> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Charting a Better World Through Malcolm X’s New York
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/charting-a-better-world-through-malcolm-x-new-york/
- Published: 2024-09-17T20:51:36.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:08:19.000Z
- Description: A new essay collection contextualizes the activist’s life through the physical spaces that nurtured him, like Yuri Kochiyama’s apartment-turned-community center.
- Author: Shameekia Shantel Johnson
- Tags: Books, Malcolm X, New York, Review, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-large, #Import 2025-11-24 09:36 (2023, 2024, part 2)

Malcolm X’s name alone evokes an array of images and social connotations that anchor him in the public zeitgeist as a hyper-militant Black man, provoked by racism yet driven by self-determination. Unlike other dearly beloved leaders and writers of the modernist era such as Toni Morrison and [James Baldwin](https://hyperallergic.com/celebrating-the-singular-beauty-of-james-baldwin-god-made-my-face/) — whose life’s work has arguably been overdubbed — Malcolm X is rarely afforded the same dimensionality. That is, until now.

Aptly titled *Mapping Malcolm* (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City), a new essay collection charts the topography of the political leader’s life and ever-evolving stances toward politics, religion, and love. By exploring the ways Malcolm X was shaped by the context of his built environment, jumping from geographical markers from Nebraska to Harlem in the years before his assassination in 1965, editor Najha Zigbi-Johnson and a series of contributors — including writers, artists, and activists — offer up a blueprint to redesign our world.

From the gilded typeface to the maroon cover, the book’s design by Albert Hicks IV and Marcus Washington Jr. of [Ayem](https://www.withayem.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com) immediately plants us in emblems of Islamic faith that orient the reader to a tender experience with their subject. The impassioned conversations, speculative essays, and yielding artworks within mimic the intimacy of reading holy scripture.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/09/mapping-malcolm-cover.jpg)

But in this case, converting the reader is the point. The book oscillates between two transitory junctures of Malcolm X’s political awakening: how he found the Nation of Islam to become a Black nationalist, and how he left it for Sunni Islam and to become a human rights advocate, fighting against global imperialism. In her essay “Moving in Thought: Malcolm X and Black Space-Time,” curator Ladi’Sasha Jones outlines the transformative power of the firebrand’s multi-scalar humanitarianism, which led him to establish the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964.

Elsewhere in the book, a transcript of a conversation between scholars Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra and Denise Lim underscores the interracial solidarity between Malcolm X and Japanese-American activist Yuri Kochiyama, whose granddaughter Akemi Kochiyama is another featured contributor. Archival images of Kochiyama in her Manhattanville projects apartment, which is decorated with protest ephemera and was a site of abolitionist meetings of which Malcolm X was a part, have been remodeled by Zakiyyah Haffejee and Adam Osman as a 3D diagram to emphasize how the space also functioned as a library and community center. In the moments we see his comrades shine, we remember that the sun doesn’t rise and set on Malcolm X alone.

Urban studies scholar Darien Alexander Williams takes a different tack, instead highlighting Malcolm X’s impact on revolutionary Black music through the likes of drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln, providing a playlist one can sit with to embrace liberation through sound. Such critical reframing of Malcolm X’s complex legacy warps a traditional sense of place, reminding us of our capacity to wholly transform the physical structures we inhabit through daily acts of defiance.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2024/09/architecting-friendship-a-spatial-commemoration-of-yuri-kochiyama.jpg)

Spread from Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra and Denise Lim's "Architecting Friendship: A Spatial Commemoration of Yuri Kochiyama" in *Mapping Malcolm*, including a photo of Yuri Kochiyama with her stuffed animal collection and a digital rendering of movement in her New York City apartment

[Mapping Malcolm](http://bookshop.org/a/539/9781941332832?ref=hyperallergic.com) *(2024), edited by Najha Zigbi-Johnson, is published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, and is available online and through independent booksellers.*