50 Years After Malcolm X

On this date fifty years ago, Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom.  Today the site of the Audubon, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, is a laboratory for Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.  I have ridden by it many times and, in fact, once went inside the Ballroom.  Every time I passed or visited the site I thought, however briefly, about his importance, not only to the history of the US and the world, but in my own life.

I first read Malcolm’s autobiography when I was about twenty.  It was around the same time I discovered African-American writers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston—and when I first heard Bob Marley.  In one way or another, they all not only expressed the burning desire to be free, but also made oppression—which is to say, the things that turn people into slaves of all kinds—clear and vivid.

I identified with their wishes and feelings for, as it turned out, reasons very different from theirs.  How could mine not be different?  After all, as difficult as my grandparents’ lives were, nobody brought them here in chains.  Even more to the point, I knew who my grandparents and their grandparents were, even though I had never met the latter.  So, even though I knew that so much of what I learned in school was a whitewashed (Yes, I am conscious of that word choice!) version of the truth, I wasn’t—couldn’t be—conscious of it in the profound way that Malcolm and all of those black writers and artists were. 

So, in my own clumsy way, I reacted to the injustices that persisted long after Malcolm’s murder and the deaths of the others I’ve mentioned though their polemics, rhetoric, rhythms, intuition and sense of irony.  What I did not understand was that they could use those tools or gifts or whatever you want to call them because they mastered them in ways that exact terrible, terrible costs.  (Baldwin has written that any people who has a language of their own has paid dearly for it.) What I could not understand was that I was paying my own dues, as it were, but I did not yet understand what I was paying for.  So I borrowed anger, grief, pain and a very dark kind of humor in my own feeble attempts to come to terms with why I could not live the kind of life for which I was being trained—or why anyone should want that kind of life.

So why am I mentioning such things on this blog?  Well, for one thing, being a cyclist has freed me from a lot of things.  I think of all of the time and money I didn’t have to spend on buying, fueling, maintaining and parking cars.  That is part of the reason why I have been able to live in New York and spend time with things I love:  I didn’t have to work in some job or in some business that would have destroyed my psyche or other people’s lives.  Being a cyclist when it wasn’t fashionable also, I think, has made me less vulnerable to propaganda and groupthink, if it hasn’t made me a better critical thinker or more creative person (though I think it’s done the latter for me).  

Of course, for me, freedom has meant living as the person I am.  Anyone who cannot live with integrity and with dignity is a slave or a prisoner or worse.  One way I identify with Malcolm is that it took him as long as he did to truly come into his own, even if he accomplished a lot else before doing so.  His descent into slavery, as it were, came when, in spite of his academic success and oratorical skills, his eighth-grade teacher mocked his dream of being a lawyer. When he, as an inmate in the Charlestown (MA) Penitentiary, became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, he found a voice.  However, it took him much longer, I think, to find his voice.

Our voice, if you will, is how we express our authentic selves in the world.  For some, it is in their careers or vocations.  For others, it is in creative work or performing:  I think of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar as his voice.  Others express it through a passion or relationship.  Actually, I think that for most of us, our “voice” is a combination of the things we do and are.  Whatever it is, if it isn’t authentic, we’re still slaves or prisoners.  For me, that is the real importance of Malcolm X’s life and work.

The Next Frontier, Then And Now

Today, Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is being commemorated.  I am thinking now about how he spent the last days of his life working to help the sanitation workers of Memphis to gain better pay and working conditions.  I am also thinking about the speech he gave on 4 April 1967—exactly one year before he was gunned down.  In it, he denounced the Vietnam War and the ways in which the United States was turning into the kind of repressive colonial power against which it fought to gain its independence.

Nearly half a century later, his words and actions remain relevant, if for different reasons than they were when they were new or, say, twenty or thirty years ago.  I concur with those people who see them as evidence that he was turning his attention toward economic inequalities and how power—whether military, political, capitalist or corporate—is used to initiate and reinforce such inequities.  Interestingly, Malcolm X was turning his interests toward those very issues before he was shot to death in the Audubon Ballroom.  Some have posited that it’s a reason why the widows of the two men became allies in the struggle for social and economic justice as well as close personal friends.  Having met Sister Betty Shabazz, however briefly, a couple of years before she died, I would accept such an explanation.

Whatever their motivations, I think she and Coretta Scott King offer valuable lessons for transgender people.  I am not the first person to say that our state is about what that of gays and lesbians was in the 1970’s or nearly all African-Americans until the 1950’s.  The gains made by the Civil Rights movement did not improve the lot of all people of color; that is not a fault of the work Matin, Coretta, Malcolm or Betty did.  While it’s great that my hometown—New York City—and some other jurisdictions have human-rights laws that include language to specifically include transgender and other gender-variant people, such laws—as Martin and Malcolm discovered—will not, by themselves, bring about social justice.  That is because they cannot bring about economic justice.  They might say that a would-be employer cannot discriminate on the basis of race, gender or other qualities, but they do not address the conditions that put us at a disadvantage when we apply for those jobs—or that relegate us to inferior jobs at lower pay and longer periods without jobs and, in some cases, housing. 

What Would MLK Do?

Forty-three years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death.  It's the first assassination of a public figure that I can recall:  I was nine years old at the time.


Of course, anyone who concerns him or herself with equality has to think about King.  Thinking about him invariably brings to mind the man who is often thought to be his opposite:  Malcolm X, who was also gunned down.


Most people who are working, or have worked, for the betterment of their group of people see King as an icon.  The fact that he faced the institutionalized (and, too often, legal) discrimination of his time is reason enough to venerate him.  However, I think that it's often assumed that King would be in support of some cause or another.  The same people might have wanted to claim Malcolm X as an ally, except that they see him as someone who pursued his ends through violence, and advised others to do the same.


I think it might be fair to assume that King would favor LGBT equality.  However, I'm not so sure of what he'd think of same-sex marriage, or even legal protections for transgender people.  After all, he was ordained as a minister in a conservative Protestant denomination.  Then again, his views on LGBT equality might have evolved had he lived longer.  There was evidence that some of his views, or at least his focus, was starting to change in the days before his assassination.  He had treated the fight for equality mainly as a legal and moral issue.  However, it is said that by the end of his life, he was starting to think about the economics of the issue more.  Perhaps he understood, as James Baldwin said more than half a century ago, that no community can hope to improve its lot when even the local supermarket isn't owned by someone in the community and the profits are going to some faraway place.


Malcolm X understood that from the beginning of his days as an activist.  He said that, in essence, African-Americans had to develop their own economy, which would be separate from the larger American/Western economy.  He did not want, or expect any assistance from the government or any other established institution.  Ultimately, I believe that he had the right idea:  Groups of people, if they want to better themselves, ultimately must establish their own stores, banks, schools and whatever.  However, that wasn't possible in his time because African-Americans and other marginalized communities didn't have the resources necessary to bring about such a system. 


King was beginning to understand that.  And, after the journey to Mecca he took the year before he was killed,  Malcolm was starting to realize that in order to bring about economic, not to mention ethical and spiritual, justice, unity rather than separatism was needed.  So he started to see the need for a universal brotherhood that would include alliances and friendships with sympathetic whites and people of other races.  That, of course, was Martin Luther King's territiory.


Would they have joined forces?  (Interestingly, their widows became very close friends.)  Would their alliances and brotherhoods have include LGBT people.   Somehow the notion that they would have done those things seems not so far-fetched.  

A Journey Through Change: It Remains The Same

Today I took the longest ride I've taken since my surgery. I pedalled about 40 miles and more or less reprised a ride I did once just before Memorial Day, and once again shortly afterward. I'll probably sleep very, very well tonight!

After crossing the Queensboro (a.k.a. "59th Street") Bridge, I rode up Third Avenue to East Harlem, where I traversed Manhattan on 119th Street. Then, I pedalled along the streets that box in Mount Morris Park and made another turn onto a street full of beautiful brownstones, which I followed to St. Nicholas Avenue. I used to ride that way often when I was working for Macmillan Publishing, on 53rd Street and Third Avenue, and living in Washington Heights.

With all of the changes that have overtaken the rest of Manhattan--Most of the places in which I lived and worked are all but unrecognizable--the St. Nicholas corridor looks much as it did long ago. The people all look either very young or very old; most of the buildings are sad and worn, though seemingly not much more so than they were back in the day. Among those sooty brick tenements, on the right side (as you go uptown) of the avenue, there's a place called Alga Hotel which, remarkably, looks as it did all of those years ago. Its exterior is painted an almost-tropical shade of electric blue, which is utterly incongruous with its surroundings but wouldn't look out of place in Miami Beach or some other place with lots of warm weather and Art Deco architecture.

It has been at least twenty-five years since I first saw the place. I don't recall it painted in any other color, and it never looks particularly worn or weathered. However, it has always looked sad. It's tempting to say that the place seems sad and forlorn in spite of its bright exterior. However, I think that hue actually adds to, or helps to create, the aura of gloom because it so belies what I imagine the inside to be like: I have no proof, but somehow I have always guessed that it was and is a welfare hotel or one of those places that charges by the hour.

Anyway, the neighborhoods are much as I remember them, save for Columbia-Presbyterian's research building, which stands on the site once occupied by the Audubon Ballroom--where Malcolm X was assassinated--and always seems to be expanding. A few more blocks up, I came to the entrance ramp for the George Washington Bridge's walkway. I don't think I can recall seeing so many cyclists or pedestrians, not even in May or June. Then again, I'm not surprised: The temperature rose to about 75 F (24C), the warmest we've had in months. Many of those cyclists were, I'm sure, on their bikes for the first time this year. I haven't ridden a whole lot more than they've ridden!

From the Jersey side of the bridge, I rode past immaculate and sometimes ostentatious houses and stores that had little charm save for the fact that they line the ridge of the Palisades and offer spectacular views of the Hudson River and the city. The streets full of those houses and stores climb the rock outcroppings and end in James J. Braddock Park, a rather charming spot that features, among other things, baseball fields, picnic areas and a pond. Until I Googled his name, I didn't realize Braddock was a boxer. (Then again, I know practically nothing about the sport.) He defeated Max Baer for the heavyweight title he lost two years later to Joe Louis.

The last time I rode through that park, the sun was setting and it was Saturday night. As I pedalled through it this afternoon, the sun shone brightly and spring was beginning.

I continued my ride through North Bergen, Weehawken and Union City, where most of the signs were in Spanish and the air filled with the aroma of roasting meat and spicy sandwiches and tortillas. The next time I ride that way, I'm going to stop in one of those cafes.

Finally, I reached the Hoboken waterfront, where I slurped down an Italian ice--half wild black cherry, the other half vanilla-- from Rita's. They were giving out ice free samples, and the one I got was very good. I'll be stopping there, too, on my next ride.

I never saw that promenade so filled with people as it was today. It wasn't just an unusually warm and sunny day for this time of year, or simply the first day of spring; it was one of those days most people would have prized at just about any time of the year.

The waterfront promenade in Jersey City was also thronged. I could almost feel the Beatles' Here Comes The Sun playing in the background: People seemed joyful, or at least relieved. This winter, while colder than last winter, still was not unusually so. However, we had two blizzards and one other major snowstorm, and most of the weather between those snowfalls was simply dreary. If this winter was a war, people were acting as if they were seeing the Armistice when in fact today and the past couple of days might be more like a truce or a cease-fire.

After I left Jersey City, a fairly brisk wind began to blow from the southeast and into my face. I pedalled into that wind through Bayonne and over the eponymous bridge into Staten Island. Then, along Richmond Terrace, which winds along New York Bay-- where one can see rusted hulks of containers and the ships onto which they were loaded or from which they were unloaded-- until the road makes a sharp turn just before reaching Snug Harbor, a mansion owned by the Vanderbilts and surrounded by some of the most beautiful and interesting gardens one will find. When it's open, you can see more than 400 species of roses, among other plants, as well as one of the best views of New York's harbor and skyline.

Just past Snug Harbor was a donut shop where I've stopped on previous rides. The proprietor, an older Italian man who always seemed to remember me even when a long time passed between visits, always allowed me to use his remarkably clean bathroom even though an "Out of Order" sign always hung on its door and I saw him refuse other customers. And I would always buy a cup of tea and a pastry that looked and tasted like a cross between a pain au chocolat and a cinnamon roll for my trip on the Staten Island Ferry, which was only a couple of blocks away.

However, that donut shop is gone now, just nine months after the last time I stopped there. In its place is a "gourmet" food shop. Why does every other little convenience store have to call itself that?

And here is something else I don't remember from the last time I took this ride: the security measures you have to go through in order to get on the ferry. You're allowed through a checkpoint and ordered into a waiting area, which consists of a few benches in front of a security guards' booth, and a bicycle rack off to the side. All of this is ringed by fences, into which a guard brought what looked like a Labrador to sniff my bike. Other cyclists, who came a few minutes after me, got the same treatment. It all felt rather like entering an airport staffed by junior high school substitute teachers.

The ferry ride itself remains one of the best things in this world one can do for free. The boat docked at the ancient pier and gangplank, which led to a new ferry and subway terminal that had just opened not long before the last time I did this ride.

Now I wonder about some of the other rides I did regularly before my surgery. Will anything along those routes have changed during the months and seasons that have passed?