My Extra Reading Assignment: 100 Years of Malcolm X
May 19, 2025 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz — known to the world as Malcolm X. Globally, people around the world are celebrating his legacy on Black nationalism, internationalism, and anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements. Various people and organizations are sharing tributes and reflections on Malcolm X’s life and work through social media. To reflect on this moment I have to go back to the late 1980s when I attended duPont Manual Magnet High School. Manual HS is where I majored in Visual Art (VA) and minored in High School University (HSU) aka ‘college prep’. In HSU English reading was crucial as it enhanced cognitive and academic skills, impacting future success. My teachers promoted regular reading that improves vocabulary, comprehension, and critical thinking.
One of my first English teachers was Mrs. Baker who was a stoic and occasionally warm Black woman with medium length, graying hair and cinnamon-colored skin. In my mind, she sort of looked like Toni Morrison who is one of my favorite authors. One day after class Mrs. Baker pulled me aside and gave me a book to read for extra credit. It was “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” written by Malcolm X in collaboration with journalist Alex Haley. Back then I was reading everything I got my hands on and I read the book in less than one week. In a short time, this one book shifted my entire world. Any report I was expected to write for the teacher has all but faded away from my memory. However, the story still resonates.
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little during a turbulent time in the United States often referred to as ‘Jim Crow’. Although slavery had been abolished in the US in 1865, the Jim Crow era laws continued to cement everyday discrimination against Black people until 1964. Many laws still drive institutional or structural racism, or the ways in which societal structures, policies, and practices perpetuate racial inequality, even in the absence of explicit discriminatory intent (ex. “anti-DEI” or anti-woke” legislation). As we follow along in the book we learn about how Jim Crow impacted Malcolm X and how he overcame it through education, advocacy, empowerment and self-determination.
Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from
Birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient. — Malcolm X
Malcolm X’s impact on me showed up in my high school artwork. While much of the Civil Rights Movement occurred prior to my birth, I saw myself as carrying a torch. I was just a baby when Black Nationalism hit its peak but reading about it later inspired me to take pride in my heritage and culture, and it gave me a strong sense of identity. I would carry this feeling to college. At Pratt Institute I became a student activist and, as a graduate student, I established a lab model to address the digital divide. Years later, I was part of the first wave of generative AI art, and I was commissioned to create a portrait of Malcolm X using image style transfer.
Activist Marcus Garvey’s ideas had a profound impact on young Malcolm X, whose father, a Garveyite, instilled in him a sense of Black pride and a determination to fight for social justice. We can still see resonances of this fight such as in Kendrick Lamar’s performance of “Not Like Us” during the GNX concert tour. Marcus Garvey face can be seen among many others in one of the backdrops during Lamar’s performance. Notice (in the below photo) that Lamar is wearing an “X” pendant on his chain, which likely has more than one meaning but definitely includes an homage to Malcolm X.
Reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and listening to speeches such as “The Ballot or the Bullet” gave me insight on withstanding the impact of systemic racism that contributes to disparities in wealth, life expectancy, access to healthcare, and educational opportunities. Growing up, I witnessed how this impacted my family and community. For example, my mother was at the top of her high school class but not allowed to be valedictorian. My sister was our high school’s valedictorian but she was asked not to speak. I was told I would not finish high school and would become a teen mother. Malcolm X’s words helped me to understand why these things happened across generations. Most important was knowing that others’ assumptions and expectations were not always based on fact.
Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X after him challenged the status quo. In the words of World African Artists United, “Malcolm X remains urgent, unfinished — a symbol not of comfort, but of reckoning. His words still cut through sanitized narratives, asking us to confront who we are in relation to structures of power.” This day is an invitation to read, reflect, and reimagine as I have done using generative AI. Latent space, which helps large language models or LLMs learn from data, is where I found an untested domain for digital art with Black subject matter. Since delving into computer graphics in the late 1980s I had yet to find a welcoming space to continue what I was exploring until the invention of generative AI. It’s a different way to challenge the status quo (in art and technology).
When I am dead — I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form — I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with “hate”. He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol, of “hatred” — and that will help him escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race. — Malcolm X
As a teenager and young adult the message I received from Malcolm X was not one of hate, rather it was one of love by any means necessary.