Malcolm X’s Birthday and the Personal Nature of Deep Change
May 19. Malcolm X’s birthday. I entered middle school as the 1960s turned into the 60s. War, social roiling, visions of the nuclear sword of Damocles, multiple assassinations, and waves of civil unrest and violence washed over a boy working through adolescence and then early adulthood. A world vibrated down Route 66 and Highway 61, switching between the Byrds’ Turn, Turn, Turn and Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction on its way to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman. New people in unanticipated times populated my personal universe as I labored to wend my way to adulthood. Malcolm X showed up early in that journey. I tried to understand him and the reactions to him. I learned about the difficulty (and the importance) of sorting through what people say about someone and forming one’s own opinion about someone.
A corpse. A bullet riddled podium. A mystery about an assassination: Who killed Malcolm X and where were any of the law enforcement agencies that had seemed so threatened by him and so busily monitored him? I devoured Malcolm X’s autobiography. At Harvard, he became the focus of my work in a freshman advanced writing seminar with, shall we say, a range of reactions from my seminar mates. I interviewed Dean Epps who knew Malcolm X and edited a collection of Malcolm X’s. speeches at Harvard, The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard
The more I learned about Malcolm X the more that I mourned his passing and celebrated his life, his intelligence and courage along with his ferocious dedication to freedom, learning as well as to the principle and practice of human rights. I also came, flat out, to like him. If I had a minute with him today, I would tell him of my continuing and even growing gratitude to him and how he lived his life. Given another moment or two, I would ask him about his relationship with MLK (recently explored in The Sword and the Shield ) , his expanding focus on human rights writ large, how he balanced his dedication to cause and to his family, and his view of Frederick Taylor. I’d take notes. Lots of them.
America’s recent years of retching and convulsing about human rights generally and regarding black people particularly or even about a massacre such as in Buffalo…most likely all that might surprise Malcolm X would be that anybody was surprised. Below appears a quote from his talk at Harvard Law School in 1964. Unfortunately, it is little if any less relevant today than then. Fortunately, we can still learn from these words.
I don’t think anyone would deny either that if you send chickens out of your barnyard in the morning, at nightfall those chickens will come home to roost in your barnyard. Chickens that you send out always come back home. It is a law of nature. I was an old farm boy myself, and I got in trouble saying this once, but it didn’t stop me from being a farm boy. Other people’s chickens don’t come to roost on your doorstep, and yours don’t go to roost on theirs. The chickens that this country is responsible for sending out, whether the country likes it or not (and if you’re mature, you look at it “like it is”), someday, and someday soon, have got to come back home to roost.
“The truth will set you free. But not until it’s finished with you.” (David Foster Wallace). In the process, of course, of dealing with the truth we must deal with our associated emotions or, as Gloria Steinhem said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” And, finally, it’s up to each of us to stay with it or, as they say in the Navy Seals, “Embrace the suck.” Embrace it on Malcolm X’s birthday. On every day. In our personal lives. In our professional lives.