REMEMBERING MALCOLM

Last week, I received an invitation to participate in a panel discussion that I immediately accepted. The panel discussion will take place on May 17th, the hundredth anniversary of Malcolm X’s birth. The topic will be the influence that Malcolm has on America and on our personal lives.

I won’t be offended if you’re questioning why I was invited. Part of the answer is that I was in high school when Malcolm rose to prominence and a high school senior when he was assassinated. In other words, I’m old enough to recall Malcolm’s influence and to remember how I felt about him and what he taught me.

I first learned about Malcolm through my interest in boxing and my admiration for Muhammad Ali. I remember when Ali, then Cassius Clay, won the heavyweight boxing gold medal at the 1960 Olympics, but he grabbed my attention more after he changed his name and became a contender for the heavyweight title.

What first made me sit up and take notice was not just Ali’s amazing boxing skills. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him standing in the corner of the ring, his back turned away, his arms raised slightly as he prayed. It was a moment of incredible contrast. The arena was full of screaming fans, and yet he was quietly talking to God.

I’m sure part of why that impressed me so much was that, as a minister’s son, prayer was a part of our family’s daily life. But we prayed either in church or in the house, not in an arena. That was something new, something I admired. I wanted to know more about the man who influenced Ali, and that’s when I became acquainted with Malcolm and began to pay attention to his speeches.

Of course, Malcolm was controversial, especially when people compared and contrasted him with Martin Luther King, Jr. But the more I listened to Malcolm, the more I felt confronted and challenged. That wasn’t simply because I was white. No, his challenge for me was deeper than race.

Put simply, as a minister’s son, I was raised, no matter the circumstances, to always be nice. Niceness was the golden virtue, the right response to either praise or criticism, and I suppose by the time I was in high school, I had become quite proficient at being nice. But I was also becoming aware that being habitually nice often led me to feeling like a hypocrite. Nice wasn’t what I was always feeling. Instead, niceness was often a mask, and I’d witnessed too many occasions when being nice had been an excuse for not standing up for what is right. Evil doesn’t have a problem with niceness; in fact, evil seems to count on people playing nice, always nice.

Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X were not nice. They weren’t afraid to offend, to take on their critics, to say what they had to know would make people hate them. Perhaps a lot of people thought that Ali and especially Malcolm were combative and rude. But for me, the more I listened to Malcolm, the more he reminded me of the prophet Jeremiah. Talk about someone combative and rude, someone who was never accused of being nice; that was Jeremiah.

Like Jeremiah, Malcolm was interested in something more important than niceness. He was committed to the truth. It was his unwavering pursuit of truth that led him ultimately to split with the Nation of Islam community, which led directly to his assassination. I’ll never forget the question an interviewer asked Malcolm after his home was bombed, his family almost wiped out. “Aren’t you afraid

to die?” was the gist of the interviewer’s question. Malcolm’s answer was “I’m already a dead man.” Jeremiah said almost the same thing.

Both Jeremiah and Malcolm were prophets who remind us of the danger of niceness, the danger of needing to be liked as a life goal. The prophet is not always one who sees thousands of years into the future where everything is light and sunny. Rather, the prophet is one who proclaims the truth, the often uncomfortable truth, that underlies the present moment.