One Moment In Time

Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did, you would know him. And if you knew him, you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood!

Ossie Davis, delivering the eulogy for Malcolm X, February 27, 1965.

It was Sunday afternoon, February 21, 1965, around 3:00 pm. The Organization of Afro-American Unity had scheduled a rally at the Audubon Ballroom on 165th Street and Broadway in Harlem. Just a week earlier, a fire bomb had destroyed the home of Malcolm X, nearly taking his life and that of his wife and children. As people arrived for the rally, they were scrutinized closely by security guards, but not searched.

As Malcolm made his way to the podium to speak, a scuffle broke out between two men. This drew the audience’s attention away from the stage and distracted his personal bodyguards. When that happened three other men rushed towards towards him and unloaded a volley of gunfire. Although supporters and police rushed him across the street to a Columbia Presbyterian Hospital clinic, Malcolm X was dead on arrival. He was 39 years old.

Widely believed to be a conspiracy involving the Nation of Islam, with either full knowledge or complicity of both the FBI and NYPD, Malcolm’s murder left a scar on the psyche of Black America that many would argue has never healed. It would be one moment in a very violent decade when people fighting for civil rights would be cut down by oppressive forces determined to maintain the status quo.

Now forty years after Malcolm X’s death, his family is working to carry on his legacy, ironically at the site of his passing. The once empty and unused Audubon Ballroom has been renovated and is preparing to
open as the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center. A memorial ceremony will be held there tonight, though its official opening will be on May 19th, on what would have been the Malcolm’s 80th birthday.

”It’s our responsibility to make sure that we do preserve and document our history to empower future generations,” said Ilyasah Shabazz, the third of six daughters born to Malcolm X and wife Betty Shabazz.

Interestingly, as Harlem remembers him, the city of Lansing, Michigan, where he spent much of his youth, struggles to come to grips with how it treated young Malcolm Little and other Black people in the 1930’s.