Supporters of Malcolm X ask why he isn’t in Nebraska Hall of Fame already

OMAHA — Only a few blocks from the birthplace of Malcolm X, a parade of Omahans called Wednesday evening on a state commission to induct the famed civil rights leader into the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

Their main question: Why isn’t he in the Hall of Fame already?

“You are doing something that the world has already acknowledged. You just have to catch up with them,” said Leo Louis, president of the board of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, which operates a visitors center at Malcolm X’s birthplace near 35th and Evans Streets.

20 support Malcolm X

The six-member State Hall of Fame Commission took two hours of public testimony Wednesday night at the Revive Center, near 24th and Lake Streets, concerning the eight nominees this year to join the state hall, located at the State Capitol in Lincoln.

Twenty of the 23 people who testified said it was time that Malcolm X, who was born as Malcolm Little in Omaha in 1925, should be inducted. One testifier, Creighton University journalism professor emeritus Eileen Wirth, said both Malcolm X and Louise Pound, University of Nebraska professor and author, should be enshrined.

Advocates for Malcolm X said he had been honored in many cities, through the naming of schools and streets, and was celebrated in a Hollywood movie and an autobiography by Alex Haley, but still he had not  gotten the recognition he deserves in the state of his birthplace.

‘It’s time’

“We should not even have to ask. It’s time,” said Preston Love Jr., an Omaha activist and instructor who conducts heritage tours of North Omaha. The most requested stop, he said, is Malcolm X’s birthplace.

Malcolm X would become the first African-American to join Nebraska’s Hall of Fame. Among the current 26 members are Buffalo Bill Cody, authors Willa Cather and John Neihardt, Boys Town founder Father Flanagan and Ponca Chief Standing Bear.

But past attempts to induct Malcolm X have failed, in part because he lived less than a year in Nebraska before his family fled the state because of harassment from the Ku Klux Klan. One criterion for induction into the Nebraska Hall of Fame is that a person’s “residence in Nebraska” was important in influencing their life and contributing “to their greatness.”

Supporters of Malcolm X said Wednesday that his family would have stayed longer in Omaha had they not been terrorized. His father, a minister, was active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which led to the family’s being targeted.

They said his family’s experience in Omaha did influence his life’s work.

Misportrayed by historians

“I think Malcolm X goes beyond artificial borders,” said Franklin Thompson, a former Omaha City Council member who teaches race relations at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Thompson, who recently announced his retirement as the City ofOmaha’s Human Rights and Relations director, said Malcolm X has been misportrayed as a “radical” and someone who had a rift with Martin Luther King Jr., another leading civil rights leader of the 1960s.

“He actually wanted peaceful change,” Thompson said, in calling for African Americans to empower themselves, become educated and seek freedom, justice and equality “by any means necessary.”

That phrase, Thompson told the Hall of Fame Commission, was “a kissing cousin” to the phrase uttered by a founding father of America, Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty, or give me death.” 

A role model

Other supporters of Malcolm X called him an inspirational role model for transformation. Malcolm Little was basically an orphan, and a street criminal, before converting to Islam in prison and rejecting the temptations of prostitution, gambling and alcohol.

Barry Thomas, who taught social studies in the Omaha Public Schools for 19 years, said his life and outlook were transformed after reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” in college. He said he has met others who became educators after reading the transformation of Malcolm Little into Malik el-Shabazz.

Ron Hull, who chairs the six-member Hall of Fame Commission, said the board will hold one more session to take public testimony Monday at 6 p.m. at the Phelps County Historical Society in Holdrege.

Three finalists will be chosen at an Aug. 12 meeting at the State Capitol, Hull said, with a final selection being made Sept. 12.

The other nominees are: 

• Famed baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander of Elba, the third winningest pitcher of all time.
• Calvin Chapman of Nebraska City, said to be a key figure in the Underground Railroad and a former mayor. 
• Elzada Urseba Clover, born in Auburn, the first botanist to catalog plants in the Grand Canyon.
• Howard Hanson of Wahoo, a composer, educator and champion of classical music who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his Symphony No. 4.
• Ernst H. Herminghaus of Omaha and Lincoln, a landscape architect who designed Lincoln’s Pioneers Park.
• The Rev. Hiram Hisanori Kano of Litchfield, a Japanese-American Episcopal priest who was considered a saint by the Episcopal Church.
•  Emma Louise Pound of Lincoln, author and folklorist. She taught English at the University of Nebraska and was a pioneer in linguistic studies. A skilled tennis player and golfer, Poundwas the only woman in NU history to earn a men’s varsity letter.