Vol. 74/No. 13      April 5, 2010

The meeting, celebrating Women’s History Month, was chaired by Ilyasah Shabazz, one of the six daughters of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz. The event was held at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center in Harlem, which occupies part of what had been the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm gave numerous speeches during the last year of his life and where he was killed.

Howard Dodson, director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, gave a brief history of the fight in the 1990s to preserve the Audubon and establish the center. The ballroom had been shut down following Malcolm’s assassination and was later purchased by Columbia University, which announced plans to tear down the building and construct a medical center.

Dodson said that Betty Shabazz was a leader of those in New York and elsewhere who waged a successful battle to get the city administration “to stop the destruction” of the Audubon. “She came to believe that this place of tragedy should be transformed into a place of honor in tribute to Malcolm’s legacy.”

“This room used to extend all the way back to the end of the block,” Dodson said. “They only conceded to preserve less than half of it,” with the medical center now occupying the rest of the block. The center displays videos of Malcolm’s life and has a meeting hall on the second floor used for community events.

Dodson said that Betty Shabazz reviewed and made recommendations on all the art for the center. She surprised those who thought she would choose works only by African American artists, he said. Instead, Shabazz used the criteria of what would add to understanding the legacy of Malcolm, not the nationality or skin color of the artist. A sculpture of Malcolm X in the lobby was created by Gabriel Koren, a Hungarian-born sculptor. A mural covering an entire wall of the meeting hall was painted by Daniel Galvez, a Mexican American. The etched glass decorating the entrance was created by Colin Chase, an African American.

Also speaking on the panel were Safiya Bandele, who worked for many years with Betty Shabazz at Medgar Evers College; Aisha al Adawiya, founder of Women in Islam and a friend of the family, who is a member of the center’s board of directors; Donna Jackson, director of an organization that promotes social networking; and Steve Clark, editor of several collections of speeches by Malcolm X published by Pathfinder Press, coeditor of the just published Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.

In introducing Clark, Ilyasah Shabazz pointed out that after the assassination, “Many did not know what Malcolm’s message was. It was important to see his work published.”

Clark noted that Pathfinder’s relationship with Betty Shabazz goes back to soon after the assassination in 1965, when the publisher approached her about producing Malcolm X Speaks, which came out later that year. Pathfinder’s editors and Shabazz shared the determination that “neither assassins nor anybody else would keep Malcolm’s words—and his example—from getting in print and staying in print, for current and future generations to read, study, and above all emulate,” Clark said.

Clark pointed out that many of the speeches and interviews had first been published or covered in the Militant newspaper. He quoted Malcolm’s January 1965 statement—in the very meeting hall where the panel was held—that, “None of the newspapers ever talk about our meetings [or help publicize them] in any way, shape, or form, other than the Militant—the Militant does.”

Clark noted that Malcolm X Speaks was followed in 1967 by Malcolm X on Afro-American History and in 1979 by By Any Means Necessary. In the 1980s and 1990s, “when I got to know Betty and worked with her,” Clark said, Pathfinder published more speeches that were not yet in print, in Malcolm X Talks to Young People and February 1965: The Final Speeches.  
 
Place of women in political life
Picking up on the Women’s History Month theme of the event, Clark commented on the shift of Malcolm’s views on the place of women in social and political life. In the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm pointed to the stance of the Nation of Islam—one he helped propagate—that “the true nature of a man is to be strong, and a woman’s true nature is to be weak … he must control her if he expects to get her respect.”

Anyone ever acquainted with her “knows that is hardly a good description of Betty Shabazz!” Clark said to laughter from the audience.

By the latter half of 1964 and early 1965, following his break with the Nation and two trips to Africa and the Middle East, Malcolm had changed his views. In every country making economic and social progress, he said, women were also making progress in gaining freedom and a right to education—and vice versa. In the freedom struggle in the United States and around the world, he added, women have “made a greater contribution than many of us men.”

Clark pointed to the discussion of this question and many others in the new book Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, including Malcolm’s collaboration with women who were leaders of the Black rights struggle in the United States such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Gloria Richardson. Noting that the book has 74 pages of photographs and illustrations, Clark held up the photo of Richardson standing off National Guardsmen armed with bayonets in the early 1960s sent by the governor to quell Black rights demonstrations in Cambridge, Maryland.

He also pointed to a 19th century woodcut, obtained with the help of the Schomburg Library, of recently enfranchised former slaves fording a creek with rifles in hand to ensure they were able to cast their first vote in rural Georgia.

During the discussion, Ilyasah called on Karole Dill Barkley, a former high school classmate, who was in the audience. “Karole knew my father before she knew me, because of Pathfinder Press,” Shabazz said. Barkley said she had grown up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, and had attended a private secondary school along with Ilyasah Shabazz. Somehow as a teenager she had gotten hold of Malcolm X Speaks, and “I studied it,” she told the audience. “Malcolm opened up my perspectives. What he said resonated with me.”
 
 
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Malcolm X and the communist movement  
 
 
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