Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. I have been watching a few different documentaries about the revolutionaries of the 50s and 60s. I hope that I'll have more time to read about their struggles. Malcolm's time after the Hajj, in which he became more vocal about the global struggle against tyranny and oppression, are the most fascinating to me. What really amazes me is that I actually lived 1 block away from the Audubon Ballroom for 1 1/2 years. Malcolm's daughters have been working on the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center to make it into a repository of Malcolm's writing and life's work, which will open on May 19, his 80th birthday. Here's a CNN article with more details.
Nothing deeper to write at this point, but just wanted to include a quote from the eulogy that Ossie Davis gave at his funeral:
Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. Consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man but a seed which, after the winter of our discontent, will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is. A prince. Our own black shining prince who didn't hesitate to die because he loved us so.
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