Human Rights

I just finished reading excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I am working on finishing it in its entirety. He will always be someone whose loss I mourn in many ways: he had conviction, he admitted mistakes, he changed his views, he was passion embodied. I can only imagine the state of race relations today if Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had not been assassinated. I know there are so many theories about each of their deaths; there are probably enough to fill several filing cabinets, but I tend to believe, as I usually do, that their deaths were some type of government conspiracy. I am sure that the idea of King and X joining forces in the late sixties, as they had planned to try to do, scared the shit out of the predominantly white government. It should have scared them. Combining the passion and brilliance of two of the greatest reformers in this country’s history, would surely have caused worldwide change. I frequently wonder how much further we would be now. Would there have been a Jena 6? Would there black men pulled over by the police for simply being black? Would it even be an issue that the democratic presidential nominees are a woman and a Black man? Would we racially idealize any ethnic group? Would we still need the United Negro College Fund? How much more progressive could we be? How little would the color of a person’s matter? Would we be fighting in Iraq? Would we respect Muslims? I can only imagine.