The Off Topic Topic

[Jacob]

[Fireblade]

America has finally perfected hologram technology.

We will be using it to bring dead niggers back to life.

[CountDeMoney]

America has finally perfected hologram technology.

We will be using it to bring dead niggers back to life.

First one back:  Malcolm X.

Gonna put all these devils back in line.

[Sheilbh]

First one back:  Malcolm X.

He's an extraordinary figure and I think probably one of the most misunderstood (or too simply understood) figures in the 20th century.  When you start reading his stuff and about him it's rather different from the reputation.

[CountDeMoney]

First one back:  Malcolm X.

He's an extraordinary figure and I think probably one of the most misunderstood (or too simply understood) figures in the 20th century.  When you start reading his stuff and about him it's rather different from the reputation.

That's because his reputation doesn't jibe with the palatable face of the Civil Rights Movement.

When I was elementary school, I got to see the big push in the late 70s and early 80s towards making MLK's birthday a Federal holiday;  and, as was usual at the time, you spent all of February learning about the Greats in Black American History--MLK, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Douglass, DuBois, hell, even Crispus Attucks;  but there was always the one figure, off to the side, as if he had an asterisk next to him.  Who's the angry-looking brother with the sinister Darth Vader-style name?  Talk to adults at that age, and you get a response fit for a 9 year old:  Oh, he didn't like white people.  He was a separatist.  He was even a racist.  Marcus Garvey got more coverage in school than Malcolm X.  The X was an asterisk.

Honestly, when you're 9 or 10, that sort of explanation kind of scares you. 

And then a few years later, sometime right at the end of summer between 7th and 8th grade, I was at the county library looking through the used paperbacks that they sold for 5 cents, and I came across his autobiography.  I saw the name Alex Haley, and I remembered "Roots", so I bought it.  And I read it.  And then everything clicked.

So while my friends were reading The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia or Mack Bolan books, I was reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 

But that's just how you tackle things you don't understand, or don't get an explanation from those that should give you explanations.  So you buy The Autobiography of Malcolm X for 5 cents when you're 13, and get the explanations yourself.

First step to becoming a Civil Rights Warrior for life.

[Ed Anger]

The Roger Maris of Negroes.

[CountDeMoney]

I am so much to so many.

[Sheilbh]

First step to becoming a Civil Rights Warrior for life.

Nice

That's smart analysis though.  He doesn't fit with the domestication of the civil rights movement.

[Capetan Mihali]

[Ed Anger]

[sbr]

Malcolm X's autobiography is one of my favorite books.  I read it for the first time about 15 years ago and have read it a few more times since then.

[Josquius]

That review would be funny if I hadn't read pretty much the same
thing for another product.
Seems he has wrote it all over.

[jimmy olsen]

[DGuller]

 

[Josephus]