The family of Malcolm X didn’t have advance word that Beyoncé would make an apparent tribute to the leader in her Super Bowl show. But, “I absolutely loved it,” Malcolm’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz told Page Six on Monday.
Bey’s performance included dancers in Black Panther-like berets forming an X on the field.
Shabazz told us someone from Team Beyoncé had reached out to her and family members to participate in Beyoncé’s New Orleans-set music video for her new song “Formation.” Shabazz “immediately went on a diet,” she joked, but, “it didn’t happen.”
She saw the Super Bowl show as “making a statement [about] all the senseless killing.” But not everyone was a fan.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani blasted Beyoncé’s performance.
“This is football, not Hollywood,” Giuliani said on “Fox & Friends.”
“I thought that she used it as a platform to attack police officers, who are the people who protect her and protect us and keep us alive,” he said. “And what we should be doing, in the African-American community and in all communities, is build up respect for police officers and focus on the fact that when something does go wrong, OK, we’ll work on that.”
He added: “But the vast majority of police officers risk their lives to keep us safe.”
The video for “Formation” includes images such as a young black boy dancing in front of riot police and Beyoncé singing on top of a submerged squad car.