Last night I prepared for
today’s class by looking for a video about Malcolm X. I like to give my college
students some background on the authors we read. “Learning to Read” is a
chapter from his autobiography. In it Malcolm X tells about teaching himself in
prison by copying the dictionary, word for word. His true education began when
he could read about ancient cultures and the history of black people in Egypt
and Africa. It was a huge surprise to him that blacks had a culture in Africa
since it had never been mentioned to him before.
I thought that was
rather ironic, since I had learned nothing about Malcolm X in my high school,
not even in my college in the 70’s. All I had known was that he was involved
with the Black Panthers somehow. I can’t remember where I got that idea.
I found many videos about
Malcolm X on Youtube. Some were of speeches, some of interviews. The third one I viewed was a debate between Malcolm
X and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was riveting. It showed these two highly
educated, eloquent black men trying to find a way to help black people overcome
the brutality of the segregated South in 1963.
Malcolm X talked about the need
for change. He saw that while white men in white sheets used to chase black men
with bloodhounds; they had now taken off the sheets, put on police uniforms and
used police dogs. All the things he had heard about change in America still
hadn’t happened, not in 10 years or 100 years. Malcolm X believed that only an “action
program” would help. That and a conversation with each other wherein blacks and
whites could talk openly without hurting each others’ feelings.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
said that only nonviolent resistance could make a change. He pointed out that violence would never work because black people
would never win; violence only ended by killing more black people. The
statement he made that really surprised me was this: “I don’t think there is
any real organization to these riots. I think they grow out of the conditions I
have mentioned all along and as long as these intolerable conditions are there …
every city will sit on a powder keg, and can explode over the slightest
incident.”
Then I turned on MSNBC
and Baltimore was burning.
We talked about Malcom
X and Martin Luther King,Jr. and the riots in Baltimore today. The things most
of us agreed on were that both men were right. Violence could not win, but non-violence
has not worked entirely either. There were those who said that things would
never change, and those who thought that if there could be a middle way to force
change without violence, there might be some hope. The people in my classes
gave me hope because they were talking about something that they cared about
deeply, and they talked without hurting each others’ feelings.
I haven’t watched
the news yet today. I am still haunted by what I saw last night. A woman threw
her arms into the air and asked why the police and politicians weren’t there to
help save her neighborhood. She was there because she had come to get her son
and take him home and away from the violence. And I saw a minister standing in front of a
community center his congregation had been building for eight years –
completely burned down behind him. He was asked what he thought of the rioters
and he said, “violence is the voice of the unheard.” And I saw the line of
police with helmets and shields slowly moving ahead to make the rioters leave
the area. I heard that 6 police officers were in the hospital with serious
injuries – others were hurt but not severely.
And it has been 50
years since Malcolm X was assassinated, but last night Baltimore was burning.
