Malcolm Was Here

This spring, amid the tents of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Columbia students gathered to strategize, sleep, eat, and read. Speeches and performances of music and dance enlivened the neoclassical campus. Now, a few months later, the fenced-off lawn is profoundly empty. Its grass is no duller a green than that of Columbia’s other parched midsummer lawns, but absent the life of the encampment, the area is somehow more arid, more deeply hollow. Fifty blocks north, part of the university’s medical school occupies the same building as the former Audubon Ballroom, the central meeting space for Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and the site of his assassination on February 21, 1965. Originally slated for demolition, the former vaudeville palace came to share space with the university in 1990, after Black political organizations, the Harlem community, and Columbia students rallied to block its destruction, one small batt…