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Books by & About Malcolm X
Malcolm X:
The Man and His Times /
Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X
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Martin and Malcolm and America
Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England,
and the Caribbean
The Black Muslims in America
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X /
Malcolm X Speaks /
By Any Means Necessary
February 1965: The Final Speeches
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Malcolm X and
the "Pan African Pantheon”
By Jared A.
Ball, Ph.D.
Today would
have been the 85th birthday of Malcolm X [May
19, 1925 – February 21, 1965]. It is also the
85th anniversary of the birth year of what living
legend
Elombe Brath calls our “pan-African pantheon;”
Malcolm X,
Patrice Lumumba
and Frantz Fanon.
And in each case the analyses and movements that
produced this pantheon are as necessary as ever.
Lumumba’s Congo remains mired in a Western-inspired
and Western-supported
world war costing the lives of at least 10
million Congolese and counting. Fanon’s Martinique
remains impoverished, consumed by labor strife and
said by the French president Nicholas Sarkozy to
forever be the property of France. And despite
mythological delusions of progress Malcolm’s Black
America is so impoverished, suffering world
record-levels of un- and under-employment, a
recession said to be “permanent,”
and rates of incarceration seen as so systematic as
to have that process compared to a
modern state of enslavement.
And while there
is the annual temptation to ask, “what would Malcolm
say or do in response to today’s conditions,” it is
best to remember at least of couple of things:
First, today’s conditions and a living, breathing
Malcolm X are absolutely mutually exclusive. One
could not exist with the other. There is not one
trace of evidence to suggest that Malcolm X would
have, over the last 40 years, found ways to accept
or rationalize the loss of a movement and a momentum
that was designed to rid us of the conditions faced
here and abroad, so we have to conclude, based on
all existing evidence, that what exists today is in
part the willful result of his assassination. This
is, of course, the purpose of political
assassinations, to stunt or end movements
represented by the target. What do we think those in
power
killed him to achieve?
Secondly, as we
have argued
previously, the fact that those who took up the
mantle of a struggle defined by Malcolm X remain
marginalized academically, omitted journalistically
or left to languish in prisons absent any legitimate
legal justification, is conclusive proof of the
continuity of power and the incompleteness of that
movement. This especially after this past week’s
release of a man who admits to having carried
out the killing of Brother Malcolm. If this man can
serve his time and be allowed to go safely home
while so many others whose efforts were in the
lineage of Malcolm X remain incarcerated or exiled
there can be no discussion of “progress,” or
“completion.”
And finally, it
is as
Dhoruba bin-Wahad said many years ago, “If
Malcolm were alive today he’d be a political
prisoner and we’d be saying nothing of him because
we don’t support our political prisoners.” Malcolm X
represented an incorruptible proponent of
revolutionary politics that defies a single name but
combined a kind of revolutionary nationalism, pan-Africanism
and anti-imperialism with a grassroots focus that is
today as threatening as ever. It is why Wahad noted
that as soon as Malcolm X’s image became powerful
again among the youth of the early 1990s that it had
to be destroyed. This is part of a continuing
semiotic warfare Malcolm himself noted when he
proclaimed correctly that the United States “had
perfected the science of image-making.”
Congressman
John Lewis wrote in his
memoirs that in 1964 as a member of the
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee he toured
the African continent on a path that happened to
follow one recently taken by Malcolm X. Lewis noted
that at each stop African leadership warned his
contingent that if they were anywhere to the right
of Malcolm no ear would be given them. Malcolm X had
become the international standard by which our
struggle was measured. Today, that standard has been
reset along lines far farther to the right of
Malcolm X than Lewis and SNCC represented in 1964
and to our severe detriment.
Let's make yet
another call to commemorate Malcolm X by encouraging
further enrollment in efforts attempting to continue
his work. We have the examples, beginning next week
with the
release of his missing autobiographical chapters
in New York City, as well as,
The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, whose
Washington, DC chapter will be hosting a
Malcolm X Day event May 29 and the
Black Is Back Coalition whose work around the
country is beginning to reignite and reset the
standards of an anti-war movement. In the end
Malcolm’s Organization for Afro-American Unity had
as part of its mission a Black united front that
sought to further the phrase he helped to
popularize, “by any means necessary.” That kind of
political unity is a missing component to a truly
commemorative effort of our “shining Black prince.”
For Black
Agenda Radio, I’m Jared Ball. Online go to
www.BlackAgendaReport.com.
Jared Ball can be reached at
freemixradio@voxunion.com.
Source:
Black Ageenda Report
posted 20 May 2010
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Malcolm X
artifacts unearthed—Police docs and more found among
belongs of 'Shorty' Jarvis—1 February 2012—Documents
outlining the crime that landed Malcolm X in prison in
the 1940s are among some 1,000 recently unearthed items
purchased jointly by the civil rights leader's
foundation and an independent collector of
African-American artifacts. The documents and other
artifacts belonged to late musician Malcolm "Shorty"
Jarvis, who served in prison with Malcolm X and was one
of his closest friends. Jarvis' 1976 pardon paper also
is part of the collection, which was recently discovered
by accident. The items had been in a Connecticut storage
unit that had gone into default, and were initially
auctioned off to a buyer who had no idea what he was
bidding on. The Omaha, Nebraska-based Malcolm X Memorial
Foundation, which oversees the Malcolm X Center located
at his birthplace, will house and display the
just-arrived archives. It split the cost with Black
History 101 Mobile Museum, based in Detroit—the
birthplace of the Nation of Islam.—Mobile Museum founder
and curator Khalid el-Hakim declined to identify the
original buyer or the price the two organizations paid
for the trove. Still, even after splitting the cost, he
said it's the largest acquisition to date for his mobile
museum, which includes Jim Crow-era artifacts, a Ku Klux
Klan hood and signed documents by Malcolm X and Rosa
Parks. . . . The collection also reveals an enduring
connection between the two Malcolms after their
incarceration, Malcolm X's conversion to Islam and his
rise to prominence. There's a 72-page scrapbook of
Malcolm X's life that was maintained by Jarvis until
after his friend's 1965 assassination. One of the civil
rights era's most controversial and compelling figures,
Malcolm X rose to fame as the chief spokesman of the
Nation of Islam, a movement started in Detroit more than
80 years ago. He proclaimed the black Muslim
organization's message at the time: racial separatism as
a road to self-actualization and urged blacks to claim
civil rights "by any means necessary" and referred to
whites as "devils."—TheGrio
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Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
By John Lewis and
Michael D’Orso
Lewis, an Alabama
sharecropper's son, went to Nashville to attend a Baptist
college where, at the end of the 1950s, his life and the new
civil rights movement became inexorably entwined. First came the
lunch counter sit-ins; then the Freedom Rides; the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Lewis's election to
its chairmanship; the voter registration drives; the 1963 march
on Washington; the Birmingham church bombings; the murders
during the Freedom Summer; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party; Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1964; and the march on
Montgomery. Lewis was an active, leading member during all of
it. Much of his account, written with freelancer D'Orso, covers
the same territory as David Halberstam's
The Children. Halberstam himself appears here briefly as
a young reporter but Lewis imbues it with his own observations
as a participant. He is at times so self-effacing in this memoir
that he underplays his role in the events he helped create. But
he has a sharp eye, and his account of Selma and the march that
followed is vivid and personal. He describes the rivalries
within the movement as well as the enemies outside. |
After being forced out of SNCC because
of internal politics, Lewis served in President Carter's domestic peace
corps, dabbled in local Georgia politics, then in 1986 defeated his old
friend Julian Bond in a race for Congress, where he still serves. Lewis
notes that people often take his quietness for meekness. His book, a
uniquely well-told testimony by an eyewitness, makes clear that such an
impression is entirely inaccurate.—Publishers Weekly
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Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
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John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
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A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake.
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She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost
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Ghosts in Our Blood
With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean
By Jan R.
Carew
Carew, an
activist, scholar, and journalist, met Malcolm X
during his last trip abroad only a few weeks before
he was killed in 1965. It made such an impression on
Carew that he felt compelled to search out Malcolm's
family and friends in order to flesh out the family
history. He interviewed Wilfred (Malcolm's older
brother) and a Grenadian friend of Malcolm's mother
named Tanta Bess. Comparing his family's experiences
with that of Malcolm X, he gives the most complete
picture yet of Malcolm's mother. Carew also offers a
tantalizing glimpse of Malcolm X's transforming
himself into El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a man less
blinded by his own racial prejudices yet as
committed to the betterment of his race as ever.
Just before his death, Malcolm X became convinced
that a U.S. agency was involved with those trying to
kill him, and Carew here reveals the evidence
Malcolm X gave him to support these beliefs. |
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The mystery of Malcolm's death remains unresolved, and
we are once again filled with regret that he was cut
down before he could fulfill the promise of his
later days. While this book will not replace The
Autobiography of Malcolm X (LJ 1/1/66), it is an
important supplement. All libraries that own the
autobiography should also purchase this one.—Library
Journal
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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