Since writing my first post and reading the comments, I have been trying to remember how I became interested in, or even learned about, Malcolm X. He certainly wasn’t studied or even mentioned in school. To my knowledge, African-American history was that Harriet Tubman ran the underground railroad until Abe Lincoln freed the slaves and everything was good for a while, until Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat (I was never quite sure of the significance though), and then Martin Luther King had a dream. (Obviously this is slightly exaggerated, but you get the point, and I wasn’t alone–most schools, even if they are primarily Black, tend to give a very abridged version of history when it comes to the Black experience.) I didn’t know about Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Little Rock, Jo Ann Robinson, Medgar Evers, Emmitt Till, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), the Selma-Montgomery March, Huey Newton, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X…

So however it happened, I got The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I was fascinated, not only by Malcolm himself, but also that such an influential and important person could have been ignored, and I wondered who and what else had been conveniently omitted. Since reading his autobiography, I have taken classes and schooled myself in what we call “African-American history,” but it is as much “American history” as the (European) American history we learned in school, and far more interesting in my opinion.

Still, Malcolm is my favorite. I admore him because he said what nobody else would say, but everyone knew was true, whether they aknowledged it or not (if he was so full of lies as people would like to think, then why was he a threat?). It was easier for people to hate Malcolm than to deal with the issues, so he is still hated by some people today, over 40 years after his death. I also admire him because he was open to change, and never stopped examining his beliefs and methods. As a minister in the Nation of Islam, he preached and believed that white people were devils, but after his pilgrimage to Mecca, he saw that there were Muslims who were white, and he questioned and changed his original ideas. I think many people, especially powerful people, are either afraid or ashamed to admit they have changed, but I think it shows a person is conscientious and that they care about what they are working for and the people who believe in them. I think we have a lot to learn from Malcolm, both from his messages, which are still very relevant, and from how he lived his life, and I would like to do my part to honor his legacy and hopefully change some of the misconceptions that people have about him.