By Al Calloway
Too many Black people heard truth come from Malcolm’s mouth yet discounted truth because it could not be right, it came from “a non-believer;” from someone not baptised in the faith, in Eurocentric Christianity. Beset by classical conditioning, beaten through the body into maimed minds, the African that left many doors of no return, survived horrible slave ships in crossing the Atlantic Ocean to centuries of chattel slavery, years of Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, legal discrimination, drugs and mass incarceration, heard truth and found a way to run from it, to hide somewhere in no man’s land, to so-called freedom!
In the main, Black people are still running from Malcolm X and the truth — it cannot be found that he lied to us and the world — and hide shame because they believed they were freed by bogus Civil Rights Laws. Well, here we are folks, as Malcolm said: “hoodwinked, bamboozeled and led astray!” A true meaning of the word “freedom” politically did not escape Malcolm X and other Pan-African Black Nationalists of the 1960s. It is clearly understood that “freedom” is something that has to be given, therefore it comes with conditions — a quid pro quo. We got integration, white America moved away, inner cities deteriorated, white people land banked and now comes the coup de grace, gentrifacation!
Simultaneously, African nations began receiving so-called independence from their colonial European masters. Similarly, this “independence” came with conditions. Monetary policy, natural resources and governance remain the European model. And, as with the American model, true leaders of the people are routinely assassinated. Civil wars and other manner of civil strife meander throughout Africa as European countries orchestrate and finance disorder while they protect and grow their mining, agricultural, banking and other interests.
All excuses in the world cannot provide a smoke screen for forgetting Malcolm X The Truth Teller! It is intellectually dishonest to do so. It is also spiritually abhorrent. Malcolm Little who became Malcolm X, who, in turn, through consistant religious devotion became el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, once committed in prison as a confused process hair, peg-leg wearing, loud color hoodlum named Malcolm Little, never strayed from truth. He married Betty Dean Sanders and never fornicated, smoke, drank, or took any drugs. Together, Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz had six daughters, and Sister Betty Shabazz went on after the assassination of her husband and achieved a doctorate degree in Higher Education in 1975 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
