The Smithian

...playing at ... [Los Angeles'] Rogue Theater through July 28 is “One Night in Miami…”, which imagines a hotel room confab between Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown, and Cassius Clay.

The burdens of a public life, of living as a symbol of some vast and unquenched yearning, are well-known, but few among us understand with the terrible insight of the Shabazz family what it means to die that way. Malcolm Shabazz, activist, blogger, and grandson of Malcolm X, died Thursday in Mexico City at the age of twenty-eight. His is the seventh untimely death in an index of lamentation that spans four generations. For many years now it has been quietly known and seldom spoken that both Martin and Malcolm’s heirs occupy a space on the far end of some bell curve of suffering. The specifics—King’s brother drowning little more than a year after his assassination, his mother gunned down in the sanctuary where he and his father pastored, Betty Shabazz’s death after a fire in her home—seem both too crucial to forget and too cruel to recognize with any frequency.

"Despite the significant tragedy, my mother refused to live her life as a victim."

...story of the relationship between the wives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and how they developed a strong friendship as single mothers following their husbands’ assassinations...

...it was the idea of a somehow more authentic Obama, angry and rage filled, that exists out there. It is what the right dreams about late at night that somehow President Obama will lose his shit and lash out at white America...Beck saying O hated white people, the entire right saying there is a Michelle Obama tape that says how much she hates white people, this last thing with the Hampton speech. It is all a desire, an imperative on the part of conservative America to depict President Obama as angry. And because it is so powerful a meme, it is the only real way I see the President losing this cycle. Therefore, his top priority always has to be, remain calm. Like Jackie Robinson...UCLA, War hero, calm in the face of overt racism. Jackie had the temperament to win for all black people—to take the insults, disrespect, and perform at an extraordinary level. President Obama isn’t Martin or Malcolm; he’s Jackie Robinson. He has to let the haters in America call him out to his face and remain calm. He has to let the cheaters cheat, and remain calm. He has to swallow his instinct, which is probably to laugh in the face of people who are demonstrably lying, in order to remain reasonable.

It ain’t sexy but it is winning.

...brow line eyeglasses—the kind favored by Malcolm X—have landed in the hipster bargain bin. Leave it to Tom Ford to rescue them with this exquisite version made of gold-plated metal and water buffalo horn, the way they used to be in the 1960s.

A brilliant new book recasts the Civil Rights activist not as a redemptive symbol but as a political tactician...

A feud over the estate of Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, has created divisions among the couple’s six daughters and has resulted in something none of them had intended: keeping part of their father’s legacy from the public.