Malcolm X: 60 Years Later, the Fire Still Burns

Sixty years since the bullets flew inside the Audubon Ballroom, the echoes of Malcolm X’s voice refuse to fade. His words — razor-sharp, unflinching, and drenched in the righteous fire of a people’s fury — still pulse through the bloodstream of struggle. His death was an assassination, yes, but also an attempt to erase a man who had become too powerful, too articulate, too dangerous for the America that preferred its Black men bent or broken. Yet, even as his body fell, his legacy stood taller.Ossie Davis called him a prince. Not a prince of fairy tales, not a prince who waited for coronation, but a Black prince forged in the heat of a nation’s betrayal, a prince of Harlem’s night, prison’s solitude, and Mecca’s revelation. A prince who saw his people lynched, jailed, choked, shot, forgotten, and still, he stood. A prince who knew that loving Blackness in America was a revolutionary act — and he loved us so much it got him killed.Sixty years later, America still fumbles with his name, tries to soften his edges, and turns him into a postcard-sized version of himself, an icon without the teeth. Schools speak of him in hushed tones, if...