Fifty Years of Civil Rights

Work of Malcolm X and King a start, but we have far to go

Ilyasah Shabazz has spent a lifetime following in the footsteps of her father, Malcolm X. She was only two years old when her father was assassinated by former Nation of Islam members, and she has said in previous interviews that she has no recollection of the event.

Growing up, Shabazz was apolitical and was raised in a racially integrated neighbourhood in New York. When her mother talked about her father, it was in the context of being a husband, and less about his activism.

In college, she finally decided to read her father’s autobiography and took classes to learn more about his work. At times, she found herself in awkward positions, with other black students expecting her to be more outspoken. She found herself being nominated as president of black student unions.

“My father came from a lineage of activists,” says Shabazz. “His father was the president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association . . . Actually, his parents met in Canada, with the Garvey movement. My mother was the niece to one of the co-founders of the Garvey movement. So they were very much activists and very much enlightened about world history, about the injustices, about the transatlantic slave trade being the largest migration of people in the history of mankind.”

“My father had such a reaction to that,” says Shabazz, referring to events such as the Birmingham Church bombings. “Some people say that he was violent, but in actuality, [he was] reacting to all the violence that was perpetrated on people, or people who fought against injustice. So you have this young, beautiful man, filled with such compassion and so brilliant and intellectual, who was able to articulate the pains, the desperation–just all of the things that many people could not articulate, and were afraid to articulate.”

“He confronted these things head-on. He warned us against the folly of running in place and thinking we’re making progress. But we’re running in place, putting a Band-Aid on it if we’re not addressing the wounds.”

“If you want to talk about the social climate of the ‘60s, it wasn’t that long after the emancipation proclamation,” says Shabazz. “You can imagine the psychological scars were raw. Most people didn’t know anything about Africa, or the significant contributions Africa made towards world history–compared to today, [when] we have the internet.”

Today, Shabazz is an activist, author and public speaker. She’s the co-author of recently released young adult book, X: a novel, based on the teenage years of her father’s life, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the American civil rights movement. Having been born near one of the peaks of the movement, she has witnessed its after-effects. While she agrees that much progress has been made, the movement is far from over.

“Even today, when we see re-enactment of ancient times on the continent, you never see these people with dark skin,” she says. “And often times, the actors have English accents. It becomes a disservice, clearly to the indigenous people of the continent.”

“We have the internet. We really don’t have any excuses. And so I challenge young people on campuses, just as much as people in the 1960s demanded that the educational curriculum was inclusive of history, of ethnic diversity, but primarily in this country of African-American history since Africans cultivated this barren land so we could call it the United States of America. So much has changed that we now have access to any truth we want to know.”

Looking to the Past

Fifty years ago, if you were black and lived in the United States, you likely used separate “but equal” entrances to movie theatres and used racially assigned toilets. If you were in the military, fighting for your country, you were grouped with other black men in your unit, but still led by a white officer.

Though the movement had been growing slowly for many years, it came to a plateau with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

Most history textbooks in North America have a page dedicated to Rosa Parks, and how she sparked a successful boycott, just by deciding to sit at the front of the bus. Many more protests would be similarly successful, without the use of force.

It seems unthinkable that in 1957, high schoolers would have to be escorted by armed soldiers to enforce a law that ended educational segregation. Black men would be refused sandwich service based solely on their race. Even if black people were legally allowed to vote, there might be a crowd of Ku Klux Klan members waiting for them at the polling station.

The civil rights movement came to a peak when Dr. King and 200,000 to 300,000 demonstrators marched to Washington D.C., where King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech to a widely televised nation.

A few months after this speech, Malcolm X, also known as Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, left the Nation of Islam. Though much more controversial than Dr. King, Malcolm X also had the same goal of ending racism, his methods being very different.

“I think that they both had the same goal to end racism, but MLK was a gradualist,” says Dr. Charles Quist-Adade, a sociology professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. “He believed in a piecemeal, gradualist approach, while X called for structural changes. He was for a radical transformation of American society. On the other hand, he wanted to do this purely within the African-American system and he wasn’t entirely engaged in the entire American society. For him to be successful, he needed to engage the entire system, not just going it alone.”

“It takes both the black keys and the white keys on the piano to create harmonious music,” says Quist-Adade, referring to Dr. King’s message.

“My father’s perspective was a little different, but both Dr. King and my father sought to eliminate racism,” says Shabazz. “My father’s angle was from more of a human rights angle, and I think that Dr. King and the civil rights movement was more from a civil angle.”

“I think my father came from the perspective of: if someone doesn’t want to integrate with you, why would you push that?”

Malcolm X believed in working with other black people to improve their condition, and that black people have a right to control their own economic and social destinies. For some time, he believed that black Americans should separate from white Americans. Having seen the way black people were treated, he thought that peace with white people was impossible.

Though he was born Malcolm Little, he began signing his name with an “X,” which signified the original, African name he would never know. “Little” was likely the name of an ancestral slave owner.

X was polarizing. When he was part of the Nation of Islam, he believed that white people were “devils” and that their demise was inevitable. However, his views changed in March 1964, before going on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca during Hajj season. He had left the Nation of Islam, feeling that it had gone as far as it could, and converted to Sunni Islam. During his time in Mecca, he saw Muslims of many different races, and believed then that racial problems could be solved through the religion.

This contrasts with King, who was a Christian. By further comparison, he was a pacifist, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s success with non-violent protest.

Looking Forward

In 1991, Rodney King was beaten within an inch of his life by four white police officers for drunk driving. He was unarmed. Even though the entire incident was video taped by a bystander, all four officers involved were acquitted, sparking the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.

Last year, two similarly high profile police altercations with unarmed black men occurred. Michael Brown, after robbing a convenience store, was shot by Darren Wilson, and Eric Garner, after selling untaxed cigarettes, was choked to death by Daniel Pantaleo. Both police officers were acquitted. While there was only eyewitness accounts of Brown being shot, it’s extremely difficult to dispute the video evidence of Garner being choked to death.

In the following months, Ferguson and other parts of the United States were rife with protests and rioting. “Hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe” were written on protest signs and t-shirts.

“You can’t pat police officers on their shoulders when they grossly abuse their powers like what happened in Ferguson and New York,” says Quist-Adade. “You can’t do that, when ordinary people are on demonstration against such abuses. Leaders must come out and support the people, they must come out with laws that will be meaningful to address the problem.”

Despite 26.6 per cent of the population being black, 56 per cent of those stopped by New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program were black. Only 11 per cent of those stopped were white.

“African-Americans are still the underclass in America. The election of Barack Obama is a significant token, in the sense that over the years, we’ve seen the election or promotion of African-American leaders into the military, politics, especially President Bush era, we had Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice–these were all token because at the end of the day, not much [in the way of] structural change has taken place.”

According to Pew Research, in 2013 the poverty rate of white Americans was 10 per cent, versus 28 per cent for black Americans. The definition for poverty was a family with two adults and one child with less than $18,751 in 2013. As well, 32.8 per cent of black children under 18 live in poverty, compared to 12.4 per cent of white children.

However, there has been a fair amount of progress made in the last 50 years. According to the US Census Bureau, 20 per cent of black people over the age of 25 had a college degree in 2010, versus only four per cent in 1970. Eighty-four per cent also have a high school diploma, a vast improvement over 31 per cent in 1970.

“Progress has been made indeed,” says Quist-Adade, “and unfortunately some people have used that . . .  as a reason to be complacent. You see what happened in the ‘60s and beyond, and compare that to what’s happening today, you can say, ‘Oh, we’ve come a very long way, so more or less we’re okay or better off now.’ But I don’t think that’s the approach we should take.”

It’s getting more difficult to remain ignorant in the year 2015, when we have notepad-sized computers that can quickly access the wealth of human knowledge and connect to other people anywhere in the world.

“I tell students all the time that we are those leaders that we seek. We can’t blame the school, the system, we can’t blame the curriculum–we have to accept responsibility and make the change ourselves,” says Shabazz. “Especially those who are educated, those who mean well, who seek social justice.”

“When talking about racism, we should also look at the intersection of race, class, gender. Ability, disability, sexuality, because they are a combo, as it were.” says Quist-Adade. “One affects the other in terms of life chances, possibilities of people. We should not only be fighting for racial justice, but for class justice, gender justice, LGBTQ justice. It should be done in tandem, together. You can’t have one section of the population doing well. Both the victim and the victimizer suffers, at the end of the day.”