By Chloe Wayne
Yesterday would have been the 83rd birthday of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz…Dr. Melissa Harris-Lacewell gives us her thoughts on the significance.
Ossie Davis’s rather powerful eulogy for Malcolm:
So far removed from the Civil Rights generation, I find it difficult to assess the extent to which his legacy today reflects his actual impact during his short life, or his posthumous deification or commodification. Who was Malcolm Little, really? How can one grasp such a prominent, polemical figure when his words and images are thrown at us left and right– often scattered, disjointed, and even contradictory– without any historical context or sense of continuity in which to ground them?
I think it’s important for us to commemorate Malcolm, and it is equally so to acknowledge the difficulties we face in making sense of him. Whether we agree with his (varying) ideological stances or not, his relevance today reaches much farther than the one-dimensional personas we have erected in his place.
To duly honor him is to dig a little deeper to study him and the forces/structures that birthed him. Accordingly, if the 1980s and 1990s consigned his countenance to T-shirts and posters, let this generation reject the hoary catchphrases and angry-faced photographs as inadequate representations of the man, and return him– and more importantly, truly progressive and radical action– to the forefront of our political consciousness.
