February 21 Birthday
February 21, 1965: Malcolm X was preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem when three men rushed the stage and opened fire. He was hit by sixteen shotgun pellets and pistol bullets. He was thirty-nine. The assassins were members of the Nation of Islam, from which Malcolm had broken the previous year. His pilgrimage to Mecca had transformed his views on race — he had seen Muslims of all races praying together and had returned preaching a message of brotherhood that threatened the Nation's separatist doctrine. He and Martin Luther King Jr. had never collaborated, and their approaches were fundamentally different, but they were both killed at thirty-nine, three years apart, by men who feared what they represented. On February 21, 1848, The Communist Manifesto was published in London by the Communist League. It was a twenty-three-page pamphlet, written in German, with the opening line: "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." Karl Marx was twenty-nine, Friedrich Engels twenty-seven. The manifesto was commissioned by the League of the Just, a group of German emigré workers in London. It was little noticed at the time — its influence grew decades later, after Marx's Capital was published and the labor movement took hold. The manifesto's prediction that capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions has not come true; its description of how capitalism works — the commodification of labor, the concentration of wealth, the cycles of boom and bust — has proven remarkably durable. Nixon arrived in Beijing on February 21, 1972. He was greeted by Zhou Enlai, not Mao — Mao was in poor health and the meeting was not guaranteed. Mao received Nixon later that day for an hour-long conversation that ranged from philosophy to Taiwan. Nixon told Mao: "You wrote that the present is a time when the past is a parent of the future. And it is also a time when the present is one of turmoil." Mao replied: "And I wrote that myself? Well, if I did, I was just shooting my mouth off." The visit ended with the Shanghai Communiqué, in which both sides acknowledged their differences but agreed to pursue normalization. The trip fundamentally altered the Cold War balance. Nina Simone, born this day in 1933, was trained as a classical pianist at Juilliard but denied admission to the Curtis Institute — she believed because of her race. She played in Atlantic City nightclubs to support herself, mixing classical technique with jazz, blues, and folk. "Mississippi Goddam," written after the Birmingham church bombing, was banned in the South but became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. She was volatile, brilliant, and uncompromising. She died in France in 2003. Alan Rickman, born this day in 1946, was a graphic designer before he became an actor. He was forty-two when he played Hans Gruber in Die Hard, his first film role. He was sixty-one when he played Severus Snape. People born on February 21 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Amethyst and the birth flower is Violet. Historical events on February 21 include 1848: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto, 1965: Malcolm X assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, 1972: Richard Nixon arrives in Beijing for historic China visit. Famous people born on February 21 include Nina Simone (1933), Alan Rickman (1946), Erma Bombeck (1927).