UQAM history professor Greg Robinson, a specialist in Asian immigration to the United States, spoke about Chinese and Japanese activists in the Black rights movement. Marie Conilh de Beyssac ended the panel with a talk comparing Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Participants at the program browsed books and other materials on display at tables set up by Pathfinder Books, the Kepkaa Creole bookstore, the Quebec Committee for the Rights of Haitian Workers in the Dominican Republic, and La pleine lune (Full moon) publishing house.

…and in Nebraska…

OMAHA—Steve Clark spoke at Black History Month meetings at two universities in this city, the birthplace of Malcolm X. Both talks were based on Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power.

A February 14 meeting at Creighton University , was sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs, Black Studies Department, Multicultural Advisory Council, Initiatives for Diversity and Education and Action, and the Pathfinder book center in Des Moines, Iowa. Participants included Walter Brooks, a leader of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, a group that organizes a visitors’ and community center at the birth site of Malcolm X in north Omaha. Ricardo Ariza, director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, chaired the meeting.

Clark explained that one of the central purposes of the book is to make the case that Malcolm X was a revolutionary leader of the working class. “Recognizing this is more important than ever today,” Clark said, “with the capitalist crisis devastating workers all over the world, including millions who are African American, and with U.S. imperialism fighting wars from Afghanistan to Pakistan and beyond.”

Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, Clark said, “is a book about the dictatorship of capital and the consequences for billions of working people the world over of the crisis of capitalist rule by a handful of propertied families. The author, Jack Barnes, does not make the claim that the establishment of a workers and farmers government will end racism, second-class status of women, or other forms of exploitation and oppression,” Clark stated. “The author makes a more modest—but very important claim—that only such a government gives working people and the oppressed the essential political instrument we need to advance the fights to eliminate these scourges once and for all.”

The following day, Clark spoke at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) sponsored by the Black Studies Department there. Among those attending were professors from the department, as well as James Freeman, director of the UNO Multicultural Affairs Office. Sharif Liwaru, president of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation in Omaha, chaired the meeting.

Several participants focused their questions and comments on the deteriorating economic conditions and inferior schools in North Omaha, a working-class area with a high percentage of African American residents. Vickey Parks, a member of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, noted the decline of Black Studies programs at universities and said she expected a social explosion like the one in Egypt could happen in Omaha’s Black community. The discussion continued for some time after the meeting.

Later Liwaru took Clark and others on a tour of the Malcolm X birth site in North Omaha and the new visitors center there.

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