MAY 19 CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF MALCOM X

SANKOFA*




A time to remember.......
Remember because they want us to forget........
Remember just because he was for equality for our people......
Remember him for showing us all, that you can Self Educate yourself......



Malcolm X

"My alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity."





"A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own self-hood, it can never fulfill itself.

By Malcolm X

"When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire . . . or preserve his freedom."





"Without education, you're not going anywhere in this world."



"A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything."





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Beginning in the 1960s, Malcolm was invited to participate in numerous debates, including forums on radio stations (Los Angeles, New York, Washington), television programs ("Open Mind," "The Mike Wallace News Program") and universities (Harvard Law School, Howard University, Columbia University).


In 1963, the New York Times reported that Malcolm X was the second most sought after speaker in the United States.


On June 29, 1963 Malcolm lead the Unity Rally in Harlem. It was one of the nations largest civil rights events.



In March 1964, after his split with the NOI, Malcolm forms the Muslim Mosque, Inc. Several months later, he also organizes the Organizations of Afro-American Unity (OAAU).


Malcolm's autobiography, which he worked on for two years with writer Alex Haley, was published in November 1965.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACK

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine.

Henrietta, quite possibly, got substandard care because she was black. Their treatment often began later, medication was scarcer and black patients would not question white doctors who frequently treated them inequitably, in less than equal facilities. The alternate reason for her lack of diagnosis and, perhaps, improper treatment, is that those were the days.






The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings.



HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.




Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta's small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent.


And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.



Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother's cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother?


Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance?



Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.



This book is emotionally inspiring..... THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACK.