support of the OAAU’s effort to have the United
States of America brought before the United Na-
tions on charges of violating the human rights
of African Americans. Before he moved forward
with these plans, Malcolm X was murdered at the
Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, on February 21,
- Malcolm X’s insistence on the dignity of
African culture and heritage and the centrality
of Africa in the African-American struggle for
human rights was perhaps his greatest philo-
sophical influence on the literature produced
during the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT.
Malcolm X delineated and dispersed his pow-
erful and at times strident ideas (“revolution by
any means necessary”) and ideology in his writ-
ings, The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X (1965;
written with Alex Haley) and several of his now-
classic speeches and lectures. He added his voice
to those of such important literary forerunners
as DAVID WALKER, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, HENRY
HIGHLAND GARNETT, and MARCUS GARVEY. The
best-known speeches/essays include “Message
from the Grass Roots” (1964), “The Ballot or
the Bullet” (1964), “The Oxford Debate” (1964),
and “The Last Message” (1965). The recurring
theme in these essays, as in The Autobiography,
is the need for black people to unite to defeat
white racism and black oppression wherever
they are found. For example, in “Message to the
Grass Roots” he admonishes, “We have a com-
mon enemy. We have this in common: We have
a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and
a common discriminator. But once we all real-
ize that we have this common enemy, then we
unite on the basis of what we have in common.”
Malcolm’s speeches and essays also record his
development and ideological metamorphosis to
a more global perspective and an emphasis on
human rights.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New
York: Grove Press, 1965.
Sales, William W. From Civil Rights to Black Lib-
eration: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-
American Unity. Boston: South End Press, 1994.
Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African Ameri-
can Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997.
Malachai CrawfordMama Day Gloria Naylor (1992)
GLORIA NAYLOR’s postmodern neo–slave narrative
Mama Day is set in Willow Springs, a politically
liminal space reminiscent of St. Helena’s Island.
Naylor’s narrative style is much influenced by
ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s celebration of communal
oral narrative as the true key to black history. The
oral tale telling is split between three local voices.
A chatty local insider offers a cautionary tale about
Reema’s boy, who went away to college and came
back with a tape recorder in order to write a schol-
arly account of the historical truth of 1823. Sadly,
by trusting academic methods and scientific de-
duction, he has missed the real clues embedded in
oral tradition, local history, and the legacy of slav-
ery written large on the landscape, on the tongue,
and on literal black bodies. The local guide gradu-
ally reveals Sapphira Wade’s and Mama Day’s sto-
ries and then goes to the graveyard to overhear
George and Cocoa, who offer each other their
life stories while she sits by his grave. George is a
northerner, the son of a teenage black prostitute
who abandoned him to a New York orphanage
where he learned to rely only on himself and the
present moment.
Ophelia is a provincial southerner who, after
widening her cultural experiences in New York
City, comes only slowly to appreciate her island
heritage and her special powers. In Willow Springs,
a sacred ritual ground and lush mythic ecotone,
the local Gullahs relish their geographic isolation,
negotiate storms, tease nosy anthropologists, play
tricks, tell tales, honor their ancestors, preserve
their folk culture, and evade the developers. Day
family history, we discover, begins in 1823, when
African conjure woman Sapphira Wade murdered
Bascombe Wade, her white slave owner and lover.
She first secured freedom for herself and her seven
sons, plus the deeds to the plantation, and thenMama Day 331