Ilyasah Shabazz’s Message of Love and Empowerment

The daughter of Malcolm X speaks at Duke as part of Black History Month

Ilyasah Shabazz

On Feb. 17, four days before the assassination of civil rights leader Malcolm X 61 years ago, a capacity audience of campus and community members gathered at Duke University’s Penn Pavilion for a lecture presented by his daughter, the author and educator, Ilyasah Shabazz.

Shabazz, the third daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, said her father’s “words carried the weight of urgency, the promise of a shared dignity, a call to action that resonates as powerfully today as it did back then.”

“Minister Malcolm X spoke truth. Yes,” she said. “He spoke love. The kind of love that defends. The kind of love that protects. The kind of love that builds.

“Brother Malcolm,” she continued, “believed in healing, not hiding. He believed in standing tall, not standing low. He gave language to pain so it could become purpose. He gave voice to the unheard. He gave strength to the silenced, and in doing so, he lifted up generations of youth.”

An adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, Shabazz also works as a social activist and advocate for young people at-risk. She talked about her parents’ legacy and the importance of an inclusive teaching of America’s history.

A recurrent theme during her lecture was the power of education to positively transform lives, individually and collectively.

Shabazz paused to acknowledge the formidable jazz pianist and composer, Mary Lou Williams, and the mission of Duke’s Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture. The center co-hosted her lecture as part of Black History Month, which celebrates its centennial anniversary this year.

“[My father] was a devoted lover of jazz, poetry and literature, and he believed that culture was inseparable from liberation,” Shabazz said. “And so, may [Mary Lou Williams] rest in everlasting power and peace.”

“When we embrace our history and all of its complexity, we become agents of social transformation.”

Ilyasah Shabazz

Known as El Hajj Malik El Shabazz at the time of his death, Malcom X’s controversial legacy veered mainstream in the 1990s, largely because of conscious rap music,  new scholarship, the 1992 biopic about his life, directed by Spike Lee, and in recent years, the 2020 film, “One Night In Miami,” directed by Regina King.

His widow, pregnant with twin girls, witnessed her husband’s assassination with three of her daughters, including Ilyasah, who was two. Faced with the challenge of raising six daughters, Betty Shabazz went on to earn a doctorate in education. She died in 1997. However, during her lifetime, she grew close with her fellow civil rights widows: Myrlie Evers and Coretta Scott King.

“Today, Rev. Dr. Bernice King and I continue that sisterhood,” said Shabazz, referring to her mother’s friendship with Coretta Scott King.

“My mother … dedicated the last 20 years of her life to higher education, knowing that informed minds are essential to creating meaningful change,” Shabazz said. “She often said that the classroom is where transformation begins, not just for individuals, but for entire communities.”

Shabazz, speaking of her parents‘ legacy, said: “My parents knew an essential truth. If I learn to love me, then I can learn to love you. If I don’t love me. I can’t love you and I will be of no help to you, ever.”

She added, “These lessons of self-love and empowerment are much more than personal revelations; they are building blocks of social change … When we embrace our history and all of its complexity, we become agents of social transformation.”

Co-sponsors for the event were the Department of African and African American Studies; the Center for Multicultural Affairs; and the Center for Muslim Life.