“In order to go forward, you must know the roots and origins,” Ilyasah Shabazz told a group of Riverview Gardens High School students Friday at the Riverview Gardens Family and Community Resource Center.
“I’m a big advocate of history and understanding of who we are.”
Shabazz herself has remarkable roots and origins. She is the daughter of El Haaj Malik El-Shabazz, better known to the world as Malcolm X.
The Ethics Project brought Shabazz and motivational speaker Victor Woods to St. Louis to offer students encouraging words of self-empowerment and to urge the importance of literacy.
“If you believe in yourself and apply yourself, you can become anything, no matter what your circumstances are,” said Woods, author of the memoir A Breed Apart: A Journey to Redemption.
Christi M. Griffin, founder and president of The Ethics Project, said students need guidance from adults with relevant life experiences.
“We forget those are the youth that we have failed,” Griffin said. “Reach out to them, they want to be seen and heard. When you have an expectation, they’ll exceed it.”
Clarissa Reel said she and other students benefited from the experience.
“Hearing Shabazz and Woods speak was exactly what the students here at the high school needed to hear,” Reel said.
“It was very encouraging to us all. Shabazz is truly a walking, breathing message to ‘wake up’ from history.”
Shabazz shared life experiences recorded in her book, Growing Up X, about growing up as a Muslim and the daughter of Malcolm X, then one of the most feared men in America.
“You are not alone,” Shabazz encouraged the students. “Breathe and find empowerment.”
Woods’ experience relates to growing up in a high-class household, then becoming a criminal and landing in prison.
“What you face pales in comparison to what you’ve been through,” Woods said. “Make a way out of no way. No excuses. Most of our brilliant children come out of poverty.”
Reel was impressed with how Woods found humor in his painful experiences.
“Woods was the most hilarious motivational speaker I’ve ever experienced. His stories of imprisonment really put enough fear in our boys to make them straighten out their behavior,” Reel said.
“He was down-to-earth and honest with us, which is what we as young people don’t usually get with many adults.”
Another student, Trevion Scott, said their messages had the intended encouraging effect.
“This profound experience has marked an important date in my life,” Scott said.
“It has changed me as a person, as well as a student. With the knowledge gathered from today’s presentation, I’m prepared to go back to school and make a change.”
The program fit into the Riverview Gardens School District’s new student behavior initiative called Positive Behavior Instructional Supports program.
The mission of The Ethics Project is to reduce the impact of crime, wrongful prosecutions and mass incarcerations by increasing collaboration of agencies and ministries that serve those most affected by crime and by raising the bar on ethical conduct within the system.
Its founder, Griffin, encouraged the students: “Take the Malcolm X message and revive it.”
Malcolm’s daughter delivered the revived message of a man who changed his life by becoming a serious reader and writer while incarcerated for burglary.
“If we are to live purpose-driven lives and not just exist, we have to read,” Shabazz said.
“You have a choice in life – live aimlessly or exist in life and take full advantage of what life has to offer.”
For more information, visit ProjectEthics.org.
