Egypt Otis had a simple motivation for starting her latest project: recording and preserving as much of the historical record as she could find about the time Malcolm X spent in Flint.
“When you hear about Malcolm X and his legacy, you hear about his time in Lansing and Detroit, then going into Harlem, but what about Flint?” said Otis, a Flint native and the owner of Comma Bookstore & Social Hub. “He was here. He lived here briefly and I thought this topic would be a great opportunity for me to publish my first issue of Hood Archives AudioZine.”
In the 1940s, Malcolm X briefly worked as a janitor at AC Spark Plug and lived in a boarding house on Liberty Street that has since been torn down, according to Flint Journal archives. Later, in the 1960s, he made several trips to Flint for meetings and speaking engagements – and was surveilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigations during those visits according to documents later released in the FBI’s vault.
But Otis was interested in learning much more than just the fact that he spent time here. What did he say when he was in Flint? Who was he with? Who heard him speak? As a master’s student studying archival administration at Wayne State University, her passion is preservation of audio files, periodicals, and other pieces of history. She put those personal passions and the skills she’s learned in her program to use on this project.
She started by thinking about the people who heard him speak during an event at the IMA Auditorium on October 27, 1963, knowing at least some of them must still be alive, and set about trying to track down any who might still be in the area.
“When I put it out there that I was doing this work and researching this, people started coming to me,” she said. “So the first thing I was thinking was who was there? That’s when the Nation of Islam was having these series of speaking engagement events called Elijah Speaks. I figured that there had to be someone who was in attendance that day who could give a firsthand account.”
Through relationships she has with some members of the Nation of Islam, she was able to track down Brother William T.X., who was one of the first Nation of Islam members in Flint. He’s in his early 90s now and lives outside of the area, but came to the bookstore and shared his experiences.
“He came up here and he was really open,” Otis said. “He was comfortable with giving me an oral history. So that kind of started the process of collecting this history from someone who was actually there. And it gives you just more context of the event, like what was occurring during that time, what Flint and the culture of Flint was like during that time, and just specifically what Malcolm X spoke about that day.”
That wasn’t the only breakthrough for the project, though. The family of a former Flint community leader happened to find a box that contained two audio reels. They didn’t know what was on them, but they were labeled ‘Malcolm X.’
“Come to find out, it was Malcolm X and all of the other Nation of Islam members who were present during that speech,” Otis said.
The reels had not been stored in the typical environment-controlled space that such rare historical items would be if they were in a museum or archive facility, so they were in delicate shape. With help from Kimberly Schroeder, a faculty member at Wayne State, and use of the university’s Digital Media Projects Lab, Otis was able to create a digitized version of the reels and listen to them completely.
“I was able to be one of the first people to listen to it from start to finish up to the point where the police raided the event and then it stopped after that,” she said. “So some of those excerpts and some of that insight is also inside of the AudioZine. That’s the only thing in existence that gives us any insight into what actually happened that we can hear and witness ourselves.”
The Hood Archives AudioZine is a recurring publication in which Otis intends to document different rare historical artifacts and audio archives like sermons, speeches, radio broadcasts and more. Her intent is to expose or re-expose new audiences to these often forgotten historical words and events. Issue 1 is titled, “Malcolm X Visits the Flint IMA.’ It includes a print booklet with historic photos as well as excerpts from the speech, from Brother William T.X.’s oral history, and a SoundCloud audio link meant to accompany the print publication. Copies can be purchased in the store or ordered online, and Otis’ work can be followed on Instagram.
“He does have Flint roots and he mentioned it when he opened for Elijah Muhammad,” Otis said. “He talks about his relationship with Flint and how some of his roots started here. I think that it’s just important that we get the full picture of his life. And you have to include Flint in that.”
For Otis, she’s long been passionate about combining historic preservation with a desire to make those items easily accessible for new generations to engage with, and her background at Wayne State has prepared her to add the technical expertise to take those passions further.
“I’m a curator of cultural events and I’m a collector,” Otis said. “I collect Black ephemera in the form of periodical rare books and oratory spoken word albums. So I was kind of already doing some of this work, and then wanted to find out, how do I actually preserve it? How can I make this accessible to people? I’ve been able to go to school and do something that I really love and learn how to do it in a traditional context so I can make myself more useful to people and just do it on a larger scale.”
She also has a focus on her hometown. Flint has an incredible history, but there are gaps in it because many important portions of it are recorded only in the minds and stories of people who have lived it, not actually documented and preserved. She also hopes the work she’s doing in creating her AudioZine encourages more people to get into historic preservation and archival work.
“I want more people to hopefully become interested in this work in Flint,” she said, “I wanna establish memory work in Flint and for people to get interested in it. There’s a lot more history that’s out there that we need to engage with in Flint before it becomes lost, before people start to pass away with those stories, and then we can’t find them anymore. That’s something that I do want to do and kind of give back, helping restore these stories in a way where it can reach a multitude of audiences.”
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