Baltimore Burning

          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.