A Few Thoughts as MLK Day is Around

[Chenyin Pan]

As Martin Luther King Day is 2 days away, I’m sitting here in the corner of the Starbucks Café, watching the flow of the passengers and cars outside in the cold. My thoughts have lost in my trip up north to Northeastern during the Thanksgiving last year. It was a trip that supposed to trace back Malcolm X’s life.

I went to the Roxbury out of the belief that the historically predominant black neighborhood still immersed in the Jazz, in all the accounts described by Alex Haley, and that I would still find a replica of “Shorty”. Shorty is actually one of my favorite characters in Malcolm’s autobiography. His city wise, his loyalty towards friends, his too-good-to-keep-a-white-girl manner impressed me tremendously. Though his adventure as a little town corny craving for cosmopolitan had encountered endless racism and city cruelty, Malcolm X’s guts to date the white Sophia should be respected and admired. If you want to have an idea on the heat under that spotlight, just watch Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner made in 60s or, just asks whether there is any Chinese who’s willing to hit on a Tibetan. All my moldings about Roxbury based on my readings of Malcolm X were shattered to pieces as later on I came out from the subway station found the place is residential and mixed. Homies live in the hood nicely welcomed me to their apartment and weeds were lightened when we chill. When the thick English accents dispersed from the tube when they were watching Bear Grylls’ fetish, my mind was lingering in the image that Malcolm might also enjoyed his puffs with those jazz musicians after the gig.

Left Boston with the disappointment that I didn’t really see many remnants about Malcolm, with the regrets that I’d have to leave Boston, I boarded the Greyhound bound to the Big Apple. While the “Zoo York” hoodie wearing Bostonians were out of sight, the melodies from the saxophones and the enticing street talks reminded me that the center of the universe is upfront as I submerged from the escalator at Port Authority. I was thinking about Theresa Hotel and Malcolm’s assassination all my way to the hostel that I booked.

Worked as a porter between the trains back and forth from Boston to New York, then dealt drugs till the moment he got busted, Malcolm X was facing this intensified conundrum named real life. His fall was in Harlem, his culmination and demise were in there as well.

Harlem, the notorious scary yet dangerously exciting used to drawn me with names, stories and incidents such as “Harlem Renaissance”, Fidel Castro’s stay, meet-up with Malcolm X in Theresa Hotel and big riots back at critical times in the history. I choose to visit Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial first, but the place was already closed for the holiday and won’t back before my leave. Wandered in front of the gate for a few minutes full of contrite for the bad timing and don’t know what to do, the greenish color tapered off in the facet, and the poster on the window of the catering advertisement brought me the excuse that they might not really have many valuables out there.

While MLK is honored with a national holiday and his rhetoric known as I have a dream been widely spread, Malcolm X has been deliberated ignored and unconsciously regarded as black racist and premature. No need to say my disappointment when reading Coretta King’s My Life with Martin Luther King as she almost in every way corroborated her husband’s story in his own autobiography and regarded X in the tune of pity, of neutrality at best. While King advocating “turn another cheek” (using Malcolm X’s words), contributions done by the X and Panther buddies like Huey Newton and Bob Searle were mostly forgotten outside the sphere of African American studies plus ones love cooking since Searle wrote a book showed off his culinary stills back in 90s. While affirmative attitudes to MLK grow as we having the Monday off on January 18th, the memory of Malcolm X is about to fade away with only that inconspicuous museum chilled lonesome in Harlem’s winter.