Amina Rachman's life of service and activism

A headline about Malcolm X broke through my mass-media boundaries recently, who was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965, while delivering a speech in Manhattan.

- RACHEL SAMPSON Special to the AmNews

Had my aunt Amina not been traveling with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) down south at the time, she would have been on the stage when he was shot and killed. While still a teen, it had been one of her jobs to introduce him before his speeches at the Audubon Ballroom.

My aunt, Amina Rachman, was just settling into her hard-earned retirement and working on a memoir when cancer took her all too suddenly on Sept. 25, 2011. She was going to call it “From X to Aleph (),” an apropos title for her journey from Christian to Muslim to Jewish convert (‘Aleph” being the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet).

Born in Harlem in 1948 as Sherron Jackson, my aunt became Sharon 10X in the Nation of Islam, Amina Abdur Rahman in Islam, and ultimately Amina Rachman before becoming a bat mitzvah at her Brooklyn synagogue in her 50s.

Her career in public service and political and social activism began in high school with SNCC. She met Malcolm (as she called him) while participating in an early morning demonstration against Harlem Hospital before school. She quickly became close to him for the next two years until his death. His late wife, Betty Shabazz, told my aunt just after his death that her husband saw Amina as another daughter. Amina was interviewed in the ’90s for the “PBS documentary about Malcolm X's life called “Make it Plain’.