For Betty: Remembering The Love of Revolutionaries
Whenever I feel too tired, when I feel weighed down by the day’s indignities, when being a Black Muslim woman living in the United States feels like a perpetual fight between a desire to simply live—a desire for my people to simply live—and the ideologies and structures aimed at eradicating us, when I feel like I am not doing enough, when I feel my uncomplicated love for my people is not enough to keep on keeping on, when I feel hopeless, I think about Dr. Betty Shabazz and feel strengthened by her example.
Examine closely the life and legacy of Dr. Betty Shabazz, and you’ll find not only a principled scholar, community organizer, wife, activist, registered nurse, mother, educator, but also a Black Muslim woman who believed profoundly in love as an action one must continuously show up for.
Dr. Betty Shabazz was a courageous human rights activist before meeting Malcolm X. I think many of us take for granted how much this revolutionary woman worked to preserve and protect the legacy of her husband Malcolm X. I think many of us don’t think enough about the courage it took, after instinctively using her pregnant body to shield four young daughters from a spray of bullets, to run over without hesitation to perform CPR on her dying husband.
In the decades that followed Malcolm X’s assassination, Dr. Betty Shabazz often spoke of him in the present tense; she was not a widow. Malcolm was still her husband. She loved that man, and he loved her. In interviews she gave after his assassination, she spoke about loving him enough to hold him accountable and push for a marriage of equal partnership and mutual exchange. She loved him enough to require him to grow and deepen his own commitment to fighting for human rights, a fight that necessitates working alongside Black women.
Betty kept Malcolm alive for their daughters. Towards the end of Dr. Betty Shabazz’s homegoing in 1997, their eldest daughter Attallah Shabazz gave attendees a moving insight into the depths of Malcolm’s and Dr. Betty’s love for each other: “People never imagined the amorous side of Malcolm Shabazz, the boy, man, the charmer, the man who rapped to his Apple-Brown-Betty in my presence, in my sister’s presence. And for anyone who had access to the house, you knew the mushy sweet delicate side of mighty people. So while we talk about triumph let us not rob one of being wholly vulnerable and sensitive, yearning for balance.”
Attallah went on to say about her parents, “While people may have referred to our mother as the widow of Malcolm X, there’s a closure to widowhood. She lived as the wife of Malcolm X. Her endurance was fueled because she was his woman. His pulse was with her until she made her transition. … You could picture his amber arm with his palm extended to her on that hour when she made a transition and her brown arm reaching back to him as he said ‘come on brown sugar.’ … She’s with her dance partner, they’re serenading once again. Forever after. So that’s a picture. Knowing how much she loved him and he her, that we can’t ask to trade in.”
I can’t help but reflect on how urgent it feels to remember the gentleness, the genuine whole-heartedness, and the love of the revolutionaries who shape and inform us.
We live in a world that would have us believe that resistance against oppression requires a denial of our own hearts. As if love is somehow less principled, less radical. Or worse yet, that would co-opt that love into passivity and inaction. But when I look around at the ancestors who fought endlessly for our people, all I see are their hearts and their love for our people lived aloud.
It was in part their capacity to love and the openness of their hearts that propelled Dr. Betty Shabazz and Malcolm X to speak out and resist oppression. It was principled love, in the purest sense of our understanding of love, that gave them courage to keep on keeping on, to see futures beyond the day’s propaganda machines. Beyond fear-mongering tactics that aim to dismantle collective action. It was love that kept Betty going, through bullets, bombs, and flames, love that showed up in her daily actions. Black people, Black women specifically, know love that exists beyond whatever physical or structural circumstances that attempt to chain us. Love propels and fuels the courage to fight, to resist by “any means necessary.”
In a recent interview, Malcolm and Betty’s middle daughter, Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, had this to say regarding what her parents taught her about Black love: “When I think of Black love I think that first we have to have self love. And I’m grateful that my parents made sure we had that. My mother made sure that all six of her girls learned about the significant contributions that women made to the world, the significant contributions that Islam made to the world, and the significant contributions that the African diaspora made to the world. … I think that Black love is first loving who you are so you can see others as a reflection of you.”
The United States and the world continue to give Black women a bevy of reasons to fight for our beloveds, to fight for ourselves.
Though I be tired and grieving, like my ancestors before me, like Dr. Betty Shabazz, I keep going. I keep loving the revolutionaries who blazed a trail for me, I keep loving the warriors who stand beside me in the fight now, and I keep loving myself.
May principled love and the courage it offers continue to guide our commitment to fight for human rights and justice for all oppressed peoples. May God’s peace, blessings, and mercy continue to be upon Hajjah Dr. Betty Shabazz and El Hajj Malik El Shabazz and their family. You can learn more about the living legacy of these revolutionaries by visiting The Shabazz Center.
Sagirah Shahid is a Black American Muslim poet, arts educator, and performing artist from Minneapolis, MN. She has received awards and fellowships from The Loft Literary Center, The Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Twin Cities Media Alliance, and elsewhere. In 2016 Sagirah was commissioned by the city of Minneapolis to write poems that were transformed into illuminated metal fixtures along the city's iconic Nicollet Mall strip. Sagirah's prose and poetry are published in Paranoid Tree, Terrain.org, Winter Tangerine, Puerto Del Sol, Paper Darts, Juked, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. Her children’s activity book Get Involved in a Book Club! is available for purchase at Capstone Press. Sagirah is a poetry editor with Overtly Lit.