Black History Month

What more can I say Malcolm X has had a profound effect on my life and many others. So I wanted to kick of the Black History Month with some word of wisdom from the good brother Malcolm. On of the most influential partakers in the Civil Rights Movement. If one had to select one historical personality within the period 1940 to 1975 who best represented and reflected black urban life, politics, and culture in the United States, it would be extremely difficult to find someone more central than the charismatic figure of Malcolm X/El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, May 19 in 1925, and growing up in the Midwest, young Malcolm Little was the child of political activists who supported the militant black nationalist movement of Marcus Garvey.

In 1960 Malcolm X established the newspaper Muhammad Speaks, which by the end of the decade would have a national circulation of 600,000, the most widely-read black-owned newspaper in the country. However, by this time, serious divisions developed between Malcolm X and the NOI’s patriarch, Elijah Muhammad, and his coterie of organizational leaders based in Chicago, over a number of issues. Malcolm X was personally dismayed when it was publicly revealed that Muhammad had fathered a number of children out of wedlock. He also chafed under the NOI’s political conservatism and its refusal to support civil rights protests.

In reaching out to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, and other civil rights leaders, Malcolm X proposed a broad coalition of black activist organizations, working in concert to achieve social justice. On Sunday afternoon, February 21, 1965, just before delivering an address at the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X/El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was assassinated before a crowd of hundreds of people, including his pregnant wife Betty Shabazz and three of their four children.