First we have Beyonce's weird and wrongheaded Black Panther/Malcolm X tribute during the Super Bowl halftime show. I give her credit: she's probably the only entertainer in America who can dress as a fascist and get away with it. Here's a link with some pictures: Black Panther tribute
For the record, the Black Panthers during the 1960s were criminals and murderers masquerading as revolutionaries.. David Horowitz exposes his long encounters with them in his memoir Radical Son and details how they raped and murdered a friend of his.
As for Malcolm X, he was a schismatic from the the Nation of Islam who preached black and white separatism. He ran entirely counter to where the mainstream was heading. Meanwhile, civil rights leaders were getting real work done.
(In fairness to Beyonce, she probably knows nothing about this history. She's knows something about making money though. This is a woman who auctioned off the rights to take the first pictures of her baby.)
The distortion of Black History appears even at the local level. For a seventh grade history project, my son had to answer this question: "How did President Eisenhower crush the spirit of freedom for African Americans?" (Bonus question: And when did he stop beating his wife?" )
I made my son read the chapter on "Little Rock" in Jean Smith's outstanding biography of Ike. In his answer, he noted the Eisenhower administration's strong support of overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and how federal troops enforced desegregation of the schools in Little Rock.
He earned a 100 on his paper. Common sense still lives.
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