Our Own Black Shining Prince

Reflecting on Brother Malcolm X's 100 years of soul saving.

Yesterday marked the 100th birthday of el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, also known as Brother Malcolm X. I chose to share this after his birthday because I wanted to spend the actual day reflecting on his life and legacy before deciding whether this piece fully expressed what I needed it to. It doesn't. Nothing ever could.

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MAY 19, 1998—The boy sat on the living room floor, knees tucked to his chest, eyes wide, shining like wet stones in the blue flicker of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Denzel Washington filled the screen, breathing life into Malcolm with each word that pulsed through the television like a heartbeat, steady and unafraid. His mother had put the film on gently, reverently, as though lighting candles on an altar. “You need to know him,” she’d whispered, her voice quiet with something he couldn’t name.

Hours passed, each scene carving itself into the boy’s chest, until the Audubon Ballroom appeared—thick with voices, heavy with waiting. Then came the sudden eruption, a violent bloom of sound, Malcolm falling, Denzel’s body folding like a poem cut short. The boy reached out instinctively, fingers brushing the screen as if he could hold Malcolm there, suspended, protected from harm.

He didn’t notice his tears until they dripped from his chin, pooling onto the carpet beneath him. His cries broke from deep within, sharp and unfiltered, the raw grief of a child seeing a hero die for the first time.

Turning slowly, the boy found his mother sitting behind him, silent on the couch, her own eyes glistening, reflecting his heartbreak back at him.

“Why did they do it, Mommy?” he sobbed, voice trembling like the last leaf clinging to a winter branch. “Why’d they kill him? He only wanted to help people—I don’t get it.”

She took a breath, steadying the quiet space between them, allowing the question to settle like dust. Her words came softly, clear as moonlight filtering through the blinds.

“Because Malcolm was teaching us to love being Black,” she said. “And that frightened them. People were afraid that if he kept speaking, the whole world might learn to love us too.”

She reached down to cradle his small, wet face, her palms warm and certain. Together they stayed like that, breathing into the hush, holding each other in a fragile circle of truth.

For the rest of the day, the living room became a classroom, the couch their desk, as mother and son slowly unpacked the story that the film had only begun to tell. Malcolm’s life was more than the violence of his death, she explained—it was a series of powerful actions and courageous choices that changed the course of history.

She spoke of Malcolm’s tireless work with the Nation of Islam, how he helped build mosques across America, offering spaces of hope and community to countless Black people who had long been denied both. She reminded him of the scenes in the film of Malcolm standing before thousands, his voice clear and commanding, calling for self-respect and economic independence.

“Do you remember when Malcolm led people to the police station to get justice for Brother Johnson?” she asked. The boy nodded, recalling the image of Malcolm raising his hand and the silent discipline of the crowd that followed him. “Those sort of moments are what we need,” she explained. “It was a message…that our lives mattered, and we would no longer quietly accept abuse.”

Together, they revisited Malcolm’s powerful speeches—moments that had lingered in the boy’s mind: Malcolm speaking fiercely about human rights at rallies and universities, confronting racism openly and fearlessly in televised debates and interviews.

“He wasn’t afraid to tell America about itself,” she told him gently, her voice filled with quiet admiration. “He forced this country to face truths it wanted to ignore—about racism, about poverty, about how Black people were treated here and around the world.”

They spoke again of Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Mecca, unpacking the significance more deeply. His mother described how Malcolm had expanded his understanding of justice and solidarity, returning to America with a new vision of unity, advocating collaboration between oppressed people worldwide.

“Malcolm wanted to take our fight beyond just America. He spoke about freedom and justice as global rights—rights that connected Black Americans to people everywhere,” she said, her hand gently resting on his shoulder.

In that quiet room, the boy learned to see Malcolm not just as a figure on the screen, but as something alive still. Thunder held still, a lit wick, a Black psalm humming through time. He was cadence and conjure, a tongue twisting toward truth, not just an orator but a kind of conjurer, a man who moved words like rivers. He was a husband, a father, a question, a refusal. A body carved from belief. A name that does not fade but flares brighter the more you listen.

A BLACK MAN.

Denzel Washington as Malcolm X, moments before being assassinated.

“We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” — Malcolm X

That boy walked away different, as though Malcolm had rearranged his cells, rewired his blood, stitched a vision deep inside his bones. Being Black became less about surviving and more about believing there could be a tomorrow worth all the todays.

In years to come, he returned to Spike Lee’s film so often it became ritual, Denzel Washington’s Malcolm a companion more faithful than any childhood friend. Twice yearly he immersed himself in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, each reading a pilgrimage, each sentence an anchor in turbulent waters. He marked his own body with that profound and defiant X upon his left forearm, wore the iconic X baseball cap like armor in public arenas and quiet portraits. He stood humbled as Malcolm’s daughters placed upon him the weight and honor of their father’s name, the Betty Shabazz and Malcolm X Vanguard Award that bound him forever to a lineage of courage.

And yet, despite every word written, every community effort led, every tribute offered, every attempt to keep Malcolm’s flame burning brightly within the darkness of America, none of it could ever truly repay Brother Malcolm—for Malcolm had reached through screens, pages, and recorded speeches to and pulled the boy’s soul from the teeth of this world. Had shown him how to stand unbroken in a land still waiting to swallow him whole.

I wouldn’t be half the man I am, or half the man I’m stumbling toward becoming, if Malcolm hadn’t lit the path.

And it’s not lost on me that, for some, this may seem like too heavy a load to place on any one man’s shoulders—but I’ve lived enough, read enough, breathed in this world deep enough to know Malcolm was never just one man; spirits like his don’t simply come and go—they are gifted, carried into this world by something older and greater, stars sent spinning into the dark to remind us we still have light.

To understand Malcolm—to truly revere him in the way he deserves—one must understand what he offers to Black and Brown people, particularly Black and Brown youth. Malcolm’s voice was a torch illuminating what so many of us spent struggling with in the dark. I recall vividly in my own boyhood how so many people in my neighborhood did not speak of progress because America had buried our language. Malcolm excavated it. When we were taught to swallow our anger, to smile politely as the world chipped away at our dignity, day by day, bit by bit. Malcolm held space for our righteous rage.

I remember clearly when I began to understand I was Black, though I had always known the color of my skin. It was not the skin itself but what my skin meant. How it reshaped the spaces I occupied, how it drew eyes, suspicion, questions, judgments. How even as I write this, my experiences remind me that I exist most often in the non-Black imagination somewhere between fetish and felon.

God, it wears you down like weather.

God, it’s knuckles bruised against a brick wall.

God, it’s a splinter caught deep beneath the skin, impossible to ignore.

God, it’s a scream swelling in a throat that never quite breaks free.

Malcolm gave language to all of this. He taught me that the anger boiling beneath my skin was not wrong, nor was it something to hide away in dark corners. He taught me dignity was not something earned but something inherent, something to be fiercely defended, unbending and unashamed. He did not teach me anger—that had always been there, waiting for me to recognize it. What Malcolm gave me was permission to embrace that anger, to interrogate it, to harness it for something greater than bitterness. He showed me anger as a path toward justice, a language spoken boldly against the lie that I was not fully human.

“Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change,” — Malcolm X

As a young man, I often found myself bewildered by the way people spoke of Malcolm, by how swiftly and easily they labeled his righteous anger as hatred. They would twist his voice, distorting it until his calls for dignity and self-respect became something monstrous in their mouths. And for a time, I wondered if perhaps they had simply misunderstood him, if the sharpness of his language was too raw, too unfiltered for them to digest. But as I grew older, as I began to see the careful construction of the American lie for what it truly was, I understood clearly that this was no misunderstanding.

America had never feared hatred from Black people—it was hatred itself that built the walls, filled the prisons, chained bodies to ships, and left strange fruit swinging in Southern trees. America had long grown comfortable with hatred. No, what terrified America about Malcolm was not hatred but power: the power of self-definition, of self-determination, the power to refuse to bow one’s head or whisper softly or tread quietly through a world set on destroying you. Malcolm was teaching generations of Black and Brown men and women, boys and girls, to be disobedient. To question every command that asked them to diminish themselves, every rule that demanded their complicity in their own erasure.

The confusion was intentional, carefully crafted. To call Malcolm hateful was to make him easily dismissible, to convince those most in need of his truth that it was dangerous, undesirable. But Malcolm’s voice, ringing loud and clear across generations, refused to be diminished or misunderstood. The disobedience he cultivated was never about violence or vengeance—it was about worth, about reclaiming the fundamental humanity stripped away by centuries of subjugation. And the fear he inspired was not a fear of bloodshed or hatred but a fear of awakening.

A fear that one day, perhaps sooner than anyone imagined, Black and Brown people might rise together and, with one voice, declare that the time for obedience had long since passed.

“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.” — Malcolm X

Malcolm became more than a figure to me—he became a compass, a lens, a standard by which I measured not only the world, but my own position within it. I learned quickly that to carry Malcolm’s inheritance is to bear a complex and demanding gift. It asks everything of you: courage, clarity, a willingness to be a truth bearer, even in moments when lying would be simpler, easier, safer. Malcolm made it impossible for me to be comfortable in American deceit.

In my activism, Malcolm sharpened my eyes, showing me how easily movements lose themselves in compromise, how readily the language of liberation softens into appeals for mere recognition. He taught me that true activism isn’t a polite request whispered into the halls of power; it is the thunderous insistence that we deserve to be seen, to be respected, to exist without apology. Malcolm taught me not to trade my outrage for scraps, not to mistake the illusion of access for real change.

In my writing, Malcolm guided my pen toward honesty, toward a language stark and unadorned by false comforts. He showed me that words can be weapons or salves, and it is a betrayal to wield them carelessly or without intention. Every sentence became an exercise in truth-telling, each page a battlefield where dignity must be fought for line by line. Malcolm never allowed me the luxury of neutrality in my prose; neutrality, he reminded me, is merely complicity in more sophisticated clothing.

And when I moved through white institutions—the schools, the corporate offices, the publishing houses—I felt Malcolm’s presence beside me like an unwavering conscience. He offered no illusions about acceptance; these spaces, he warned, were built on foundations of exclusion and exploitation. Yet, I also learned from him how to navigate them without surrendering my soul, without softening my voice or shrinking my demands. Malcolm never allowed me to forget the conditions of my presence in these rooms, nor permitted me the ease of quiet gratitude. I was not there to blend seamlessly, but to challenge fundamentally.

Malcolm also taught me the grace of evolution, the courage it takes to become someone new. To outgrow one’s self again and again. He modeled transformation: from Malcolm Little, wounded by cruelty, to Detroit Red, hardened by streets paved with despair; Malcolm X, defiant and sharpened by anger; and finally, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, softened by understanding, deepened by compassion, expanded by vision. In his evolution, Malcolm taught me that there is no shame in shedding old selves, in admitting when you have been wrong, in reaching toward a deeper truth even if it shakes the foundation beneath you. Malcolm’s journey showed me that growth is not betrayal. It is liberation.

Most importantly, Malcolm changed how I loved my people, how I saw them. Not just as resilient, but as sacred. He taught me that to love Black people fully was to understand deeply our wounds, our joys, our complexities, and contradictions without judgment or reservation. Loving us meant believing in us fiercely, even when the world insisted otherwise. Malcolm’s love did not sugarcoat our struggles nor romanticize our survival; it embraced us exactly as we were, demanding only that we never abandon ourselves or each other.

Malcolm X (top middle left) and Muhammad Ali (top middle right) sitting with their daughters.

“I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field—but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credential.” — Malcolm X

I do not believe this world deserved Malcolm X. To say that it did would be to suggest the world had prepared itself, had opened itself, had made space for him—which we all know it had not. And still would not. The world never welcomed Malcolm; it barely endured him. It disrespected him, distorted him, destroyed his physical being. And yet, even now, Malcolm refuses erasure. He is born forward, not by a world that finally understands, but by Black folks themselves—particularly those Black folks this society most misunderstands, most marginalizes, most hates. The ones who carry within them a magic America cannot name because it is too busy lying in the mirror about itself.

Malcolm is kept alive, not through hollow tributes or polite remembrance, but in the beautiful, radical practice of everyday Blackness. In the countless refusals to diminish oneself, in the courage required to stand tall when the whole weight of history is pressing against your spine. Malcolm lives each time a Black voice speaks truths that America would prefer silenced, each time Black feet march forward despite weary bones, each time Black hands rebuild what the country has burned down.

Every day I wake, I feel Malcolm’s eyes upon me. A loving, compassionate challenge. He set a mirror before us, reflecting back not just who we were but who we might yet become. And each day I struggle to meet that gaze, to be worthy of the reflection staring back at me. I cannot say with certainty whether I have done him justice, whether I have made him proud. But I have tried. God knows, I have tried.

And though there are no true words to repay him. No perfect syllables shaped from breath or bone that could settle the debt. I keep reaching, keep fumbling toward the poetry of gratitude. Maybe this reflection, flawed as it is, will speak like a whispered prayer, will echo something deeper than language. Malcolm deserves every song we have learned and forgotten, every praise our tongues can carry, every thank you pressed from hoarse throats, every shout rising raw and righteous from the belly of our days.

If words are what we have—broken and beautiful, fleeting and fierce—then let us offer all of them, a chorus loud enough to reach wherever he now rests, a testament trembling with the truth of how much he gave, how much he meant, how much he still matters.