Paths Crossed: Amina Rachman
Sixty years after Malcolm X was assassinated, I honor my aunt's life and work with Malcolm—in her own words. Here, an incredible first-person testimony of Harlem's place in the Civil Rights Movement.
A headline broke through my mass-media boundaries this past week about Malcolm X, who was assassinated on February 21, 1965 while delivering a speech in Manhattan. Had my aunt Amina not been traveling with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) down south at the time, she would have been on the stage when he was shot and killed. It had been one of her jobs as a teen to introduce him before his speeches at the Audubon Ballroom.
Yes, my aunt was a badass. And she was just settling into her hard-earned retirement and working on a memoir when cancer took her all too suddenly on September 25, 2011. Her memoir was to be called From X to Aleph (א), a damn good title for her journey from Christian to Muslim to Jewish convert (Aleph being the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet).
Born in Harlem in 1948 as Sherron Jackson, my aunt became Sharon 10X within the Nation of Islam, Amina Abdur Rahman within Islam (when becoming a mom to her daughter Sabra), and ultimately Amina Rachman before becoming a Bat Mitzvah at her Brooklyn synagogue in her fifties (after she and my aunt Leonore became moms to my cousin Josh).
Her career in public service and political and social activism began as a teenager with SNCC. She met Malcolm (as she called him), while participating in an early morning demonstration against Harlem Hospital (before school). She quickly became close to him for the next two years until his death. His late wife, Betty Shabazz, told my aunt just after his death that her husband saw Amina as another daughter. Amina was interviewed in the 90s for the PBS documentary about Malcolm X’s life called Make it Plain; to my delight, I unearthed part of her segment here.
My aunt graduated high school at only 15 after a hero of an educator recognized that her boredom had been mistaken as special needs. After her travels with SNCC to the south and to Chicago, and all the organizing in Harlem, she joked that she retired at 18. Next she fell in love, became an Orthodox Muslim, worked at the Urban League, and gave birth to her daughter at 21. Amina went on to serve as Deputy Chancellor of Education under NYC Mayor David Dinkins, and as a leader at the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) union under Randi Weingarten.
At 35 she met my aunt Leonore at a fundraiser for the LGBTQ group now called Hetrick-Martin Institute. These were the aunts of mine who took me to my first Broadway shows as a kid (Cats and Into the Woods) and whisked me away from the depression and chaos of my parents divorce and home life in middle and high school—two fun summer weeks swimming and painting and seeing the stars in Fire Island or Cape Cod, with my then baby cousin Josh.
Visiting with my aunt this week through her words was a bittersweet experience; it has been nearly 15 years since we spoke, since we took art classes together at the Open Center in the New York of my late twenties before I went to Berlin. I want more of this book she never got to finish, the gift of these incredible pages of history through the eyes of “an exceptionally precocious, curious, Black girl in Harlem in the 1950s and 60s, within a really complicated family, during an extraordinary time in American history, who pushed through classism and racism to become a mover and a shaker in the world of education policy.” This is how my also since passed aunt Leonore put it—more of the ghosts I visited this week in preparing this piece. It pangs me, as it has before, that right under my nose was Amina, my four grandparents, and the like, who lived extraordinary moments I never really woke up to and probed across my self-involved teens and twenties.
I will never forget Amina telling me that those last days before she died were the worst but also the best days of her life, as she got to hear what she meant to so many people. I grapple with the unknowable knowing it must be to hold the fact that your death is impending, and I had no idea how to acknowledge such a thing on the phone with her; but I did, before flying back from Berlin for her funeral. In a speech at the funeral, here is some of what former NYC mayor David Dinkins had to say:
I was privileged to work with Amina—first, as my education policy advisor while I was Borough President, and later, as a member of the team at the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. I never ceased to marvel at how remarkably clear and patient she was in her dealings with the uninformed, the misinformed and (on occasion) the downright ignorant. She helped to address some of the most troubling issues of our times, and did her level best to enlighten, to inspire, to motivate and to educate.
I admired Amina’s calm courage. She relied on reason and truth to advocate for civil rights, for religious tolerance, for quality education for the poor, and she gave more than lip service to her belief that we must all shoulder the responsibility for each and every human being, including the sick, the powerless, the most vulnerable.
We thought the world of Amina, and we mourn her passing. Yet we know that she would want us to look beyond our tears to the battles ahead and rededicate ourselves to creating a world free of inequities, intolerance and ignorance. The City of New York is a better place because she was here. It is said, my friends, that service to others is the rent we pay for our space on earth. Amina Rachman departed us paid in full. Let her not look down and find any of us in arrears.
I see no better time to humbly share these words, to share a piece of Amina’s memoir, and to share an important piece of history as we examine what it means to stay in our hearts at present. I gratefully acknowledge my aunt’s activism and the words she authored before her death, below, in the hope that they can impact and guide others.
CHILDHOOD AND BELONGING
Black people didn’t live all over New York City when I was growing up. We lived in a few neighborhoods. Most Black people who lived in Manhattan lived in Harlem, unless a family came into some money and moved to Queens or out to Long Island. At that time, Harlem was not just poor people. Harlem was the place where Black achievers and celebrities lived. You would see boxer Sugar Ray Robinson in the neighborhood. Or baseball player Roy Campanella, after he was paralyzed and in a wheelchair, investing his money in a liquor store on the corner of 134th Street and 7th Avenue.
I’m fairly certain my parents separated when my mother was pregnant with my brother, and my mother took my sister and me back to her old neighborhood. We lived in her parents’ first floor apartment on 220 West 134 St. The building no longer exists, but back in the 40s and 50s, my grandfather was the superintendent. I remember the coal truck would come by, put out the chute, and shoot the coal down into the basement. My grandfather and my uncles, who also lived in the building, would “bank the coal,” shoveling it into the furnace. Any issues about heat and hot water and all the nasty comments about the superintendent not taking care of the building were directed at my grandfather. I heard them all. Next door in 218, my great-grandmother lived in a large 5 or 6 room apartment—large by New York City standards—and over time, various different aunts and uncles lived there too. Generations of families often stayed on the same block back then.
Although she was pregnant, my mother was somewhat of a partier from what I heard, not unlike any teenager today who still wants to have a good time with her friends. That meant finding babysitters, not so much for my sister, but for me, because I was already two-and-a-half. I was more trouble—talking, running around, being a wild toddler. Ethyl Ryans, the neighbor who lived upstairs from my grandmother, the person that I was told was my godmother, became my babysitter. I would stay upstairs with her if my mother was going out in the evening while my sister, still an infant, would stay downstairs. Over time those stays at my godmother’s house got longer and longer, and eventually that arrangement became permanent. By the time I started school at four, my godmother was the person who registered me for school. She was listed as my guardian of record; there was never another name.
For years, the question of whether my mother abandoned me or whether my godmother simply took over plagued me. I think it was probably a little of both. As a child, I remember saying to my godmother, “I want to go downstairs and visit my grandmother.” I remember that felt really crazy to me, that I would have to go downstairs and visit my family.
My grandmother had poker-keno card games on the weekend. People in the neighborhood would drop by at all times. People came to tell her things, people came to find out things. My grandmother knew everybody’s business.
My godmother, Sweetheart, was a reader. We had lots of books and magazines and newspapers in our house. At the time, New York City had seven or eight daily newspapers. We got the News, the Mirror, and after work Pop would come home with the Post, which was a liberal paper back then. Dear, their daughter, would bring the Journal-American. Soon I was reading every one. In fact, years later when I worked with Malcolm X, my first job for him was his clipping service, cutting and filing stories from the newspapers so he could read them later.
Having a quiet, ordered upbringing, coming home every day to sit at the kitchen table and do homework while my godmother was cooking dinner and talking—all of this made our home different from every other one in the building. Part of the conversation when I came home from school would be about the history of Harlem. My godmother had grown up there with all of it. I knew she had participated in the early boycotts of all the stores on 125th Street to pressure them to hire Black people. She would talk about the nightclubs that Black people in Harlem couldn’t go to, like The Cotton Club. People forget that segregation existed up in the north too. Between the stay-at-home godmother, the two-income household, the books and papers, and the thoughtful conversations, our lifestyle was close to a middle-class upbringing in the middle of a working-class building. I was really very aware of those advantages.
Still, I bounced around between these very different households, not being solidly a part of any of them. I could—and I still can—make myself fit in anywhere. But belonging is a different issue. I was very aware, and my godmother’s daughter reminded me constantly, that I didn’t belong there. With my birth family, over time, I became aware that I was different. The card games, everybody hanging out, arguing—that apartment was better than going to a show anywhere! But I also knew that I didn’t fit there. Right before people returned to the apartment from my great-grandmother’s funeral, my sister had gone through the house and removed knives and other things that could be used as weapons. My father saw this and said that my sister was a fighter. “See, your sister is smart and knows what could happen when people come back to the house. This would never cross your mind.” I remember being shocked that he would insult me this way. I thought to myself, as only a ten year old could: I’m very smart and I know lots of things! I was jealous that my sister clearly knew things that I didn’t, but I was also enraged, thinking, What kind of stuff is that to be proud of?
A number of years back, my sister and I had a very frank conversation about those days long ago. “I hated you,” she said. “I was so jealous that you were living in that really nice apartment with that nice family, and that you had things like new clothes for school. I was living with the people who were on public assistance, and had wild card games and drunken fights every weekend. Why did I get dumped there?” I was baffled. I had no idea she thought this way. I had envied her. I told her, “I grew up angry that you were living with the family. I was dumped with a neighbor who never let me forget that I didn’t belong there, and lived with the threat that if I stepped too much out of line, they could put me out.”
Not having a place in either home, in either family environment, made me find places outside where I could truly belong. Religion, school, and musical and political activism became vehicles for me to learn to move in a bigger world. All of these worlds became family for me. But another question for me was about how to be in the world. Are there some rules, some guidelines that ought to govern us?
RELIGION
My father’s father was impatient with what he felt was a distinctly Christian attitude of accepting things—waiting for heaven and rewards after you die, by-and-by, in the sky. He would say, “All these people focus on the hereafter, and all that’s doing is taking away from what they should be doing right now.” My guess is that if he wasn’t a Garveyite, he was probably very sympathetic to Marcus Garvey’s message of doing for self, investing in the Black community, and creating Black businesses. Although he never went to church, he was very attracted to the Commandment Keepers, one of a few Black synagogues from the early 1900s. In the 1920s, Wentworth Matthew started the Commandment Keepers in Harlem as its rabbi. There was a growing interest in Judaism in Black communities, with some among Marcus Garvey’s followers calling themselves Black Jews. Whether or not these folks were Jews by mainstream Judaism standards is another question. I think some considered themselves Christian Jews or Jewish Christians, and probably their theology was a bit of an amalgam of the two. Underlying this interest in Judaism was the recognition that Christianity and slavery are intertwined in the history of Black people in this country. It is hard to separate the two. My older neighbors in the 1950s were completely incredulous that any Black person in their right mind would be voluntarily involved in a church, a church that had helped to drag them out of their native land and enslave them here. My godmother, Sweetheart, also didn’t belong to any of the churches, but she sent me to St. Phillip’s Church because she believed that children should be raised with some basic religious structure.
SCHOOL
From a kid’s perspective I had a wonderful elementary school, but looking objectively at test scores, income levels, and all the other statistical data, it was a horrible school. The building was very old with a coal-burning stove. Rats ran freely through the halls. Classrooms had wooden desks nailed in place and huge sliding doors. By the time I started pre-kindergarten at four, I was reading. I don’t think my abilities were so apparent to my teacher. By first grade, school bored me. So I got into major trouble. I ran my own little world in the back of the classroom. I got sent to the principal’s office several times. I think some teachers thought that I had learning disabilities, that I must be acting up in class because I couldn’t do the work.
It was the principal, Elliot Shapiro, who figured out that I was bored. Elliot Shapiro was a famous administrator in his time, a real fighter for children’s needs. When Mr. Shapiro came across unused musical instruments in a boarded-up warehouse, he decided that he wanted to give kids in his school music lessons. He brought a teacher from the Henry Street Settlement to give violin lessons as part of an after-school program for 25¢. It was Mr. Shapiro who came up with the idea that I would skip a grade. I basically ended up completing second and third grades in one year. Far from being overwhelmed, I found I actually liked school again. I also started learning to read music and play the violin. These things kept me from acting out, which was fortunate, as I could have been sent to Special Ed had it not been for Mr. Shapiro. He remained my hero my whole life.
In the fifth grade, I found myself in Miss Johnson’s class with her music enrichment, but it came with a price. I do think New York City schools had a history of helping the children of immigrants acculturate and become “Americans.” The attitude was that these immigrants were dirty and ignorant. While it was too late to do anything for the adults, it was possible to save their children. Some educators adopted a similar attitude towards Blacks. Being in a low-income Black school in New York City, some of our teachers were really disgusting about this, and my 5th grade teacher, Miss Johnson, was one of them. Like us, she was Black, but she saw her role as a missionary, bringing civilization to the heathens. Miss Johnson required us to read the New York Times because people of culture and knowledge read it. She taught us how proper people fold the Times: lengthwise first, and then turn with the fold, in order to read the inside and put it back, and then turn the next page. We practiced that in class. (I see so many people on the subway who don’t know how to fold the New York Times). Many things she taught us were useful, but with an attitude.
She also organized many field trips, and I started to have a sense of a different kind of life beyond 134th Street. I remember all the firsts. First trip to the Henry Street Settlement to do recitals, meeting other kids on their way to their music lessons. First trip to Carnegie Hall for Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. Miss Johnson gave families very clear instructions in advance: We would line up in the schoolyard, but first we had to pass her inspection to make sure our nails were clean, our clothes were ironed, and our faces weren’t ashy. Before Ms. Johnson began, she would say: “You are not going downtown to embarrass not only yourself, but the whole race.”
Music lessons took me beyond my neighborhood into the rest of Manhattan, but none of that could prepare me for how much my world was going to expand. In junior high I met two teachers unlike any I’d ever had: Ted Salzman and Carl Silver, a math teacher and a science teacher, both activists. Both were part of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), which, in the late 50s and early 60s, was a progressive, important organization. NCCJ also had a youth group. It was predominantly white, but there were other Black kids there. We would go to the NCCJ folk singing groups. Between the songs, we would have political discussions with Carl and Ted. We were having intense conversations about Ghana, the first African country that was just beginning to overthrow colonialism, and the youth freedom movement starting to bubble up with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. For me, this was the equivalent of somebody being at college and having sophisticated conversations with professors. This was just amazing!
I kept going to the folk groups and other NCCJ events. I had found myself a place to belong, a Manhattan-based, Harlem girl who had never been to another borough. I was meeting other kids from around the city, from Queens, from Brooklyn. Suddenly, I was being invited to places all over the city. I was going to Forest Hills and Corona. It was heaven. After two short years, I graduated from junior high and started high school. I got into Music & Art, but the kids there were clearly not my people. It’s an overwhelmingly white middle class school. All the other kids grew up taking private music lessons. I did not. But as I started high school, the sit-ins started in 1960. I became involved in the NCCJ camp, which led to Civil Rights activism with SNCC and HARYOU. School became secondary, because all these other groups and causes were simply more important to me.
ACTIVISM
The week-long NCCJ’s camp was not a recreational camp, but almost a political indoctrination camp, with discussions about how to get involved in the country, analyze political issues, figure out one’s beliefs, and take a stand. From there I hear that these students have formed their own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Through SNCC, I begin moving in different circles, going to places far beyond Harlem and Manhattan and New York. SNCC made arrangements to use various college campus dorms and buildings for their staff meetings when schools were on break. My godmother was nervous about me going so far away until she met Stokely Carmichael, one of SNCC’s first leaders. She thought he was a charming young man. A gifted student, he went to Bronx Science and then Howard University. Stokely was only a few years older than I am, but at that age, he seemed a lot older. The funny thing is that my godmother completely trusted him. Stokely would call and talk to her and say, “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take care of her.” Because my godmother would have these conversations with people like Stokely and Jim Forman, she felt I was fine. I was in good hands. Oh, my God!
At 14, I’m in the 10th grade, and I’m going to Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta for SNCC staff meetings, and demonstrations in Washington and Baltimore. We once marched from Baltimore along Route 40 to Washington D.C. and sat in segregated restaurants along the way. Anytime school was closed up here in New York City, I was there in the south with SNCC.
Soon after I start getting involved with SNCC, something new starts to take place right around the corner from home. When Kennedy appoints his anti-poverty commission, Wagner was mayor of New York City and Adam Clayton Powell, our congressman, became Chair of the Education and Labor Committee. Adam Powell can see that there’s money designated for programs to combat delinquency and youth poverty. He sets up a commission of its own in New York City to study youth in the ghetto and the consequences of powerlessness. The commission opens their office, Harlem Youth, which everyone called HARYOU, at the Harlem YMCA.
I live on 134th. In the Amsterdam News, a prominent New York City black newspaper [ED note: shout-out to my dear friend Kristin Fayne-Mulroy, the longtime managing editor there, who I introduced Amina to right before her death about writing a piece], I read that HARYOU has opened right on the next street for the purpose of studying youth in Harlem. I’ve demonstrated in the south. I know all these people at SNCC, and I’m ready to take a stand. I take myself around the corner to the HARYOU offices one day and say, “Who are you people? And what do you mean you’re here to study youth?” I look around the room. There’s no one my age here. That’s outrageous! I raised such a ruckus that day that they decide to have a long conversation with me right then and there. Before I know it, I was offered an after-school job, and became the youth representative for HARYOU. I wound up on committees and commissions. I was in meetings with the mayor. The cultural committee included the writer and activist James Baldwin.
That summer the youth division at HARYOU had 60 kids working on programs subdivided into four groups: community action, child services, performing arts, and a business unit. The business unit runs a coffee shop. The performing arts unit has kids who want to go into theater, so they create their own little community theater. The child services group works in a daycare center. The community action group is organizing rent strikes, working with Jesse Gray, a local housing activist. Each of these groups is headed by a kid, and I head the community action unit. The best part of the program was that we, a bunch of kids, organized all of this ourselves.
At the same time, I am still active in SNCC, but I obviously can’t be in the south full-time. Instead, I work with a SNCC office in New York that brings people to New York to speak and raise money to support demonstrations. We organize cocktail parties in the fancy Fifth Avenue or Central Park West homes of people who want to write checks and contribute to the Civil Rights movement. We brought in Stokely Carmichael. We brought in John Lewis. We brought in whomever we could find to speak at these parties.
We support demonstrations in the south by having parallel demonstrations here in New York. In 1960 when the sit-ins are going on in the south against Woolworths, I stand in front of Woolworths on 125th, handing out fliers and explaining the situation. I tell people not to shop here, because Woolworths in Atlanta, Birmingham, or Greensboro won’t serve Black people at the lunch counter. “Don’t give them your money here,” I say. And I begin to see a new connection—I had never thought about racism in New York City until then. But now I can see the reason why Black kids in New York City are in schools with crumbling buildings and rats, old textbooks and no science labs. It’s not the exact discrimination and segregation of Mississippi, but it’s the same general thing. I realize it’s as important to demonstrate against racism here in New York City as it is to demonstrate down south. By this time, I am so completely disconnected from home. SNCC had moved me further along my quest to find a place to belong. I’ve had the experience of moving beyond 134th Street, not because I have money, not because I have any family connections, not because I look any particular way, but because I can interact with all of these people, and dedicate myself to a cause. In a way, I almost can’t remember how I graduated.
MEETING THE MINISTER
We had a made a decision—I’m saying we, as I guess in a way I participated in this—that the movement activity should not be exclusively in the south. One of the issues was union membership for New York City construction jobs, which was quite segregated. In order to get such a job, men had to be a member of the union. But the union didn’t accept Blacks. Of all the construction jobs in the city, even those in Harlem, no Black people would be working on the site. So we started demonstrating at the Harlem Hospital construction site, while I was still in high school.
Construction sites open very early in the morning in order to be done with the bulk of work before the hottest part of the day. I always planned to go to the site first, demonstrate for a couple of hours, and then go to school. But it was really hard to leave all the excitement. A lot of mornings, I would just stay out there all day, and that’s how I met Malcolm, as I called him. Malcolm X. And that must’ve been early 1963.
One day, a group of us were demonstrating. There were white college students. There were activists from CORE. Some were walking with pickets. Some were lying in the street, blocking cement trucks from working on the site. Sometime we did both, taking turns. My shift comes, and I’m lying on the street, and someone comes over. I don’t know why Malcolm sent someone over to talk to me because I did not know him. I had seen Malcolm around on the site, and maybe he had seen me before. I was a familiar face at demonstrations.
Malcolm was emerging then as a famous leader, somebody commenting on the Civil Rights movement. He came to look, because the press was going to run over to him and ask, “Mr. X, what do you think about these demonstrations?” I guess the only thing like that today are the bloggers and the political commentators on talk radio, or on Fox News or MSNBC. People who are not actively involved in a particular event or political organization but clearly have a position and platform on the politics and activities of the day.
Malcolm’s platform is Temple No. 7. People would flock to Temple No. 7 to see what Malcolm had to say about the demonstrations or some action the president was taking, or what have you. Those who couldn’t get to Temple No. 7 to hear him speak would sometimes hear him on a Harlem street corner. Going to 125th Street and 7th Avenue was like going to the village square.
There were a couple of regulars. One guy I loved was Ed Davis. Pork Chop Davis, they called him. I don’t know where he worked or what he did, but he was clearly well-read; he had a lot of opinions and was a hell of a speaker. He would put up his ladder on the corner and talk for hours from that perch. Often he would open the newspaper, read a paragraph from a story, and then he was off and running. He’d say, “Now listen to this again. It says here the president said, ‘whatever it was he said.’” And he’d say, “Now I’m not making that up. That’s what the president said. Now does that make any sense to you?” Then he’d start tearing it apart word for word. Everyone there would get a history lesson, a philosophy lesson, a religion lesson. Pork Chop Davis would punctuate his talk with, “Am I right or wrong?” He’d go on and on and on, repeat something, and then say, “Am I right or wrong?” The crowd would respond. He was funny. He was moving. He was poignant. That’s why people would go to the street corner.
I think Malcolm recognized my face and may have been surprised to see me in the Harlem Hospital demonstration, especially sitting in the street blocking a cement truck, when he had probably seen me at other places like 125th Street listening to speakers on the corner. In any event, he sent someone over to ask me to get up and come across the street and talk to him. This would be my first meeting with James 67X, who was Malcolm’s main assistant. James comes over and says to me, “Sister, Minister Malcolm is across the street, and he’d like to speak to you.” I’m thinking, This is bizarre. So I say, “If he’d like to speak to me, he can come over here and speak to me.” “I think he’d like for you to come across the street and speak to him.” “I can’t get up from here. I have to stay.” James goes back across the street, speaks to Malcolm, comes back again and keeps trying to persuade me. “Sister, the Minister would really like to talk to you for just a few minutes. You can come back to your spot, but just come across the street for a few minutes.” And finally I tell him, “I need to sit here for another 15 minutes, and when my shift is finished, I’ll come over.”
When I finish, I go across the street to talk to Malcolm. Malcolm looks at me and says, “What are you going to do if that truck starts moving?” “That truck is not really going to start running over people.” “Oh, he wouldn’t say it was on purpose,” Malcolm said. “He’d say it was an accident. ‘Oops, my foot slipped.’ But you’d be dead either way, on purpose or on accident.” “This is nonviolent action and passive resistance,” I say. “You have to take a stand and prove to people that you want what you’re fighting for so badly that you put your life on the line,” I tell him. “But you don’t really believe that that truck might run you over.” I don’t let go so easily. I tell him about people resisting passively in India. “People in India got killed. I don’t think you really believe that that truck might run you over,” he replied. He paused. And he said, “That’s a devil sitting in there. That’s not a person who thinks like you and me.”
We go back and forth kind of discussing civil disobedience, passive resistance, nonviolent action, the philosophy, the strategy of The Movement versus Malcolm’s ideas. “Is this really the road to freedom for Black people in this country?” Malcolm asked, “begging white America for jobs, letting us in and giving us a piece as opposed to creating something of our own?” The example that he used a lot was the bus boycott. People in Montgomery had boycotted the buses for more than a year. People had walked, and taken car services, carpooled and finally got the bus company to agree to let Black people sit anywhere on the bus. The companies eventually hired a few Black people as bus drivers. Malcolm said, “People could’ve bought that bus line, or started their own and had a thriving business with a solid ridership.”
That was something to think about. His was a different idea, one that I hadn’t thought about before. And that was the beginning of my relationship with Malcolm. Every time I think back on this beginning, I marvel. I was 15 years old, and I’m having this very serious conversation with a prominent Black leader—and we would have many, many, many conversations after that. He was taking my ideas seriously and engaging with me in this discussion. It was life-changing.
I don’t think this happens a lot anymore. I don’t think people take teenagers seriously and engage with them in that kind of thinking and discussion. I don’t know why. It clearly was important to me, and I think it was useful and important to him. It must’ve been, because we continued to have those discussions. I’m not in favor of kids cutting school, but on those days, there were a number of things that happened with Malcolm and with other people when I was cutting school. I wasn’t cutting school to hang out, take drugs, drink, or whatever. I was cutting school for a purpose. I was an activist. I was a real activist.
