Malcolm X and Lorraine Hansberry: May 19th, Birthdays, and Truth-telling

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"My Weekly Say"
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“Time is on the side of the oppressed today; it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today; it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.”
– El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Malcolm X.

“If by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved.”
– Lorraine Vivian Hansberry.

May 19th marked the 84th birthday of activist and revolutionary Malcolm X, and the 79th birthday of author and trailblazer Lorraine Hansberry.

These youthful pioneers – the man who gave us the “Ballot or the Bullet” and the woman who gave us “A Raisin in the Sun”, the echoes of which still reverberate in our classrooms, on our stages, and on our televisions.

They might today have been venerated elders walking among us.

This week, I sat with that thought just a bit.

Entire empires have been built on the premise that the happy accident of a birthday, the date upon which someone crosses the veil into this life, can tell us something about her character, his tendencies, and her destiny.

I’m sure most of us have had a little fun, on occasion, with horoscope predictions or birth date books. Indeed, numbers and dates hold particular prominence in various sectors of African American communities.

I should note that even now, my homeboy Rahsul at the barbershop is doing the “Math’matix” on these birth dates, and promises to get back to me (relatively) soon.

But I wonder whether any of these equations might have told us about the miracles that were Lorraine Hansberry and Malcolm X. I wonder whether a gander at the old birthday book would list truth-telling – unfathomable, unreasonable, unrelenting truth-telling beyond anything we’d seen before or since – next to the date May 19th.

And I wonder whether, scribbled on the page somewhere, there is a note mentioning how heartily, how painfully missed are the presences of May 19th babies once absent from the body. I wonder whether anyone has found the words to describe the ache left in the vacuous absence of these two luminaries.

Today, I’m still sitting with this bit of information, and marveling at what it might have to teach us.

Born 5 years apart, both figures were raised in the Midwest. Lorraine Hansberry (b. 1925) began life in Chicago, while Malcolm X (b. 1934) was born in Omaha. Both were the children of activists. The Minister grew up watching his Garveyite-preaching father, Earl Little, battle white supremacy with sermons and direct action. The Playwright witnessed her father, real-estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry, battling racist covenant housing laws in court and on the streets of Chicago’s south side.

As children, each experienced the ostracism of being the only black children in sometimes hostile, always patronizing white schools. Both were born to committed, passionate, and highly learned parents, though Malcolm X’s father had been killed and his mother institutionalized by the time he reached his teens. In the end, neither earned a college degree, yet both are remembered among the most brilliant minds of their generation.

Each came to national attention at about the age of 29, beginning early the construction of far-reaching, international legacies.

Many of us will recall that Malcolm X’s prolific political and spiritual ambassadorship of and to the people brought him before leaders such as Guinea’s Ahmed Sékou Touré and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and led him to countries and leaders throughout West and East Africa. Those travels nearly led him – we could easily claim – to the halls of the United Nations to air the grievances of America’s oppressed African people. He was a frequent University speaker, and appeared on numerous television and radio talk shows and in the pages of countless popular magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad.
(For audio clips of Malcolm X's speeches, see WNYC's "Today In History" coverage)

But perhaps many fewer of us would recall Lorraine Hansberry’s address to the Inter-Continental Peace Congress in Uruguay at the age of 22, or her presence some years later at the table of a historic meeting between Robert F. Kennedy and Civil Rights leaders. Much of Hansberry’s work, it’s true, occurred at a stationary typewriter, and while we couldn’t compare her reach with that of the electric Malcolm X, we’d be foolish to ignore the extensive impact of her critical voice. Hansberry work populated the pages of The New York Times, The Village Voice, Ebony, and Liberation, and she spoke before organizations such as the United Negro College Fund and the American Society of African Culture.
(Click here to hear a rare Hansberry audio clip)

Both Hansberry and X found a way to reach the masses with their searing cultural and political criticisms that sound today as if they could have been written last week.

Malcolm X and Lorraine Hansberry: May 19th, Birthdays, and Truth-telling, PART 2

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"My Weekly Say"
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It was that unshakable commitment to the truth that led both to risk every fathomable comfort, despite seemingly overwhelming consequences and the danger to their livelihood and safety.

It's a testament to their integrity, and to an uncanny similarity of spirit.

There remain conflicting theories, but many argue that Malcolm X risked his very life when he broke with the Nation of Islam and, with it, the formidable Elijah Muhammad. I’m sure that no one could have known this better than he, but Malcolm X chose his people, and the love of his cause, when he could have chosen comfort and quite possibly, corruption. Amid death threats and attacks on his home and family, Malcolm X spent his final days working tirelessly in the creation of Muslim Mosque, Inc and the Organization of Afro-American Unity – seeking ways to honor his commitment to Sunni Islamic practice and his desire to promote a secular, black nationalist movement.

In the waning years of Lorraine Hansberry’s life, she divorced her husband Robert Nemiroff, a steady source of support in her writing endeavors, when she came to terms with her lesbian sexuality. Hansberry understood very well that lesbian women were presumed psychologically ill by the establishment. She understood that any open acknowledgment of her sexuality could lead to immense professional, social and physical danger. Yet in 1957, she wrote two fiercely worded open letters on the oppression of Lesbian and Gay people for the lesbian woman publication, “The Ladder”. “The Ladder” made a regular practice of anonymously publishing open letters; Hansberry’s name wasn’t printed. But her next two plays, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” and “Les Blancs” (published posthumously), began exploring such gay and lesbian themes head on.

When I began pulling this post together, I knew I’d mention that both of my subjects had been taken tragically, and far too early – one by pancreatic cancer and the other by a sawed-off shotgun. But then I began to think that we’d lost each as a result of a kind of malignant cancer, brought to bear by intolerant establishments and cultures that gnawed away at the lives of our bright prophets – these brilliant, truth-telling soothsayers – who were ripped away from us just as they began to come into their own.

We missed the burgeoning evolution of two young voices – one strident, the other subtly insistent – sent to urge us toward a more decent, upright and gallant walk.

A walk more like theirs’.

If they were here today, we could thank them for that walk. And we could thank them for having the courage to stand alone and lead by example.

But now only their words remain.

As it happens, Malcolm X was among the 600 mourners at Lorraine Hansberry’s funeral on January 15, 1965 – a day after his own wedding anniversary. At 34, Hansberry had lost her battle with cancer 3 days before.

Little more than a month later, on February 21, 1965, 39-year-old Malcolm X himself died at the hands of an assassin. 30,000 mourners are said to have filed past his casket, while more than 1000 packed into a church to hear “our shining black prince" eulogized. Months later, the city of Watts burned, and with it, it must have seemed, the hope of an generation.

Little more than 3 years later, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would shake that generation once more.

We, the children of that generation, lost our chance to know them, this brother and sister of hope.

We are left with their words, which we use like shovels to dig up our piecemealed past. And somehow, something in us understands that they and those like them live with us even now, through their lessons taught and their purposes fulfilled.

I haven’t picked up that birthday book, and I didn’t bother scouring a zodiac chart. I haven’t, now that I think of it, heard back from Rahsul at the barbershop (He’s probably got his hands full). But perhaps it doesn’t matter what they’d say.

Perhaps instead, we should just sit with the words and the voice of Malcolm and those of Lorraine.

Perhaps, if we sit very still with those voices – with those words – they will can help us to see our way clear.

To Malcolm and to Lorraine - Happy Birthday. We’re still listening.