By A. Peter Bailey
(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Positive Black Folks In Action (PBFIA), a DC-based community action organization, hosted a May 19, 2025 event that honored, celebrated and thanked Brother Malcolm X for his immense contributions to the world.
More than 100 people joined the organization’s members at Howard University’s Blackburn Center to pay tribute to Brother Malcolm; especially in the arenas of Black Unity and Pan-Africanism. The warm and deeply spiritual event was infused with personal commentary, music, Congo drumming and poetry. People from diverse walks of life gathered to be inspired by the wisdom and guidance drawn from Brother Malcolm.
Among those nuggets were a July 1963 letter to civil rights leaders and activists, in which Brother Malcolm stated the following, stressing the importance of unity: “….If Capitalistic Kennedy and Communistic Khrushev can find something in common on which to form a united front despite their ideological differences, it is a disgrace for Negro leaders to not be able to submerge our ‘minor’ differences in order to seek a common solution to a common problem caused by a common enemy….”
On Pan-Africanism, the audience drew from a document, written by Brother Malcolm and shared while he attended the 1964 African Summit Conference in Cairo, Egypt. In that document, he said, “The Organization of Afro-American Unity has sent me to attend this historic African Summit Conference as an observer to represent the interests of twenty-two million African-Americans whose Human Rights are being violated daily by the racism of American Imperialism.”
To advance Pan-Africanism, Brother Malcolm also had one and half to three hours of meetings with the Presidents of seven African countries in 1964. I told the audience that the length and depth of these meetings demonstrated just how serious Brother Malcolm was about the importance of the unity and solidarity between people of African descent.
Attendees at the 100th birthday event included youth, young adults and senior citizens who responded to the meaningful music, poets and heard from people who testified that they had been uplifted by hearing and reading about Brother Malcolm. Drawing from my years as an assistant to Brother Malcolm, who listened intently to his every word and documented his vision in the “Blacklash”, the newsletter of his Organization of African-American Unity (OOAAU), I left this message with those in attendance:
What I would love to see Black people do is set up concrete organizations and institutions that focus on education, economics, culture, communications, psychology and unity. We must come together in unity around those particular arenas, study what Brother Malcolm said we must be doing in each of them and then we must take action on each of them in order to protect ourselves inside of this basically White supremacist society.
PBFIA organizational members, which included yours truly Prof. A. Peter Bailey, Dr. Sharon Conn, Ibrahim Mumin, Keith Hunter, David Dennison, Josh Meyers and Thomas Penny with significant support from Howard University Africana Studies Professor Dr. Greg Carr; Tehuti, an aide to Earl Grant; and Abel, a technician from Sankofa Video & Books, one of Brother Malcolm’s closest friends, are to be commended for honoring and thanking Brother Malcolm for his obvious love for his people.
This full event can be viewed on the YouTube page of Sankofa Video & Books
