By Benjamin Ames, Staff Reporter
Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of Malcolm X's assassination and Donald Lasky, the 11th-grade U.S. history teacher at William H. Taft High School in Morris Heights, wants his students to remember.
Malcolm X, who was fatally shot in a Manhattan ballroom while addressing his followers, is a role model to 17-year-old Rafael Maloney.
"Malcolm never went past the eighth grade," Maloney said, "but you wouldn't know it to talk to him because he learned the whole dictionary in jail."
To make the issues of the civil rights movement in the 1960s relevant in today's world, Lasky asked his students to speculate on the conversation King and Malcolm X would have if they met in the afterlife and took a critical look at the South Bronx today. They disagreed on whether the two slain rights leaders would be pleased with the status of blacks in the borough.
Last Friday he asked his students to evaluate the methods used by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to promote equality and justice for blacks.
Santiago Gonzales, 17, said King's were better. "He wanted everybody together and Malcolm wanted separation," he said.
Lasky rearranged his second semester curriculum so that he'd teach the African-American aspects of U.S. history in February -- Black History Month.
Although school won't be in session this week, several schools commemorated Malcolm X's life in their own ways. At Jane Addams High School, students use the public address system every day this month to read short biographies of blacks from all walks of life.
At Morris High School, there was a recent "Stop the Violence" program in the school auditorium, and on Feb. 27 and 28 several students will read their own poetry.
The Abyssinian Baptist Church, 132 W. 138th St., Harlem, has scheduled a commemorative program on Malcolm's life and work at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 21.