Malcolm X: Down for the cause before the cause

Shabazz, who lives in Mount Vernon, N.Y., credits her mother for the spark to write.

The book, she said, “really serves as a tribute to my mother ... just examining her life — while she was in her twenties, her husband was assassinated in front of her, her home was firebombed, [she was] a woman with four babies and pregnant with twins — she accomplished so much while serving humanity.”

Props for her pops
Shabazz, who was only 2 when Malcolm was slain, bears love for her father that’s equally heartfelt. “He was just a young man; that’s what surprises people,” she said. “He was only in his twenties when he burst on the scene.

“This was a regular young man in search of his identity as a man and as a person of African descent and reconnecting us to what we had before bondage … that psychological trauma we see the results of today,” she said.

“He didn’t cower, didn’t compromise his values or integrity. Like Ossie Davis said in the eulogy, Malcolm was our manhood — he was his nation’s manhood. He was unwavering. After a speech I gave once, a young white male student came up and told me, ‘There are only two men I respect in my life — your father and mine.’ ”

“In a sense, Malcolm drove people to King,” said Chambers, the Nebraska state senator. “They would rather contend with someone like Martin Luther King, who said ‘suffer in silence,’ than to deal with Malcolm who said ‘if you hit me, I’m going to hit you back.’ ”

That sense of defiance, a streetwise forthrightness about personal integrity and the need for self-defense, has endeared Malcolm X to the hip-hop generation.

“Hip-hop is not just a style of music, it’s a way of life, a philosophy, and the philosophy of hip-hop comes, in a large part, from the philosophy of Malcolm X,” said Sandeep Atwal, publisher of the political/cultural blog Infernal Press, to the Web site AllHipHop.com.

Full circle at 40
There’s a sense of things having come full circle — or nearly so — for the Audubon Ballroom, the site of the tragedy. On Monday, 40 years to the day of the assassination, the location on upper Broadway in Washington Heights will be where the Shabazz family celebrates Malcolm’s life, at what is now called the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center.

The 2005 observances follow efforts to preserve the site announced in October 1997: New York City, through its Economic Development Corporation, had to that time invested more than $19 million in renovating the building, according to the mayor’s press office. Since then, however, efforts to use the location have faced complications but seem to be getting back on track.

The ballroom’s new center will house a multimedia environment containing documents about Malcolm X’s life, including memoirs, notes, speeches and other personal items.

“It preserves an important historic landmark,” Ilyasah Shabazz said of the site. “It’s about not living a life of bitterness and despair, but finding the good and praising it. Each individual has their share of life’s tragedies. You can’t live life as a victim. We would rather smile and stand than to cry and be bitter and broken. This is all a part of life’s journey.”