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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', 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 serious 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 he
had heard the word of God who had appeared 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, reduced
its men and women to chattel, stripped them of their culture, religion,
even their names, taught them 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 be 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 extremist 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 of 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 interest was in 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 psalm-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
conscienceless; 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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