February marks Black History Month — an observance that has increasingly become both polarizing and pandering. But its roots actually date to February 1926, when the scholar Carter G. Woodson established Negro Achievement Week. As Woodson envisioned it, it would be more than a one-off campaign.

“It wasn’t supposed to be a flash in the pan where we throw a procession of illustrious individuals in front of folks and say, ‘Look, this is the first Black person to do this or that.’ Woodson’s [goal] was to study [Black history] all year, and then come together during the week and celebrate what has been looked at,” explains Ismael Jimenez, Director of Social Studies for the School District of Philadelphia, and an organizer of Philadelphia’s Malcolm X centennial celebration, which will be observed in Malcolm X Park this May.

It’s fitting, then, that Jimenez, along with West Philadelphia native Ikemba Balanta, a professor at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and the host of the We Charge Colonialism podcast, just launched a free, public, five-part book club focused on James H. Cone’s book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Described by The New York Times as a book that “will revise and refocus the legacies of King and Malcolm X,” Cone shatters the stereotypes of both men, giving richer context to the factors that shaped their lives, and proving how much more alike their aims actually were.

And, yes, the book club kicks off during Black History Month — but it’s a multi-part, deep dive into the text, and it culminates in May, when Malcolm X would’ve turned 100.

Here, Jimenez, who’s also an adjunct professor in Penn’s Graduate School of Education’s Urban Teacher Apprenticeship Program, explains what he hopes club participants walk away with — and why communal book explorations hold the potential to be meaningful to us all.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Jessica Blatt Press: How did the idea for this book club come to be?

Ismael Jimenez: With the [Malcolm X] centennial coming, I started having conversations with folks who are planning the Malcolm X Day event in Philadelphia about how to build excitement around it and provide a meaningful component to that excitement. Martin & Malcolm & America by James H. Cone felt like the perfect book to jumpstart [the celebration]. I’d done a book club previously on the book and the participants gained a lot of insight — one person even described it as their first introduction to Black history, and now they’re all about it.

What made you pick this book as opposed to, say, Alex Haley’s famed biography of Malcolm X, or any other number of books about Malcolm?

It’s so interesting to juxtapose these leaders in this way. Usually they’re positioned as diametrically opposed to one another. In simplistic terms, people say one’s for nonviolence and one’s for violence — which completely overlooks how Martin was raised to be a Black leader, or that while Malcolm X was in a segregated Black community, Martin was thrust into being the only Black kid in his class from a young age, living in majority White areas. [It’s fascinating ] putting all those pieces together, and then learning the lessons that they learned as they were going through these processes — not just Malcolm, but Martin — and then looking at how they perceived America through this process.

We’re living in an era of loneliness — the previous Surgeon General called attention to the perils of our isolation, and there’s been a renewed interest in ideas put forth in works like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Can you talk about your decision to do an in-person book club, and the kind of community-building that comes out of it?

It is meant to build community, and it’s supposed to engage folks in a shared learning experience. And we really want to welcome people from different, varying situations, to bring in diverse perspectives while looking at the same text and then have conversations and engage in inner subjectivity, which is the idea that you’re not listening to respond — you’re listening to learn. You are participating in order to contribute to that overall conversation.

And so when you bring in different people like that you, by default, create community. But you also develop a way where you’re no longer isolated.

We live in an age of social media when everybody feels much more “right” than the other person. But when you’re placed in a situation looking at the same text, talking about it with other people, trying to understand things, and then connecting it with your real experiences, you go deeper, you realize it’s much more complex. Book clubs, especially in-person ones, create that certain circumstance where you’re actually engaging with other people face-to-face in a very social setting, where folks can feel comfortable to have questions that they might not have thought of if they weren’t in the same room, or until someone brought up an idea that they never thought of before.

 “When you apply that lens of the legacy of Malcolm and Martin, no longer are we simply talking about Black history — we’re talking about humanity.” — Ismael Jimenez

Some people may feel shy or nervous about being vulnerable in a group setting like this — how would you ease their minds?

First, I would say that nobody knows everything and everybody knows something. And this idea that folks who don’t have a formalized degree can’t contribute deeply to a conversation is kind of what’s wrong with this society, that places so much emphasis on those types of markers of attainment of education. Most of the education that we receive every single day happens when we’re having lunch with our colleagues, when we’re learning about what’s happening, their perspective, their world, their lives, and also connecting that back to whatever we’re talking about at the time. So if we have people engaged in the same way, around subject matter such as this, you’re engaging in that way about that subject matter but you are still relating it to your experiences and you’re relating it to your life.

Nobody should feel hesitation about being in such spaces. Sure, some people don’t learn the best this way. But other people would thrive, and not only thrive but gain a deeper kind of meaning from being in such a circumstances or such situations with other people discussing such things.

There are five sessions in the book club — are you envisioning guiding people as they read the book, or expecting that people come having read it in advance?

A combination of both. I would encourage folks to register to join the book club, and when they register there are some questions we ask to help us cater to where the majority of folks entering the book club are coming from. As a longtime educator, I know that you can assign the reading, but that doesn’t mean everybody does the reading. But even a person who might not have done the reading because life happened the week before — we all get busy — will still be able to contribute to the conversation and also listen.

It’s really special that you chose to hold the series at the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple. How did you choose that venue?

We purposefully selected The Blockson Collection to highlight the fact that it is a center of learning. Charles Blockson made this collection of artifacts and materials about African American history so people could gain and learn things that he learned about. And I think that speaks to the very crux of what we are attempting to do with the book club. It’s almost a metaphor for why we’re even having a Malcolm X centennial book club — that exposure to Black history in a way that many people haven’t been exposed to it, in a space that was created for people to be exposed to Black history that they never even knew about. Or they can research even deeper, using the resources and the materials located at the collection.

It’s also a way to uplift this collection. It is one of the largest repositories of African American history and culture in the city of Philadelphia, and many people don’t even know that it exists. So just uplifting the legacy of the late Charles Blockson and what he contributed to this, while at the same time being very purposeful in bringing people into that space, being surrounded not only with the spirit of Blockson in that collection but also all the artifacts that are there and also the books that he collected.

Blockson has said, “My main goal in life is to build a good library of Black history — knowledge is a form of Black power and this is my part in it.” What is your main goal with the book club?

I hope people take away the idea of what it means to be a better human being in a society that is informed from concepts and structures built off of anti-Blackness. Because even when we talk about Black pride and Black power, it’s not in opposition of others; it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s the idea that these lessons and these people who have experienced this society throughout time have serious contributions to the human project of reaching a more free, more liberated type of society.

Humanity benefits from these types of fights. And not only fights but also ideas and [the kind of] intellectual genealogy that Martin and Malcolm were derived from, and also James Cone, who wrote the book. When you apply that lens of the legacy of Malcolm and Martin, no longer are we simply talking about Black history — we’re talking about humanity, how folks have affirmed their humanity in situations that are not meant to affirm their humanity and made the world a better place.

When you think of Martin Luther King, Jr., you think of him fighting for all Black people and all people in general; when you think of Malcolm, people tend to not think of that idea, that it extended to all humanity — but if you look at Malcolm’s life and legacy and commitment, you see, at the end of the day, that’s really what his focus was; that focus was centered on Black people, but it extended to all humanity and beyond American borders.

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