Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, in South Bend: Tell kids their full history

SOUTH BEND − Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughter of slain civil rights activist Malcolm X, urged an audience of human rights workers and local community leaders Thursday to ensure young people were learning their full and accurate history.

She spoke from experience. Shabazz was 2 years old when she and her family witnessed their father’s assassination in New York City in 1965.

“Our pregnant mother placed her body over me and my sisters to protect us from gunfire,” she said at an awards dinner Thursday in the Century Center as part of the annual training conference for the Indiana Consortium of State and Local Human Rights Agencies.

The conference, from Nov. 1-4, saw about 100 people registered from across Indiana under the theme “Understanding and Addressing Human Rights and Civil Unrest.”

Shabazz said her mother — Betty Shabazz — shielded her six daughters from inaccurate portrayals of Malcolm X. Ilyasah Shabazz wouldn’t learn until she was in college about the realities of his life and what made him, as she said, an “icon.” She read his autobiography and started studying his life.

“My mother never gave into bitterness and despair,” Shabazz said. “She never accepted defeat for herself. … If my mother had a victim complex, I wouldn’t be standing before you today.”

More:50 Black YA authors you should read, from Angie Thomas to Walter Dean Myers

Daughter of Malcom X uses mother's lessons to teach self-empowerment

Shabazz, now 60, said she’s used her mother’s lessons working as a college professor, an administrator and advocate for young people to feel self empowered. Shabazz has authored books, such as “Growing Up X” and “Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X.” She also has served as a trustee for the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center and the Malcolm X Foundation.

At home with her mother, Shabazz recalled, “We learned to love ourselves. … My parents knew if I could love me, I could love you.”

Without that, Shabazz said, there is “division and self-destruction.”

That love, she emphasized, comes from knowing your history, adding that it isn’t truly history unless “each and every voice is heard,” including Blacks, LatinX and Native Americans. Young people needed to learn, she said, how experts believe Africa to be the birthplace of humanity.

“It’s important for us to provide a foundation for our children,” she said.

Ilyasah Shabazz recalls famous father's early life and ideas

Shabazz spoke of her father’s early life, reading part of a poem he’d written when he was 20 as he observed a Black musician playing a horn. Malcolm X had written that, at the time, it was “the only place where a Black American is free to create. … He can come up with a new philosophy.”

Top of his class, she said, he’d told his teacher he wanted to become an attorney so he could help other people, since his father had helped people. Shabazz said his teacher replied that was impossible because of his race.

His life took several winding turns. He landed a 10-year sentence for larceny and burglary, but, while in prison, he joined the Nation of Islam and studied the dictionary, his daughter said, just to learn the origin of words.

Shabazz: Parents of Malcom X encouraged independence and Black empowerment

Malcolm X’s advocacy for Black empowerment was guided by what he’d learned from his parents, Shabazz said.

His parents had bought and farmed land, despite being told they could own land but couldn’t live there, she said. They raised their own food, giving their family an autonomy. Community leaders needed to teach such independence to younger generations, Shabazz urged.

Malcolm X’s parents were civic leaders in times of violence against Blacks. Their independence and influence, she said, riled white supremacy groups, whom she said lynched Malcom X's father. (According to historical accounts, police had reported the 1931 death as a street car accident.) His mother went on to be a civil rights activist whom, she said, “authorities committed to an institution against her wishes,” sending Malcolm and his siblings to foster homes. Their land was seized, their home demolished, she said.

“These are just facts,” she said. “It’s important we learn the facts.”

Malcolm X and another civil rights leader of the time, Martin Luther King Jr., “saw themselves as brothers,” she said. “They’ve been portrayed as polar opposites, even as enemies. … Both men challenged an immoral world. So what if they had a difference of opinions?”

“We are not rivals,” Shabazz said. “We are brothers. When we fight for each other, our possibilities are endless.”

Shabazz urged her audience to be mentors and to join clubs and organizations to “challenge systems” that further incarceration and child poverty.

“We can only do this together,” she said. “Black power is not exclusionary. … It simply recognizes the crimes against humanity.”

Tribune staff writer Joseph Dits can be reached at 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Malcolm X daughter Ilyasah Shabazz speaks on Black power in South Bend