Celebrating Malcolm X: "Message To The Grassroots"
Come watch, look, read, and listen to one of the most influential Black Nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s.
We will be taking a look and listen to Malcolm X's famous speech "Message To The Grassroots," delivered on November 10th, 1963 in Detroit, Michigan.
We will be focusing on and analyzing some parts of the speech and how his message is applicable today, and also, how it is not--if it's not. We can look at how the speech is applicable to this campus community and the surrounding communities.
We will be joined by university Professor William Strickland, a protege of Malcolm X at the time.
"Professor Bill Strickland teaches political science in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also the Director of the Du Bois Papers Collection. The Du Bois Papers are housed at the University of Massachusetts library, which is named in honor of this prominent African American intellectual and Massachusetts native. Professor Strickland is a founding member of the independent black think tank, the Institute of the Black World, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Strickland was a consultant to both series of the prize-winning documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize, and the senior consultant on the PBS documentary, Malcolm X: Make It Plain. He also wrote the companion book. Most recently, Professor Strickland was a consultant on the Louis Massiah film on W.E.B. Du Bois, titled W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices."
Text adapted from university website.
"Malcolm X (born May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz,[1] was an American Black Muslim minister and a one-time spokesman for the Nation of Islam. After leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, he went on a pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca and became a Sunni Muslim; he also founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Less than a year later, he was assassinated in Washington Heights on the first day of National Brotherhood Week.
Historian Robin D.G. Kelley wrote, "Malcolm X has been called many things: Pan-Africanist, father of Black Power, religious fanatic, closet conservative, incipient socialist, and a menace to society. The meaning of his public life — his politics and ideology — is contested in part because his entire body of work consists of a few dozen speeches and a collaborative autobiography whose veracity is challenged.... Malcolm has become a sort of tabula rasa, or blank slate, on which people of different positions can write their own interpretations of his politics and legacy."
Text adapted from wikipedia.org.
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