Family members, supporters remember Malcolm X, his ideas in Washington Heights

Family members and supporters of Malcolm X gathered on Tuesday, the 58th anniversary of the civil rights leader's assassination, to celebrate his life and promise to preserve his teachings.

The event on Tuesday night was held at the Shabazz Center in Washington Heights, in the same space where Malcolm X was killed in 1965, and on the same day that civil rights attorney Ben Crump announced plans to file a $100 million wrongful death suit against the city, state and federal government, arguing that officials conspired to kill Malcolm X and then covered up the investigation into his death.

The mood at the event, which honored prominent African Americans including Joy Reid, Angela Davis and Crump, as well as public radio host Amy Goodman, was alternately celebratory and mournful, with speakers noting that Malcolm X was part of a long line of Black Americans whose lives had been cut short.

We know we cannot exclude any community that suffers from the effects of racism. And this includes Asian Americans, and this includes Arab Americans. This includes Palestinians.

Angela Davis, civil rights activist

“My pregnant mother placed her entire body over my three sisters and me to protect us from gunfire and to make sure we would not see the terror before our eyes,” said Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X and the late Betty Shabazz.

Malcolm X, who died at the age of 39, was among the fiercest critics of the U.S. government and American foreign policy. His writings and speeches often took aim at the power of white supremacy.

“And even those Americans who are blinded by childlike patriotism can see that it is only a matter of time before white America too will be utterly destroyed by her own sins,” he said in a 1963 speech, “and all traces of her former glory will be removed from this planet forever.”

But speakers at the event said his ferocity was only one part of his legacy.

“My mom loved Malcolm X,” said TV host Joy Reid. “She said, ‘That’s a man.’ But that’s a man who loved us. And the thing that he did that made him so dangerous is that he would not stop no matter what the threat was. He would never stop loving us, and insisting that we were lovable. That our history was more than enslavement.”

Reid's remarks elicited loud affirmations from the audience, as did remarks from the event's headliner, Marxist and feminist scholar Angela Davis. Davis recounted meeting Malcolm X as an undergraduate student at Brandeis University and argued that his words were “as valuable today as they were six decades ago.”

“They resonate in powerful ways because the change Malcolm was calling for, the change we were calling for has not yet happened,” Davis said. “And, therefore, Malcolm's vision cannot be relegated to the past.”

Among his most important teachings, she said, was the fact that “education is integral to social change.” Davis argued that conservatives were increasingly trying to eliminate the teaching of Black history in schools because such knowledge was seen as dangerous.

She reserved her harshest judgment for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been at the forefront of such efforts, including the cancellation of an Advanced Placement course in African American history.

“He thinks that Black studies will cause white children to feel bad about themselves,” she said. “I think he must be talking about himself.”

“You know, he's pretty stupid,” she said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Davis lauded advances made by the trans movement and called on the crowd, which was overwhelmingly Black, to reject “heteropatriarchy” and align with other marginalized communities.

“We know we cannot exclude any community that suffers from the effects of racism,” Davis said. “And this includes Asian Americans, and this includes Arab Americans. This includes Palestinians.”

She added that it also included animals, or as she put it, “nonhuman co-inhabitants of this planet.”

Despite the sustained pushback from conservatives, Davis sounded an optimistic note. She argued that in the wake of the massive Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, there is a growing understanding that racism is structural and that solutions in turn require “structural transformation.” “It’s not about white people liking Black people,” she said.

"We're on the verge of substantial shifts in the way people think about race and racism,” Davis said. “And those who want to prevent these shifts from happening are frantically trying to turn back the clock."