Opinion

20 years after Dr. Betty Shabazz’s death

June 2017 is the 20th anniversary of the death of Dr. Betty Shabazz, a former local resident of Mount Vernon and Yonkers. Her death involving her grandson was shocking to all of us and it was poignant for me personally, because months before I had written my first piece for the Journal News; a “community view” piece on her husband Malcolm X in February 1997.

I understand later that she read it because it was forwarded to her by someone to Medgar Evers College where she was the director of public affairs. She, like Ethel Kennedy, was pregnant at the time when their respective husbands were assassinated. We sometimes forget that people like Betty Shabazz, Coretta Scott King, and Aleida March, the widow of Che Guevara, are like many others having to raise small children without a father.

Shabazz continued the legacy of Malcolm X by making her own pilgrimage to Mecca, the holy land, as a Sunni Muslim in March of 1965. She was a registered nurse who later received her Ph.D. in higher education administration, and maintaining the effort to keep Malcolm X’s message here and internationally alive, fighting a Western world that has tried to eviscerate him from the history books.

Her impact locally was exceptional hosting the National Council of Negro Women, and when Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, after being unjustly incarcerated for 27 years in a South African prison, Shabazz introduced them in Harlem. She was courageous in her indictment of Louis Farrakhan as far as his role in her husband’s assassination.

I have over the years gone to Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, including on the 50th anniversary of his assassination, to pay homage to my hero Malcolm X, and each time I have also had the honor of paying my respects to Dr. Betty Shabazz, who is buried alongside her husband. As Ozzie Davis said when she died, “Malcolm X is welcoming his bride and saying to her, ‘A job well done.’”