El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz: the Continuity and Legacy of a Critical Africana Human Rights Consciousness
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El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz: the Continuity and Legacy of a Critical Africana Human Rights Consciousness James Pope 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This article places El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s praxis, as well as the Africana [Black] movement for freedom, into a human rights discourse. Exploring his evolution into an internationalist activist-theoretician in five rhythmic movements, if you will, the opening; the transitioning; the solidification; the influencing; and the continuities, it is the central premise of this article that in order to truly grasp the breadth and depth of the Africana [Black] struggle for freedom we must explore those involved and their contributions as a product of a critical human rights consciousness. Accordingly, ElHajj Malik El-Shabazz becomes an archetype in this regard. This idea rests upon the assertion that his praxis, albeit incomplete, due to his untimely death, represents an important nexus in the Africana struggle for freedom, merging various manifestations of radical praxis into a clearer articulation of the Black radical tradition. Keywords Africana studies . Black radical tradition . Critical Africana human rights
consciousness . Black freedom movement . Malcolm X
Introduction There is a tendency to study the African American manifestation of the Africana freedom movement1 from a limited historical narrative. Locked within what Bayard 1
The explicit use of Africana Freedom Movement, instead of Black Freedom Movement or Civil Rights Movement is a discursive and conceptual attempt to expand, link, and map the continuities in radical thought and behavior of Africana world as it relates to organically and systematically addressing the institutional conditions of oppression as a product of racial capitalism. This is an attempt to materially frame and conceptually link Africa with its Diasporic communities, re-inscribing and giving agency to the African world as a whole. As being contributors to and influenced by global interactions.
* James Pope [email protected]
1
Africana Studies, Winston Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC 27110, USA
Journal of African American Studies
Rustin referred to as its classical phase, this narrative is chronicled from 1954 to 1964 Civil Rights legislation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Rustin 1971; Hall 2005). This perspective has implications that arrest understanding the deeper contributions of the various forms and functions of Africana resistance. As more research and scholarship unpack this narrative, the African American manifestation is slowly being expanded to be understood as the long struggle for civil rights (Hall 2005). Nevertheless, the narrative captured in a discourse on and around civil rights still distorts much of what those who were engaged in struggle were really demanding. While veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Vincent Harding, have suggested that we must understand the civil rights movement within a deeper context, that is “a movement to deepen our unde
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