Word: hakim
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...Malik Hakim was born in the joint...
...delivery was slow and not without complications. It began in 1955 when Hakim along with two other cons organized an art class. "That was the transitional point. That was the point of moving from that rancid cancerous feeling about white folks to the point of starting to see myself, you know, beginning to understand myself, and if you remember, it was about this time that Malcolm began to speak in public. Brothers in the joint began to hear a black man articulating the thing that they couldn't articulate. We began to take a certain pride in being black...
This emerging pride in being black was reflected in changes in the life-style of Hakim and other cons at Jeff City. "They feed a lot of starch and pork in prison. Now anybody that knows anything about diet knows what that does to your body. So we began to educate the brothers about diet so that the brothers was walking past the pork chops. The man couldn't relate to that because it used to be a time brothers used to steal pork chops. But now they was walking past the pork chops and stealing the hamburgers, you know...
...Hakim and many of the other black inmates, this new pride in blackness was related to their involvement in Islam and their subsequent discovery of aspects of black history that had not been a part of the education they had received in the public schools. This discovery awakened in Hakim and his brother cons a desire to obtain other knowledge and skills they had missed. Prevented from obtaining this knowledge in the prison schools because of the tracking system. "We began to conduct our own classes. We had brothers there from Lincoln University and so forth. So the cats began...
Then again, it isn't every black man in prison who has had the same experience Malik Hakim had when he received a visit from Malcolm X in 1957. "To meet Malcolm for the first time in the life of a black man, to have been deaf, dumb and blind, is like walking into a totally pitch black room and someone turns on a million-watt light bulb. It was probably the most beautiful, the most painful experience I've ever had. Look at it like this. Christians pray to Jesus and if Jesus walked into their rooms they would...