THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 16, 1996 TAG: 9602160496
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DENISE WATSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
History books haven't detailed the Malcolm X who Benjamin Karim knew and shared with a packed house at Old Dominion University Thursday night.
The Malcolm X - the slain black nationalist icon of the '60s - who reserved Saturdays to take children to planetariums and museums to teach them the laws of the natural world. The Brother Minister who raised $300 for a waitress who said she couldn't smile because her teeth had rotted and fallen out. The Malcolm X who ministered, taught and worked to heal his people.
``Of all the anger - and it was there,'' stressed Karim, the former assistant to Malcolm X, ``there was compassion. You wouldn't think with all of his fiery rhetoric he had this kind of compassion. But it was there.''
Karim was at ODU yesterday as part of the school's President's Lecture Series and to commemorate Black History Month with his reflections of Malcolm X, the Muslim minister he served under for seven years. Karim was with Malcolm X when the minister was assassinated during a Harlem rally in 1965.
The Suffolk native met Malcolm X during Malcolm's rise to national fame as a galvinizer of black pride and controversial leader in the Nation of Islam sect. Malcolm X later broke from the Nation of Islam but was killed shortly afterward. Karim, who lives in Richmond, has since worked as a consultant to various movies and documentaries about Malcolm X's life and wrote the 1992 book, ``Remembering Malcolm.''
Thursday evening, Karim steered the crowd of 200 from the images of clenched fists and early-Malcolm X sound-bites - ``whites are blue-eyed devils'' - that often accompany discussions of the Muslim minister. Karim led the audience through a web of Hindu legends and roadtrips with Malcolm X to describe the man many in the audience have only read about in books or seen in pop culture.
``Malcolm had a habit of helping people,'' Karim said. ``He had a habit of charity. But you wouldn't read about that in the newspaper. When they don't like you, they write about you as if you are subhuman. . . . They didn't like Malcolm because he was intelligent.''
Karim met Malcolm X in 1957 when Karim, then known as Benjamin Goodman, walked into a religious rally in New York in search of spirituality. He found Malcolm X preaching behind a podium.
``He offered me a knowledge of history,'' Karim said in an earlier interview. ``He offered me spirituality, a concept of one creator, it brought my wild life under discipline.''
Karim said he's raised his four children and grandchildren with the lessons he learned from the man he calls affectionately ``Brother Minister.'' Karim, 63, travels extensively to share those lessons with others.
``The most important thing he ever told me was to seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave because that's what he did,'' Karim said. ``Without it, you are in darkness. Enlightenment can only come through education.'' by CNB