February 21 · This Day in America
He is thirty-nine. He has just stepped to the lectern at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, his wife and four daughters in the front rows, when gunmen rush the stage and cut him down. Malcolm X had spent his life refusing to be quiet — first as the fierce voice of the Nation of Islam, then, after a pilgrimage to Mecca and a break with that movement, as a man whose thinking was visibly enlarging, reaching toward a wider human solidarity. He had said plainly that he expected to be killed and did not fear it. His autobiography, finished just before his death, became one of the most-read American lives ever written, handed quietly between generations. Decades later, two men convicted of the murder were exonerated. The argument he forced America to have with itself did not end with him. It outlived the bullets, which was the one thing they could not take.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1885
After nearly forty years — interrupted by money troubles and a civil war that left it a half-built stump — the Washington Monument is formally dedicated. At 555 feet it is the tallest structure on Earth. The break in its marble, a faint change of color partway up, is still visible: the seam where the country stopped building, fought itself nearly to death, and came back to finish.
Source: www.history.com
“I'm a man who believes that I died 20 years ago, and I live like a man who is dead already. I have no fear whatsoever of anybody or anything.”Malcolm X, 1965