Najee Muhammad visited Cleveland's Cory Methodist Church in 1999 -- the church where Malcolm X gave his famous "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech more than three decades earlier.
In the surrounding black community, Muhammad saw drugs being sold in the streets, prostitution, empty lots and abandoned houses. Conditions like this in the United States are the same kind of conditions that exist on the continent of Africa, Muhammad said at the L.A. Pittenger Student Center Ballroom Thursday.
In his speech titled "Africa is Where You Are," Muhammad, associate professor of cultural studies at Ohio University, highlighted the similarities between America and Africa and explained how blacks and whites are both the products of African ancestors.
As hunger and AIDS exist on both continents, young children in Sierra Leone, Africa, are engaging in civil war while young people in the United States are using the same kind of weapons against each other, he said.
"We tend to think there's a disconnect, and I'm here to tell you there's not a disconnect," he said. "If there is a disconnect, it's because the forces that exist and have existed have sought to disconnect us."
Muhammad encouraged blacks in the audience of nearly 60 students to remember their roots.
"If you think you're not African, you need to rethink your condition," he said. "If you're a person of African descent ... if you go back far enough, you were a slave. Chances are that someone in your family was an enslaved African. That's how you got here. You didn't come over here on the Mayflower. You came over here on a slave ship."
Muhammad said to Caucasian students the role they have in ending racism by redeveloping a society that identifies with the humanity of all people.
"Don't expect black people to end it," he said. "They didn't start it."
Muhammad's research interests at Ohio University include Pan-African history, the institution of slavery in the United States and the education and pedagogy of Malcolm X. He is co-editing a book on Malcolm X's educational leadership.
Muhammad's speech encouraged sophomore Devin Day to read more about Malcolm X, he said.
"I thought it was very interesting," Day said. "A lot of the topics I heard of before, but I haven't heard them in that perspective."
Greg Bourassa, graduate student in secondary education, said he especially enjoyed Muhammad's emphasis on the pursuit of truth.
"It was really insightful," Bourassa said. "I like the fact that he said to seek out yourself. He's more about the the process than the actual product."
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