Five years ago I would have looked at this picture, appreciated the Black men for who they were to us from a very limited understanding, and moved on. Ten years ago the only quote of Malcolm X I could remember and recite was, “By any means necessary.”
Sixty-two years ago these men crossed paths for the first and only time in their lives.
For 60 seconds.
There were no philosophical discussions.
No planned photo op for the cameras.
In the moment, just two Black men.
Today, on the sixty-second anniversary of this moment, now iconic for different reasons for different people, I see something different.
Thanks to Dr. Greg Carr, Chair of the Africana Studies Department at Howard University, scholar, historian, conductor of In Class With Carr now at 315 consecutive Saturday mornings, along with Professor Karen Hunter, who asked a simple question, “can I hit record” during the pandemic, I now have the tools to look and think deeper about this picture.
Dr. Carr introduced us to the most amazing structure to study our history—the Africana Studies Framework and the seven conceptual categories to apply when learning about our history.
Social Structures: Who Are We to Others?
Who are Africans to other people.
Non-melanated people may look at the picture and see positive and negative, Black and what it means to white(ness), hero and villain. Martin Luther King, Jr. is often quoted by white people when they feel the need to show how “woke” they are, or worse, how not racist they are. The appeal is nonviolence, affable, docile, safe, comfortable. Malcolm X is framed as violent, dangerous, hateful, Muslim, a threat to their whiteness.
That is what it looks like from the outside.
Governance Structure: Who are we to each other?
Who are we to our own community. Who were Martin and Malcolm to us at home, in closed ranks. In church, I remember as many church fans with Malcolm on the face as Martin and Mahalia. The conversations, both ethereal and ancestral, about these brothers. Malcolm talked about disagreements and how they should not be held out on the sidewalk but in the house, even in the closet. Outside of the community, it should be a united front. A lesson some of us today need to learn.
This is where the picture changes.
Because when you are looking through Social Structure, you are observing them.
When you are standing in Governance, you are seeing them.
There is no tension in that handshake. No distance in their posture. No sign that either man is measuring himself against the other through the eyes of someone else. What you see instead is something familiar, something we recognize without explanation.
Respect.
Recognition.
Kinship.
Not alignment. Not agreement. But something deeper than both.
Ways of Knowing / Systems of Thought
Who are your people and what are the systems they developed to explain their existence. The lineage, but deeper, the ancestral strings that guide us on how to live. The oral instruction manual. Dr. Carr uses the example—Step on a crack ____.
All Black people across the diaspora can finish that sentence.
We can call on the same systems both Martin and Malcolm used to navigate the challenges of living here in America. In one astonishing way, things have not changed very much. Neither of them were killed because of our systems of thought. They both challenged America’s.
I was at an event once where the attendees were predominantly white, and I was introduced to the only Black woman in the room. The first question I asked, without any forethought, was, “Who your people? Where you from?”
We immediately fell into a conversation.
Not polite. Not surface. Not searching.
Just… flowing.
Later, my white friend pulled me aside and asked, “How did you do that?”
I asked him what he meant, and he said, “You just started talking like you two had known each other for years.”
I smiled and told him, “It’s a Black thing you wouldn’t understand.”
But our ancestors would.
That kind of connection doesn’t require time. It doesn’t need explanation. It comes from a shared system of knowing, one that exists beneath language and beyond introduction.
And that’s what you’re seeing in that photograph.
Movement and Memory
How do Africans remember a moment. How do we preserve the memories of our people, and how are they passed down from generation to generation. We came here with a history captured in memory and conveyed through story. If you can get past the written narratives, which are often told through the lens of people outside of our community, you can hear our ancestors both filling in the gaps and correcting the errors to bring you closer to the truth.
Martin and Malcolm had a chance meeting in the hallways of the Senate, not as a civil rights leader and human rights activist, not as a Christian and a Muslim, not as opposition.
Two Black men.
Smiling with each other, for each other.
Not for the cameras.
Some people will look at them; most can’t see them.
Everybody will remember them. How will be different.
Neither got the opportunity to meet again, not in the social structure.
And maybe that’s the part worth sitting with, not just that they met, but what might have happened if they had the time to meet again, to continue becoming, to see where those paths might have led.
But look closely and you can feel the possibility for those in the Governance structure, understand in our Ways of Knowing, and listen to our ancestors for the Movement and Memory.
The smiles are Systems of Thought.