Black History Month: Malcolm X in Lansing

by: joanb

Tue Feb 26, 2008 at 22:46:09 PM EST

When I was 20 years old, I was mugged by a cliché in Kalamazoo. A black man, aged 18 to 25, wearing a Georgetown Starter jacket, ran up behind me, threw me to the ground, shoved a 9 mm in my face, threatened to kill me, took all my cash, kicked me in the face, and ran off into the night.

It's an old, tired story. But it was also a terrifying story. As a girl from lily-white up north, the one piece of advice that I had dismissed when I moved downstate, when my mother had told me about how you didn't want to live in a poor neighborhood with black people because "something might happen to you," turned out to be something I should have heeded. (In my mother's defense, she grew up in Michigan during the Detroit riots in 1967.) However, after the self-pity cleared and I wiped the sneaker print off of my face, I started to think. How did this happen? How could a child grow up thinking there was no other path than the one down the barrel of a gun? Especially a child like the one who had attacked me: He was tall, lean, well-spoken, and I thought, as he ran away from me, that he ran with the graceful stride of a track star.

As I do in all situations in which I don't know what to do, I headed off to the library. And that's where I discovered Malcolm X. I connected with his Michigan connection on a deep level in that town still divided by train tracks, and I soon realized the very environment I was living in had created one of our nation's most powerful and imperfect civil rights leaders. Michigan, specifically Lansing, had laid the foundation for a path so powerful that it would make a pilgrimage to Mecca and return with plans to change the world, only to be cut short painfully ahead of its time.

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Time for some words of Peace from Ralph Bunche

by: janeenr

Thu Feb 21, 2008 at 10:18:27 AM EST

(In honor of Black History Month - promoted by JPowers155)

Whatever our differences are today, I think this is the time to read the words of Ralph Bunche:

I have a deep-seated bias against hate and intolerance. I have a bias against racial and religious bigotry. I have a bias against war and bias for peace. I have a bias that leads me to believe in the essential good of my fellow man, which leads me to believe that no problem of human relations is ever insoluble.

From the New York Times December 12th 1971. Ralph Bunche, born in Detroit, winner of the Noble Peace Prize and the Medal of Freedom.

May there be, in our time, at long last,a world at peace in which we, the people, may for once begin to make full use of the great good that is in us.

From the his acceptance speech Thanks rich for the inspiration. Read more below.

There's More... :: (4 Comments, 396 words in story)

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