Who Was Malcolm X?

Sunny Hostin, Ilyasah Shabazz, and Kekla Magoon (l. to r.)

Last month at New York's 92nd Street Y, co-authors Ilyasah Shabazz (the third daughter of Malcolm X) and Kekla Magoon joined Sunny Hostin, a legal analyst and host on CNN, for a conversation about the legendary civil rights leader and their book, X: A Novel. They explained why they felt it was important to write about Malcolm X's youth.

Shabazz told Hostin that this book is important because "many people had the wrong impression of Malcolm." She said people think her father went to prison and "miraculously" became Malcolm X.

X: A Novel focuses on Malcolm Little growing up in Lansing, Mich. His parents were Marcus Garvey followers and suspected targets of the Black Legion (an offshoot of the KKK). Malcolm's father was killed on the streetcar tracks and his mother shipped off to a state hospital.

While The Autobiography of Malcolm X was written when Malcolm X was an adult who knew how his story turned out, Magoon explained, "putting it in the context of a novel allows teens to connect to it." Malcolm tried to run away from his parents' legacy, she added, "As a teen, he rediscovered his potential." Magoon felt that this story needed to be told in the present. "He was living each day like this is the only day," she said. "Teens can see themselves in that story."

Hostin asked the authors about their decision to use "the n word" in the book, a word she chooses not to use herself. Magoon pointed out that Malcolm X used the word in his own writings, and that the use of "the n word" by his history teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, was a turning point in Malcolm's life. When the teacher asked Malcolm Little, who got the best marks in Mr. Ostrowski's overwhelmingly white classroom, what he wanted to be, Malcolm answered, "A lawyer." The man responded, "This is the real world, boy.... Be as good as you want in the classroom, but out there, you're just a n-----." The scene appears nearly verbatim in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. "That was a throwaway moment for Mr. Ostrowski," Magoon pointed out. "That says a lot about how much power there is in words like that. Malcolm internalized it. He had to fight against that to rise back up. For Malcolm, it was years of making bad choices."

At various points in the conversation, Hostin, Shabazz and Magoon referred to recent protests in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York. One member of the audience asked how they could "channel that activism into a change in policy." He  wondered how we could keep this energy going. There were no easy answers. "The kids protesting today could read Malcolm's speeches and feel resonance with them now," said Magoon.

When Hostin asked Magoon what she'd like readers to take from X: A Novel, she hoped most of all that they'd enjoy it. Then Magoon added, "You can be anyone you want to be. Look how bad Malcolm's life was at certain moments, and look what he did. We all have that potential--that's something Malcolm X repeated over and over in his own ministry."

This is excerpted from a longer article that first ran in Shelf Awareness.

A 50th Anniversary of a Dream

Monday is Martin Luther King Day, and 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. King delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. How do we make the impact of his words resonate for young people?

Kadir Nelson's glorious images in I Have a Dream (Schwartz & Wade/Random House) accompany the closing passages of Dr. King's speech. These are the most resonant lines, the ones adults hear in our heads when we think of his words. Nelson takes Dr. King's refrain and brings it home to children growing up today. With a portrait of Dr. King's own four children, and with the image for his dream that "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers" in what resembles a game of Ring-Around-the-Rosy, Nelson removes any background or scenery so that the children could be of any time or place. (The book includes a transcription and recording of the full speech.)

Andrea Davis Pinkney

Andrea Davis Pinkney's Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America, illustrated by Brian Pinkney, focuses on other courageous men who helped Dr. King get to that historic day, August 28, 1963. They include A. Philip Randolph, one of Pinkney's chosen 10, who organized the march, and who also plays a key role in Tanya Lee Stone's Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles: America's First Black Paratroopers. Randolph's plans to organize a similar strike in 1941 resulted in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing the Fair Employment Act, without which the Triple Nickles likely would not have formed.

All three books demonstrate how many people struggled--and continue to struggle--to realize the promise of Dr. King's dream.

This article first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.

A Rendezvous with History

Rita Williams-Garcia has many gifts. One of them, which may be hardest to achieve for any writer, is her ability to fill in only the details the narrator (and thus, the reader) needs in order to make sense of her experience. That’s what the author accomplishes through Delphine's narrative in One Crazy Summer.

Big Ma, Delphine’s paternal grandmother, does not embrace change. The Brooklyn household she runs with her son, Delphine’s father, is a traditional home, and those are the values she instills in Delphine and her sisters. So when Delphine and her sisters arrive in Oakland, Calif., and they find themselves immersed in the Black Panthers Summer Camp, they must sift through Big Ma’s beliefs and the values that their mother, Cecile, lives by to figure out what makes sense to them—as readers, we get to go on that journey with them.

The girls’ mother puts on a lot of armor. To survive as an African-American woman on her own, she has to. But Delphine doesn’t understand why that armor shields Cecile from her daughters, too. That’s another journey to understanding that we take with Delphine. There are no easy fixes for Delphine. There were no easy fixes in 1968. What the author does is create an opening to understanding. Cecile gives Delphine as much knowledge and exposure as she can handle and leaves a door open for future revelations. And Rita Williams-Garcia does the same for young readers. Brava!

In Celebration of Black History Month

A few weeks ago, we discussed Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, the story of the brave teenage girl who paved the way for the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycotts. This week, we focus on another story of young people who brought about sweeping change with one courageous act, Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down by husband-and-wife team Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney.

Like the four people who began the sit-in movement, the Pinkneys take a big idea and break it down into its simplest principles. Andrea Davis Pinkney boils down a complex historical narrative into poetic phrases and a recurring refrain. Brian Pinkney’s swirling ink lines and watercolor illustrations convey a feeling of action among four people who are sitting still. The protest consisted of four young African-American men sitting at a counter where they were implicitly told they would not be served. They were not told this in words, but rather by an unspoken understanding that black people were not allowed at the same counter as white people.

It’s difficult for most children today to understand that kind of racism. Today we have a black president. How could segregation have happened so recently in our history! This picture book presents the situation in such a way that six-, seven- and eight-year-olds can have an informed discussion about what life was like for African-American citizens before the civil rights movement.

To put these events in context, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on March 2, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. Nine months later, Rosa Parks also refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts began in December of that year. In 1957, the Little Rock Nine—nine black students in Little Rock, Ark.--enrolled in Central High School despite the governor barring their entry; President Eisenhower sent in the National Guard to escort the students into the school. And on February 1, 1960—just 50 years ago--David Leinail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, Franklin Eugene McCain, and Ezell A. Blair Jr. (now known as Jibreel Khazan), four students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, sat down at a Woolworth lunch counter and attracted more than 70,000 people to join them in sit-ins across the South. They were putting into practice the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A timeline at the back of the Pinkneys’ book charts these milestones. This is a book that the entire family can open as a way of reflecting on how far we have come as a nation, and as an instrument for sparking a discussion of where we continue to find injustice, and what we still need to do as citizens of the United States and the world.