19
A newspaper in education Supplement to THE WASHINGTON TIMES
|
WEDNESDAY • AUGUST 28 • 2013
Black Power
Vernon Dahmer, Sr.
My brother Dennis came and woke me up. He
told me the house was on fire and he got me
out of there. The house was engulfed in flames.
My father was covered with smoke and soot,
skin was hanging off his arms. My aunt carried
him to the hospital. We waited for the fire truck
to get there; it took about 35 or 45 minutes to
get there and it was just six miles away. Let's
just put it this way, they weren't in any hurry
to get there. I knew what we were doing about
voter registration, but
it never occurred to me
that something like this
would happen. We were
just trying to help other
people.
— Harold Dahmer
(Source:
/
exhibits/civilrights/exhibit.
html
Harold had just returned
home from the Army
when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his
family's home in 1966. His father, Vernon
Dahmer, Sr., a voting rights activist, was
severely burned and died from his injuries.
Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the
Black Panthers
Not all African Americans were content with
Martin Luther King’s nonviolent approach to de-
segregation. Some thought that King’s ways was
too slow or not forceful enough. They wanted
real change as quickly as possible. They thought
an in-your-face approach would tell white people
that they weren’t going to settle for anything less
than equal rights.
Malcolm X
Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X and El-Hajj
Malik El-Shabazz) was born in Omaha, Nebraska
on May 19, 1925. At the time, Marcus Garvey’s
Back to Africa Movement was gaining momentum.
Malcolm’s father Earl was a Baptist minister who
vocally supported Garvey’s Black Nationalist move-
ment. Under the climate of racial repression in the
1920s, Little’s father received death threats from the
white supremacist group the Black Legion.
In 1929, the Little’s home in Lansing, Michi-
gan was burnt to the ground by the KKK. Two
years later Earl Little’s body was recovered across
town on trolley tracks. Malcolm’s mother, Louise,
was devastated emotionally and the children were
sent to live in foster homes and orphanages.
Despite these extreme hardships, Malcolm
was a bright student who was elected class presi-
dent. Yet over time he was discouraged by some
teachers, including one who told him his dream
of being a lawyer would never come true. He
dropped out of school, moved to Boston to live
with his half-sister, and got caught up in a life of
crime; he was eventually arrested and convicted
of burglary and sentenced to 10 years in prison
in 1946.
In prison, Malcolm learned about the teach-
ings of the Nation of Islam (NOI), led by Elijah
Muhammad. Malcolm became a devoted follower
of the NOI. He read widely during his time in
prison, becoming familiar with religious and
philosophical texts as well as history. He was paroled from prison
in 1952 and took the surname “X” rather than keep what he left
was a last name rooted in the legacy of slavery. He rose quickly
into leadership roles in the NOI, moving to Harlem and serving as
minister of Temple No. 7 there. He developed a scathing critique of
white society and also of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement.
Following from the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, he stressed the
importance of blacks forming their own organizations and defend-
ing themselves against violence “by any means necessary.” Malcolm
Malcolm X
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X
When my mother was pregnant with me, she
told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan
riders galloped up to our home... Brandishing
their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my
father to come out.
—Malcolm X
Power in defense of freedom is greater than
power in behalf of tyranny and oppression,
because power, real power, comes from our con-
viction which produces action, uncompromising
action.
—Malcolm X
