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Malcolm's Life
In his Autobiography published after his murder
in 1965, Malcolm described his life as a 'chronology of changes': his
character went through a series of provisional identities which changed
continuously. At the time of his death Malcolm was still in evolution.
Malcolm Little
Born in 1925, Malcolm
was the son of a West Indian woman and a fiery black preacher devoted
to the Baptist gospel and to the secular teachings of the nationalist
Marcus Garvey.
Malcolm's family was harried out of Omaha, Nebraska by
white vigilantes in reprisal for his father's outspokenness, their home
in Lansing Michigan was burned, and ultimately Malcolm's father was
murdered. His mother suffered a nervous breakdown, and the family
disintegrated.
Malcolm was raised in a white foster home and quickly
demonstrated his ability as a student by becoming the valedictorian of
his middle school even though he was the only black in his class. When
his teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, Malcolm
said that he wanted to be a lawyer. His teacher responded that he
should think realistically about becoming a carpenter.
Detroit Red
Malcolm dropped out of
school after his 8th grade year, moved to Boston, and subsequently to
Harlem, drifting from a series of menial jobs into the zoot-suited,
bop-gaited life of a street hustler. He dealt (and used) drugs, ran
numbers, worked as a pimp, and burglarized homes and stores.
At that time Malcolm had conked his hair and tried as
hard as he could 'to be white'. His career in crime ultimately landed
him in prison where he served a ten year sentence. The sentence had
been particularly harsh because the judge was outraged that one of his
accomplices had been his white mistress.
Malcolm X
In prison Malcolm began
his redemption by joining the debate team. He developed his vocabulary
by copying words out of the dictionary and then using them in
competition.
Malcolm was befriended by a member of the Nation of
Islam, frequently referred to as the 'Black Muslims', and he came under
the influence of the teachings of its leader, the Messenger Elijah
Muhammad. He claimed that God had appeared to him and spoke to him in the form of a silk peddler named Wallace D. Fard in a Detroit ghetto in 1930. Fard had announced to Elijah that the apocalypse
was at hand. Muhammad had been chosen as the messenger of this news to
the thousands of black migrants who had resettled in Northern cities
during the Great Migration.
Muhammad preached that whites were a bleached-out,
blue-eyed mutant race created by a dissident black scientist named Yacub who had set whites loose to subjugate
blacks for his satanic pleasure. This message might sound far-fetched,
but it found ready believers among a people whose African heritage had
been destroyed by white slavers, whose men and women had been reduced
to chattel,who had been stripped of their culture, religion, even their
names, and taught to speak a foreign tongue, worship a 'spook'
Christian god, and call themselves 'Smith, Jones, Powell, Bunche and
King’. Muhammad taught that blacks had been reduced from Africans to
'so-called American Negroes' wallowing in the white man's vices and
obedient to the white man's unthreatening Negro leaders: the white man
had, in sum, murdered them spiritually, emotionally and morally.
Malcolm embraced Muhammad's teaching in prison, and when
he was released, he became a minister in his organization, quickly
rising to become one of the sect's primary spokesmen. Even more
effectively than Muhammad himself, Malcolm knew how to connect and
communicate with ghetto blacks. He told an audience in 1963, "You don't
catch hell because you're a Methodist or a Baptist. You don't catch
hell because you're a Republican or a Democrat. You don't catch hell
because you're a Mason or an Elk, and you sure don't catch hell because
you're an American, because if you were an American you wouldn't catch no hell. You catch hell because you are a black
man."
The Muslims offered blacks an alternative to the
religious belief that the fallen state of their people was the result
God's judgment. Despite their extreme rhetoric, the Muslims offered
ghetto dwellers a way out of their situation through a disciplined and
abstemious daily regimen and a business organization that sought
independence from the white world. It was Malcolm's insight to exploit
the uses of black rage as an organizing principle to expand this
relatively small sect into a nationwide organization. When the mass
media discovered Malcolm, he quickly became a star. He became a regular
on talk shows, a lecturer on the university circuit, and a figure in
the diplomatic lounge of the United Nations.
Malcolm's success and the militancy of his message made
other leaders in the Nation of Islam both uneasy and jealous. Malcolm's
disaffection with the Nation resulted from his discovery of the serial
infidelities of his hero, the Rev. Elijah Muhammad. When Malcolm was
silenced by the Nation, after cheering the assassination of John F.
Kennedy as 'a case of the chickens coming home to roost', Malcolm broke
with the Black Muslims in 1964.
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbaz
During the last year of
his life, Malcolm traveled through Africa and the Middle East and
remade himself once again. He took tutorials in orthodox Islam and made
his way to Mecca for his hajj (the pilgrimage demanded of all
devout Muslims). In Mecca he had a transforming exposure to the company
of white Muslims with whom he experienced a leveling spiritual
brotherhood that he had not thought possible. He described it as the
most important experience of his life. When he returned to America, he
no longer regarded the white man as a devil. Instead he regarded him as
a fallible, all too human enemy. His world view had begun to shift. If
he had lived, Malcolm hinted at a new philosophy based upon a blend of
traditional orthodox Islam, African socialism, Third World
anti-colonialism, and a doctrine of racial solidarity that came to be
known after his death as "Black Power".
Malcolm's Legacy
Malcolm was a force for
the liberation of black people, both by the example of his triumph over
the degradation of his own young manhood and by the furious war he
waged on the myths, manners and polite hypocrisies of race in America.
Malcolm's primary goal was the decolonization of the black mind: the
awakening of a proud, bold, demanding new consciousness of color and
everything that color means in America. He meant to haunt us, to play
on our fears, quicken our guilt and deflate our dreams that everything
was getting better. And he did. He argued that we are a society
decisively shaped by racism. The difference was that most of his
contemporaries in the 1960’s held out hope
that matters could be put right with enough conscience, good will and
money. Malcolm did not.
He saw rage as a potential liberating force to retrieve
blacks from the worst crime whites had inflicted upon them: teaching
them to hate themselves. Malcolm himself had been dragged low by
self-hatred; he had pimped and hustled and sniffed cocaine and had
finally done time; he had pegged his pants, processed his hair, and
pursued white women in what he considered to be an imitation of the
master class. In a speech in 1964 he said, "We hated our head, we hated
the shape of our nose-- we wanted one of the long dog-like noses, you
know. Yeah, we hated the color of our skin. We hated the blood of
Africa that was in our veins. And in hating our features and our skin
and our blood, we had to end up hating ourselves."
The original sin in his eyes was the white man's for
having severed the blacks from their past and reduced them to property,
but he insisted that the responsibility for their salvation was their
own. To Malcolm, this meant getting up out of the mud-- out from under
the charity as well as the tyranny of white America. It meant
renouncing integration, which was only a further denial of the worth of
black people, renouncing non-violence, which was only a newer, subtler
form of humiliation before the slave master. It meant embracing the
African past, till then a source of shame; it meant identifying not
with the white majority in America and the West but with the dark
majority of the people of the world.
And it meant standing up to 'the man'. One of the worst
humiliations of all, in Malcolm's eyes, was that paralytic silence, that head bobbing surrender that seemed
to him to afflict so many blacks in the presence of whites. The ghetto
had been cursing whitey for years in its own back streets, but seldom
to his face. (That would be nuts!) Malcolm was the crazy man gone
public: he would tell the white man to his face, in his own mass media,
what ordinary blacks had been saying about him for years.
Malcolm vs. King
Malcolm and King were
not so much opposites as halves in a yin-yang duality deep in the black
soul. But there was too much unhappy history between the two men, too
many irreconcilable differences of politics, principle and style....
King's politics was insistently multi-racial, Malcolm's insistently
black; King's means were non-violent, which Malcolm considered
beggarly; King's ends were assimilation, which Malcolm derided as a
fantasy for all but a token few "acceptable" middle class blacks. The
distance between them was the distance between utility and morality;
between the street and the seminary; between the American reality and
the American dream.
Malcolm was wounded by his outlaw reputation in the
press, particularly after he left the Nation of Islam with its
anti-white certitudes and entered on the extraordinary personal
transformations of the last months of his life. He hoped to come into
"a new regard by the public", but he remained in print and on
camera a cartoon Black Muslim inciting an otherwise pacific black
underclass to insurrection. Malcolm came to understand that he shared
the blame for this with the media. He had discovered how to make white
America jump, how close the specter of the black revenge lies to the
surface of white American consciousness-- and having discovered it, he
could rarely resist its pleasures.... His talk of guns-- and the
attendant suggestion of violence-- took an inflated priority that he
was stuck with and obliged to defend for the rest of his life.
His dalliance with the politics of armed struggle never
progressed beyond rhetoric, but he understood the uses of verbal
violence as an outlet for black America's helpless fury and as an
instrument of assault on white America's unbudging
resistance... He spoke regularly of riot and revolution and of the
necessity for 'reciprocal bloodshed' against the one-way flow then
running in the South.... Malcolm's objective in these flights of
rhetoric was the liberation of the invisible man from his invisibility.
He forced white America to "make them see that we are the enemy." He
saw no way to make white power move except through violence-- or as he
put pointedly added, "a real threat of it". Yet even then, the violence
in his rhetoric had less to do with guns than with manhood. "I don't
believe we're going to overcome by singing," he said at a Harlem rally
in 1964. "If you're going to get yourself a .45 and start singing 'We
Shall Overcome', I'm with you..." .He saw nonviolence as degrading and
beggarly-- the rough equivalent, as he once said, of the sheep
reminding the wolf that it was time for dinner. In his "Message to the
Grassroots" recorded in 1963 he reminded his black audience that all
revolutions-- the American, the French, the Russian, the Chinese, the
Mau-Mau-- have spilled blood. "The only kind of revolution that is
non-violent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution based on
loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which
the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theatre, a
desegregated park, and a desegregated toilet. You can sit down next to
the white folks-- on the toilet." No, he went on, revolution was bloody
and destructive, not polite and non-violent and hymn-singing and
trusting in the conscience of its enemy.
After his pilgrimage to Mecca and his electrifying
exposure to the color-blind democracy of the hajj, Malcolm's
rhetoric changed. In the final months of his life his politics were
transformed as certainly and as radically as his theology. He did not
fall in love with white people. He continued to argue that the racial
climate in America remained poisoned against black people--
irremediably poisoned short of the mass conversion of white America to
Islam. All he conceded was the humanity of white people-- an admission
that seemed for him and to us to be revolutionary.
Where was he headed? "I have no idea. I can capsulize
how I feel-- I'm for the freedom of the 22 million African-Americans by
any means necessary. By any means necessary. I'm for a society
in which our people are recognized and respected as human beings, and I
believe we have the right to resort to any means necessary to
bring that about."
On the two long journeys to the Middle East and to
Africa and in his regular rounds at the UN, he made it his first
priority to 'internationalize' the struggle-- to form an alliance of
interest and soul between black Americans and the nonwhite world... His
international politics ebbed and flowed between pan-Africanism--
the unity of black people everywhere around their color and common
origin in Africa-- and a wider identification with the entire Third
World from Cuba to Vietnam against the colonialist and capitalist white
West.
What Malcolm wanted most, though, was to reassert
himself as a Muslim. He really wanted to compete with Elijah Muhammad.
The Sunni Mosque he sought would give him an unencumbered pulpit for
the first time-- a theater in which to assert his claim to recognition
as an authentic man of God and as a legitimate political leader.
That recognition reached him only posthumously. The
radical young went into the 1960's as King's children and came out
Malcolm's. Only after the disaffection of young blacks with the Civil
Rights movement did Malcolm's beatification begin. His key ideas
endured:
- the stresses on the beauty and the worth of
blackness,
- the racism endemic in American society;
- the legitimacy of defending oneself by any means
including violence;
- the irrelevance of integration for the black poor
- and the self-loathing implied in begging for it;
- the futility of appeals to conscience in the
conscience-less;
- the necessity of connecting with Africa and the
African past;
- the central importance of confronting power with
power, not supplication;
- the recognition that the separation of the races was
not a program but a fact.
Malcolm's bequest was a style of thought: it came to us beginning in
the summer of 1966 codified under a new name-- Black Power-- and the
sayings of Minister Malcolm became the orthodoxies of a black
generation. His legacy was his example, his bearing, his affirmation of
blackness-- his understanding that one is paralyzed for just as long as
one believes one cannot move.
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