The first time I attended a Malcolm X Day Celebration was in 1969, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. It had a theme of promoting unity in the Black community and included activist speakers like Jitu Weusi along with music from artists who were featured at The EAST, a renowned progressive venue. This event is a prominent recollection because it became the basis for the Malcolm X Day Celebration in Washington, D.C.
By Charles C. Stephenson, Jr.
At the time, I was 22 years old, living in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and working in Citibank’s Wall Street office. My community activist efforts mainly occurred through an organization called Black Liberty Thru Black Unity (BLBU), which I had co-founded with my childhood friend Raymond “Omar” Johnson. My work with BLBU and other groups made me want to get more involved in creating social justice for African Americans, and I embraced “Black Power” as the essential element to confront issues that affected our community. I believed Washington, D.C. was the best place for me to exponentially grow these efforts, so a year later, I left New York and changed my career focus from business to community organizing.
As luck would have it, my first job in D.C. was working with former Congressman Walter Fauntroy to organize Southeast Washington residents and encourage them to participate in the bus boycott of D.C. Transit. Afterwards, I worked with the National Peace Action Coalition to organize a mass demonstration on April 24, 1971, in opposition to the Vietnam War. These sequential introductions to life in Washington, D.C., anchored my passion to mobilize and organize our community. It was a clear path for me: coalescing our efforts in mass demonstrations was the only way for Blacks in America to achieve social justice and improve all our lives.
I believed in the movement and the moment: Black Power was the organizing cry that I operated under to teach people that collective work and responsibility would lead to greater achievements in America. However, I knew that in order to establish a mass movement, we had to mobilize not only the educated but more importantly, to reach those citizens who suffer daily from American injustices.
