Sunday, September 30, 2012

Chicago City Desk: Minister Malcolm X (1963)


Source: PASMA SOBUKWE BRANCH- Nation of Islam Minister Malcolm X in 1963.

Source:The Daily Press

“Malcolm X Interview in Chicago City Desk March 17, 1963” 


“City Desk,” WMAQ-Ch. 5’s local newsmaker interview show launched 57 years ago and folded into the NBC-owned station’s Sunday-morning news program in 1996, goes away completely after this weekend.

The final edition of “City Desk” is set for the 9:30 a.m. half hour on Sunday. Hosted by Mary Ann Ahern and Carol Marin, it will be a retrospective of the program’s run, which featured such panelists as John Chancellor, Len O’Connor, Jim Ruddle, John Dreiske and Dick Kay.”  

From the Chicago Tribune

"March 1963, , Malcolm X on City Desk. Classic Malcolm at a time when he was a key Minister of the Nation of Islam. This is some time before he split with the Nation of Islam." 

Source:Floyd Webb- Nation of Islam Minister Malcolm X in 1963.

From Floyd Webb

This was an interesting interview, because a group of Chicago and national journalists, who were interviewing Malcolm X, because Malcolm X a clear revolutionary leader for African-Americans, calling for their independence from public assistance and America as a whole. That Africans in America should no longer tolerate bigotry, poverty and anything else that’s holding down Africans in America. That they should no longer tolerate these conditions and that they should stand up and fight back against the establishment that they saw as the problem that was holding them down.

Minister Malcolm was also arguing that African-Americans need to grab their constitutional rights and no longer taken them for granted and expect other Americans to enforce them for them, because in the early 1960s, African-Americans, weren’t getting their constitutional rights enforced equally as Caucasian-Americans.

Here Malcolm X was being interviewed by clear establishment figures, people from the so-called mainstream media, from Chicago, as well as NBC News in this interview. So you had a rebel being interviewed by establishment figures in this interview.

I love Minister Malcolm’s point about the names and the turn Negro with African slaves being given European and in most cases Anglo-Saxon names. And not just being kidnapped and taken from their homes in Africa, but also getting their culture, history and even their names being stripped from them.

Africans still live in America as full-blooded Africans, but having to carry names like Joe Smith and Tom Johnson, even though their family originally had a Bantu, or Zulu first and last name. Depending on what part of Africa that they came from and their ethnic background. I just don’t think these men were prepared to question someone with the intelligence and knowledge of history that Malcolm X was. 

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