Learn more about where he’ll be at http://www.ambassadorprograms.org/upcomingprograms/social_sciences/cynthia-epstein.asp
It was a freezing winter and the infamous Lake Michigan winds were about to crack our bones as we walked home from the bus and El-stops late on snow covered nights. Back in our ancient apartment block it was still so cold, that we wore gloves and jackets in our abode to keep warm. Since we were spending only just less than 40 days in Chi-Town, we put up with the cold with good humor writing home, “We are doing urban camping.”
During my stay in the City of Big Shoulders, I lived in Woodlawn—not far from where the El-Train scenes from the classic film, THE BLUES BROTHERS, were filmed.
I recall being told that the local Woodlawners, a mostly pleasant but poor urban black neighborhood at that time, had howled in laughter at the “Blues Brother’s” movie scene set in their neighborhood whereby an El-Train passed in the dead of night every 25 to 30 seconds in front of the window of the main characters abode. Recall that Elwood lived in an apartment just under the El-Train.
Those Woodlawners were laughing so hard at that scene because they knew that typically one had to wait many many 10s of minutes minutes for a train or bus to pass through their neighborhood at that time of night.
It was on one of my own El-Train rides where I began to take time to read the book, Malcolm X, which my professor of urban economics, Arvis Averette, had assigned.
It was the same El-Train line that later took me out further south in the city to hand out get-out-the-vote leaflets and voter registration information in an equally depressed neighborhood of that city. Black male urban unemployment ran about 33% or more at that time in the areas south of the city with the tallest skyscrapers.
It was while reading this biography of Malcolm X that I learned for the first time that Malcolm Little had grown up on the Midwestern plains just north of Kansas where I went to high school and college. That was in Omaha in the neighboring state of Nebraska.
While reading the Haley book, I also came to appreciate for the first times some aspects of Islam and why so many Americans might be interested in the faith—but I especially comprehended why historically marginalized peoples, like America’s black community, would turn to Islam and the strong positive renewing identity it supported….
In short, from my personal perspective, Malcolm X’s journey to Mecca in the 1960s–and his personal transformations during the quarter-year he traveled there–helped open Islam (especially, the African connection to Islam) to me and my classmates as we traveled the El-Trains of Chicago……
The full post is at:
http://the-teacher.blogspot.com/2007/11/2007-racism-in-arab-worldcan-it-be.html