Cover Image by Nsenga Knight
From Clarissa Myrick-Harris White’s introduction:
“This double issue of The Black Scholar (TBS) comprises Immortal Malcolm: The Living Legacy of El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (TBS 55.3) and Different Ways of Knowing: Evoking Epistemologies of Black Life and Culture (TBS 55.4). The publication comes to you at the end of a year in which the political power, socio-economic status, and even the history and culture of African Americans have been under relentless attack.
More than 70 years ago, scholar Rayford Logan spoke of “the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society” when writing about the erosion of nascent civil rights gained by African Americans during Reconstruction. (1) He pinpointed this lowest point as the time frame from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the turn of the twentieth century. Another scholar extended the end of the Nadir to 1920. Still others cite the early 1940s as the end of this period of decline. (2) It was during World War II that Black people organized to push for jobs in the war industry, protest against racism and segregation in the military and civilian life, and fight for voting rights and representation. This activism spurred the emergence of the modern-day Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s and the Black Power Movement a little more than a decade later. Those in the latter movement, in particular, overtly called the system that has entrapped Black Americans domestic neocolonialism.
It has been argued that people of African descent in America are now in “a second nadir” (3) that started almost a decade ago through political maneuvers that began to snatch away voting rights, economic advancement, opportunities for educational attainment, and any sense of well-being of African Americans.
Ironically, as Africans in America are plunged deeper into a second nadir, elsewhere African people are beginning to emerge from theirs. Recently, around the globe, African women, men and youths have amplified their demand for […]” (continue reading)
For a limited time, “Women of Color and Malcolm X’s Enduring Legacy” (with Maytha Alhassen, Nsenga Knight, Denise Lim, Mona Oraby, and Najha Zigbi-Johnson), is free to download and read.
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