels' response and the subsequent Q-and-A. "We have a state of emergency," Daniels said, "but without sense of urgency. And Malcolm was about urgency."
Imam Talib stated that Malcolm's universal outlook "does not negate his nationalism. But more than anything, he was a revolutionary."
In his closing remarks, Bailey requested that anyone with memories of Malcolm contact the center in order to contribute to a collective memoir.
This event should stand as the foundation of that initiative.