Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz Discusses Malcolm in the Desert, with Nikole Hannah-Jones
BPL Presents welcomes Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, NAACP Image Award Winner, who offers an extraordinary new perspective on her father’s living inheritance.
Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz was a baby when her father, Malcolm X, was assassinated. Today, she is the primary steward of her family’s legacy as Director of the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Center in Harlem. Throughout her life, she has often found herself wondering: What would Malcolm do?
To help answer this question, she followed in her father’s literal footsteps to Mecca, a journey he famously undertook after leaving the Nation of Islam. Her new book, Malcolm in the Desert: Wisdom from the Spiritual Transformation of Malcolm X, shares insight from that journey and invites readers to embark on a pilgrimage of our own, so that we too may come to better understand ourselves and our role in these challenging times.
“Liberation by any means necessary,” is the first phrase that comes to mind when many of us think of Malcolm X. We may see the iconic image of Malcolm as a sentinel at the window, an armed rebel barricaded in his own home. But Shabazz asks us to add another image to our collective memory: Malcolm as a seeker—a man with the courage to evolve through uncertainty, heartbreak, and revelation. Shabazz offers a powerful new way to understand her father’s legacy: not as a fixed ideology, but as a lived commitment to growth, discernment, and accountability that each of can apply to our own journeys in these difficult times.
PARTICIPANTS
Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz is an NAACP Image Award–winning author of six acclaimed books and a National Book Award finalist. As board chair of the Shabazz Center, she carries forward the revolutionary and humanitarian legacy of her parents, Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize, Peabody and Emmy-winning journalist at The New York Times. She is the creator of The 1619 Project, one of the nation’s most banned texts, which was targeted by federal legislation and a presidential commission under Donald Trump. Hannah-Jones is an institution builder, and this summer, she will open The North Star Books + Bar, a literary salon in her neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
BPL Presents programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
