Tue Feb 26, 2008 at 22:46:09 PM EST
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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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There's More...
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