Betty Shabazz, a college administrator and widow of Malcolm X, had three wishes for the students in the audience at the University of Utah on Thursday, when she delivered the keynote address for Black Awareness Month.
Shabazz said: "I wish you power equal to your intelligence and strength. I wish you success equal to your talent and determination. I wish you faith in yourself equal to the faith my husband had in himself."The theme of this year's Black Awareness activities is "And Still I Rise." The focus is on the black woman's voice in the history and culture of America. As Shabazz talked of the accomplishments of various black women throughout history, she kept coming back to today's students. She praised them for studying and becoming intellectuals. She prompted them to take responsibility for their own lives.
As for herself, Shabazz became responsible for her own life and the lives of her six small children 30 years ago, when her husband was murdered before their eyes.
Three fellow Muslims were arrested for shooting Malcolm X. The sound of those shots still echoes through her life. Just last month, Shabazz's daughter Quibilah was arrested and charged with conspiring to kill Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a man Betty Shabazz once said was involved in her husband's death.
The Shabazz family has said Quibilah was entrapped by the FBI. At the University of Utah, Shabazz made it clear she would not answer questions about the arrest, yet her daughter's plight was clearly on her mind.
At the time of Malcolm's death, Betty Shabazz was a traditional Muslim wife and homemaker. As Malcolm X himself described her, she was retiring and modest. But she was also educated as a nurse. After his death she got more education: a master's degree in public health and later a doctorate in education.
On Thursday, Shabazz sounded like an educator. She engaged her audience with humor and by asking them rhetorical questions. "Why do we need to study Phyllis Wheatley? It was assumed people who looked like Phyllis Wheatley could not be educated. Is that not so?"
"Is that not so?" Shabazz asked her audience, over and over. She talked of Sojourner Truth, who had 13 children, all sold into slavery, "with no one to hear her grief except Jesus" and who worked for women's suffrage.
She reminded the students that a lot of people went through a lot of pain to get to where we are today. You don't have to relive the pain, she said, just learn the history and the precedent and go from there.
When several young people in the audience asked her to help prevent the closing of the Clearfield Job Corps, Shabazz told them to write letters to their representatives in Washington. They said they had. She told them to write three, four and five letters a day.
They asked her again to help them. "I'll send you a check," she said. "That's not what we need," they said. Shabazz said, "Make a covenant with other ethnic groups." Shabazz advised banding together with others to demand educational opportunities. "Get the community behind you," she said.
"Some people in the community don't like us because we come to town to enjoy ourselves in our leisure time," the students said.
"Then you have to do some housekeeping," Shabazz told them, explaining that no one wants a noisy neighborhood when they are trying to sleep. "You can't just let it all hang out.
"Get your parents to help you," Shabazz counseled, finally. "They live in the East," one young woman replied. "They can't come."
"Well I never thought I could go to Minnesota, either," Shabazz said, referring to the place where her daughter is awaiting trial. "But I'm there every weekend."
They are your parents, she reminded the students. If you need them, they'll come.