I dream of my late father nightly.
Memories preserved as if in amber. The way he would light up with joy and genuine amazement at sometimes the simplest moment, innovations, and revelations.
The way our eyes would meet as if we both knew the thing we were witnessing was utterly ridiculous, and we’d chuckle together. No words spoken.
But the memories I keep coming back to are at the beginning of my life and the end of his. He was there when I drew my first breath and I was there when he drew his last.
My earliest memory of my father, Al-Hajj Imam Kareem Muhammad Abdullah, is his scratchy beard on my toddler cheek. The way he would save the last syrupy dregs of coffee in the bottom of his orange mug for me to drink. Oh, I felt so grown-up. I remember the sound of his voice calling out Arabic prayers in the sweltering Alabama heat as we worshipped at the mosque.
I remember how, despite that heat, he would pile blankets on me and my eight siblings. He tucked us in so tight we could barely move. It was as if somehow his cocoon of love and patchwork quilts would keep us safe.
On his deathbed in March, I tucked my dozing father in tightly. He opened his eyes and looked right at me. He motioned for me to come closer. In a hoarse voice, he declared:
“Halimah, I don’t know what happened to our people. They don’t know themselves. They need to know themselves because they have to fight. They must keep fighting.”
Then he gave me that knowing look — the one we had always shared — and I knew he was laying a charge on me.
My father was a man of peace who knew how to fight for just causes. He had done so his entire life.
He grew up in the racially segregated South, in Mobile, Alabama, the son of self-made, well-to-do funeral home and life insurance company owners. My grandparents would pile my father, his brother, and his sister into the car as they traveled, selling life insurance. They created this business because racism often denied Black people access to funds for dignified burials or refused to bury them.
We have always taken care of our own from deaths to births.
My father told me the story of a time in the 1950s when my grandmother was pregnant with one of my aunts and desperately needed to use the restroom. They pulled over at a gas station and asked to use the bathroom. The White station owner looked at the fancy car full of “Negroes,” the pregnant woman, sweating in the Alabama heat, and told her to go squat in the fields.
So she delicately lifted the hem of her fine satin dress, adjusted her pearls, and picked her way through a cotton field to relieve herself.
My father never forgot the storm that crossed my grandfather’s face.
He talked about how it was in that moment as a child, as he came to understand just how little racist White Southerners regarded his life, his family’s lives, his mother’s life — even the life of his unborn sibling.
That was the beginning.
That was when he began to understand that if “change is gonna come,” as his beloved Sam Cooke would later sing, if his own life — and the lives of his people — were ever going to change, we would have to fight.
Others of his generation across Alabama and the South felt the same urgency.
My grandfather tried to keep my father safe. He sent his son, then known as Kenneth, to an all-boys boarding school. My father viewed it as rejection, but it was really his father’s love — his desperate attempt to protect a willful son with a revolutionary spirit from a world determined to grind him into the dust.
But Mobile, Alabama, was changing in the 1950s and ’60s.
The country was changing.
Young people like my father were helping bring about that change.
So he protested.
He marched.
He went to the Edmund Pettus Bridge one fateful day, only to discover that his aunt and cousin were there, too. Together they linked arms and hands, crossed that bridge, and demanded freedom.
He would spend the rest of his life demanding it.
When the young minister Malcolm X spoke of seizing that freedom “by any means necessary,” those words resonated deeply with my father. He would ultimately join the Nation of Islam.
Meanwhile, a young woman from Birmingham, Alabama — tired of inequality herself — was also preparing to fight. She was then known as Helene and she carried with her the grief of losing a close childhood friend in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963.
Her parents had sent her away to stay with relatives for safety, but her friend had apparently asked where she was earlier that day. She was haunted by a question she would ask herself many times over the years: what kind of hatred and evil would drive someone to murder little girls worshipping at Sunday school.
Eventually, she met my father — by then a young minister with seductive fire in his voice wrapped in a deceptively suave and calm demeanor.
Together, they became part of something new.
Emerging from the teachings of the Nation of Islam, they embraced what Malcolm X and Warith Deen Mohammed brought back from their Islamic studies and pilgrimages in the Middle East over the years.
They helped build an American Muslim community unlike anything this country or the world had ever seen.
These were descendants of enslaved Africans who rejected what had been forced upon them and built something entirely new. They built mosques, schools, shops, and businesses in urban blocks and rural enclaves.
They learned to read Quranic Arabic, spoke it with ease, and were also equally comfortable with the “hip cat” and “jive” talk of the 1960s and 1970s.
And my father was there at the beginning.
He became a young religious leader who studied, taught, and traveled the country with Imam Muhammad.
Back then, we racially identified as Bilalians, named after Bilal, an African who converted to Islam and who became a companion of the Prophet Muhammad.
We wore kufis and hijabs. My father gave stirring khutbahs. He helped build mosques and schools across the South.
Years later, in the memorial following his Janazah, a Muslim burial, those whose lives he touched attested that my father demanded all of you because this life is so short, and in order to truly live it, you must give it everything you have.
And he did.
He became a scribe for Imam Muhammad, recording decades of khutbahs, lectures, and speeches while speaking to Muslim communities across the country. At times, federal agents quietly followed his movements, preferring men like my father to remain silent.
Instead, he raised his own little revolutionary.
My original middle name meant peace. Somehow, that name was lost when our names legally changed to reflect our spiritual identity. Helene became Aisha. Kenneth became Kareem. Our family name became Abdullah.
My father taught me to recognize inequity within systems and to raise my voice against it.
And then, when I began questioning gender inequities within the very faith community we loved, my father and I fought.
We were so alike.
We devoured knowledge.
We were natural leaders.
We were extroverts who loved to laugh and who were easily delighted by the smallest wonders.
At the time, we simply could not see how much we were alike.
When my father finally saw me — really saw me — I was 19 years old.
I had gone undercover inside the only women’s prison in Alabama to investigate the treatment of incarcerated pregnant women.
I wrote about the brutal racism they endured, how they were shackled during labor, and how the vegetable garden they planted to supplement the inadequate food they were served had been deliberately plowed under.
When I handed that story to my father, he looked at me.
He really looked at me.
Then he said:
“Those sisters’ lives are going to change because of what you did. Because of what you wrote.”
“Keep fighting.”
So I did.
I kept writing.
And I kept fighting.
First at the Birmingham World, the historic Black newspaper that historically documented so much of the Civil Rights Movement my father helped shape.
And also as a newsroom clerk at The Birmingham News, where I got my first taste of mainstream news framing of some of the same issues.
I showed my father my work.
He would nod knowingly.
We talked politics endlessly.
We discussed my reporting on how Muslims and Sikhs were treated after Sept. 11 while I was living and reporting in New York after the Twin Towers fell.
We talked about my reporting on veterans sickened by toxic exposures during the Iraq War and denied the benefits they had earned.
We discussed at length my work on Black maternal mortality and research into how racism impacts the lives of Black mothers and babies. And we both wept when I lost my own child while covering those stories.
We celebrated together when I covered the election of the nation’s first Black president.
I sat close enough at President Barack Obama’s inauguration that it felt like a dream made manifest. Me, a Black, Muslim girl from Alabama, clutching a pen in my gloved, yet still frozen hands.
A scribe to history. A scribe like my father.
And out in the crowd on the National Mall, my father and the rest of my family huddled together for warmth on that historic day and bore witness.
We talked about what his presidency meant for our people, our nation.
We talked about the racist and power-hungry forces gathering against it.
And when America entered another period of racist retrenchment and elected Donald Trump president, my father urged me to keep writing, keep fighting.
When, after ascending to editorial leadership roles, I found myself constantly fighting battles within mainstream newsrooms to treat job candidates, colleagues of color, and the communities we come from equitably, my father told me to keep fighting the good fight.
So I did.
And so I do.
And when I left mainstream news, my father took immense pride in my work at The Emancipator.
He loved that his daughter worked at the modern-day incarnation of an abolitionist newspaper. He loved that we are building an antiracist newsroom.
When The Emancipator moved to Howard University, his pride was practically palpable.
On the day my father charged me with helping our people know themselves — and to keep fighting — I slipped a Howard University T-shirt over his frail frame.
He wore that shirt during the final days of his life.
In his last hours, all of his nine children and his wife crowded into his hospital room, sleeping like puppies across the floor and sprawled on chairs and couches.
From his hospital bed, he called out for us to “wake up.”
“We’re going to record the final act.”
He directed his final hours like a filmmaker.
He charged me and my two youngest brothers with writing the script.
Another sibling was told to handle the lighting.
He looked me in the eye and asked for his cue: “Where do we start this?”
“I think we need to start at the beginning, Dad. Your beginning.”
He started narrating, but then he stopped and motioned to one of my sisters to bring his phone close.
Every great story, he knew, needs a prologue.
She played a recording he had saved — a conversation with his now-deceased older brother about our ancestors, where our family came from, and how we came to be.
As he listened to his brother’s voice talk about their mother, and her mother, and her mother, my father smiled, nodded gently, and leaned back against his pillows.
Less than a day later, I sat nearby as he exhaled a final time and his ruh, his spirit, drifted peacefully toward our ancestors.
These are my founding father’s values.
Find joy in simple things.
Raise children who know themselves.
Take pride in this beautiful, flawed American experiment.
And fight.
Fight because the ancestors demand it.
Now he is an ancestor.
So I do.
So I will.
I will help lead this newsroom.
I will advance the cause of antiracism through ancestral writing gifts and a lifetime spent in journalism.
I will answer that charge.
Because my father said I must.
