Malcolm X (2 page)

Like most autobiographies, Malcolm's account of his life was intended to explain how he came to enlightenment and fulfillment, but his narrative is incomplete and misleading. Malcolm's early experiences limited his subsequent political choices but do not explain them. Malcolm's conversion to Elijah Muhammad's
doctrines was a rejection rather than a culmination of his previous life. He repudiated the Christian teachings of his childhood and affiliated with a religious organization he had never previously encountered. He insisted that the major national civil rights groups and their middle-class leaders did not represent needs of the black masses, but, before joining the Nation of Islam, he had never been affiliated with any African-American advancement organization. Despite his fervent advocacy of racial unity and institutional development, he was, ironically, an outsider with respect to the most important African-American institutions. His life was spent mainly as an angry, though insightful, critic, hurling challenges from the margins of black institutional life. With some justification, he saw himself as a leader uniquely capable of arousing discontented African Americans that leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., could not reach. During most of his life, however, his status as an outsider prevented him from having the type of impact on the direction of African-American politics that he would achieve as a marbyr.

Malcolm's black nationalism derived, ironically, from his exclusion from the African-American social and cultural mainstream. Although his parents, Louise and Earl Little, were organizers for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), his childhood experiences did not connect him to the enduring institutions of black life. Rather than memories of a nurturing African-American household, Malcolm's autobiography emphasized the white forces that destroyed his family. He remembered racist whites forcing his family to move from Omaha, Nebraska, where he was born in 1925, to Milwaukee, then to Lansing, Michigan, and finally to a home outside East Lansing. Malcolm gives few indications that he was involved as a child in African-American social life. Malcolm remembered his father as an embittered itinerant preacher who, despite his Garveyite sympathies, displayed and infused Malcolm with ambivalent racial attitudes. “I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was,” Malcolm surmised, “he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man's brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child.” Watching his father deliver sermons, Malcolm was “confused
and amazed” by his emotional preaching and acquired “very little respect for most people who represented religion.” Taken to UNIA meetings by his father, Malcolm was unmoved by the message of racial pride. “My image of Africa, at that time, was of naked savages, cannibals, monkeys and tigers and steaming jungles.” Malcolm felt that his mother treated him more harshly than his siblings because his light complexion stirred memories of her own mixed-race ancestry. Neither of Malcolm's parents were able to shelter him or provide him with dependable resources to deal with the racism of the surrounding world. When Earl Little was killed in 1931, six-year-old Malcolm believed rumors that “the white Black Legion had finally gotten him.”
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Afterwards, Malcolm's family life rapidly deteriorated. His mother resented her dependence on welfare assistance. As she progressively lost her sanity, Malcolm became more and more incorrigible. At the age of thirteen, Malcolm was removed from his family entirely and sent to reform school.

In contrast to Malcolm's experience of a disintegrating family life and social marginalization, Martin Luther King, Jr., his principle ideological adversary, spent his childhood within a stable, nurturing African-American family and community.
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“My parents have always lived together very intimately, and I can hardly remember a time that they ever argued,” King once recalled. Growing up in the house his grandfather, A. D. Williams, had purchased two decades before King's birth in 1929, the family's roots in the Atlanta black community extended to the 1890s, when Williams had become pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church. After Williams's death in 1931, Martin Luther King, Sr. became Ebenezer's Pastor. The church became King, Jr.'s “second home”; Sunday School was where he met his best friends and developed “the capacity for getting along with people.” Although he, like Malcolm, came to dislike the emotionalism of black religious practice, he developed a lifelong attachment to the black Baptist church and an enduring admiration for his father's “noble example.”
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King and his family developed strong ties to Atlanta's black institutions, including businesses, civil rights organizations, and colleges such as Morehouse and Spelman. While Malcolm's family experienced economic hardship during the Depression
years, King “never experienced the feeling of not having the basic necessities of life.” Both Malcolm and King acquired antielitist attitudes during their childhoods, but the former resented middle-class blacks while the latter acquired a sense of noblesse oblige. As a teenager, Malcolm ended his schooling after the eighth grade when he was discouraged from aspiring to be a professional. King completed doctoral studies and saw education as a route to personal success and a career of service to the black community.

Both Malcolm and King recalled having anti-white attitudes during their formative years, but white people occupied a much more central place for Malcolm as a young man than for King, who had little contact with whites as a youth. Malcolm's evolving attitudes toward whites were complex and volatile, serving as the underlying theme of his autobiography. As a child, his mother took him to meetings of white Seventh Day Adventists, whom Malcolm recalled as “the friendliest white people I had ever seen.”
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His account of his youth includes both descriptions of encounters with white racism and indications of his own ambivalent feelings toward whites. Often the only black in his class, he refrained from participating in school social life. He admitted nevertheless that he secretly “went for some of the white girls, and some of them went for me, too.” Elected president of his eighth grade school class, he concedes that he was proud: “In fact, by then, I didn't really have much feeling about being a Negro, because I was trying so hard, in every way I could, to be white.”
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After moving to Boston in 1941, Malcolm soon straightened his hair in order to look more “white,” and brushed off a black, middle-class woman named Laura in order to pursue his white lover. King, for his part, reacted to a childhood rejection by a white friend by determining to “hate every white person” and thereafter had little social contact with whites until his college years.
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Spending his formative years as part of an African-American elite, he resented white racial prejudice but was rarely personally affected by it. His racial identity most often brought him rewards rather than punishments.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Malcolm's conversion to the Islamic teachings of Elijah Muhammad involved a rejection of his past
that would have been inconceivable for King. While in prison for robbery, Malcolm repudiated his earlier life and symbolized his rebirth in the Nation of Islam by abandoning his surname. He joined an organization that had not been part of his environment as a youth and acquired a new past through the racial mythology of the Nation. Malcolm's acceptance of the idea that he was a member of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in North America made his previous life—and indeed all the postenslavement experiences of African-Americans—only a negative reference point for his new identity. For Malcolm, black adherence to Christianity simply reflected the fact that African-Americans had been brainwashed and separated from their true history. During his adult life, Malcolm would increase his knowledge of the African-American historical literature, but he also popularized the historical myths of Elijah Muhammad, which replaced the complexities of African-American history with tales of the “Asian Black Nation” and “the tribe of Shabazz.”
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Unlike the main African-American Christian churches, the Nation of Islam did not have deep historical roots in the African-American experience, and its development was largely isolated from that of other black religious institutions. Malcolm learned from Elijah Muhammad that African-American history was not a long struggle toward freedom but simply the final stage of the decline of the “Black Man,” who had once ruled the earth. The Nation's version of the past was not based on historical research, but it appealed to blacks such as Malcolm who did not identify with the black Christian churches that were more rooted in African-American history.

In contrast to Malcolm's negation of his past, King placed great importance on his family's deep roots in the Baptist church and the Atlanta black community. King's great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had been Baptist ministers. He saw African-American history and the history of his own family as a successful climb from enslavement to freedom and from poverty to affluence. King's adult life as a religious leader was built upon the foundation of his childhood experiences and his ties to the African-American Baptist church and to black leadership networks. While Malcolm became a critical outsider urging blacks
to reject mainstream institutions, King became a critical insider seeking to transform those institutions.

Malcolm's and King's strengths and limitations as leaders were related to their ability to mobilize African-American institutions on behalf of the racial goals they sought. Malcolm's political evolution demonstrates the extent to which black nationalism had become marginalized since its nineteenth-century heyday. While nineteenth-century nationalists Martin Delany and Alexander Crummell were products of mainstream black institutions, Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad were outsiders—the former an alien who came to the United States only as an adult, the latter a Muslim in a Christian-dominated culture. Garvey was able to gain a massive following and build an institutional base in the United States despite the opposition of mainstream leaders, but he could never supplant them or their institutions. Elijah Muhammad similarly attacked the “so-called Negro” leaders and attracted a sizable following; yet he could never effectively challenge the dominance of the national civil rights groups.

Only toward the end of his life did Malcolm begin to move beyond his role as a representative of Elijah Muhammad. As he became restive under Muhammad's cautious leadership, he strengthened his ties with black activists who were affiliated with the major black churches and civil rights groups. He continued to criticize the national civil rights leaders, but he recognized that the civil rights movement contained militant factions with which he could work. Malcolm continued to call himself a black nationalist, but the term was no longer sufficient to describe his ideology. Advocacy of the goal of establishing a black-controlled nation no longer detracted from the achievement of goals that were more attainable in the short term. After his break with the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm denned black nationalism as black control of the political and economic life of black communities, as racial pride and self-reliance. Malcolm also insisted that he was “giving a new interpretation to the civil-rights struggle, an interpretation that will enable [black nationalists] to come into it, take part in it.”
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Malcolm's new interpretation was consistent with the evolving
ideas of many of the militant activists who had participated in the civil rights struggle, because it suggested a strategy that was in accord with their own experiences. Just as nationalism was an insufficient term to describe ideas that are only tenuously connected with the long-term goal of establishing a black nation, so too was integrationism inadequate to describe the increasingly far-reaching objectives of the activists who spearheaded the civil rights protests of the 1960s. By the time of Malcolm's break with Elijah Muhammad, many of these activists saw themselves as participants in a freedom struggle seeking rights that extended beyond civil rights legislation or even the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution. Such activists also recognized that future black progress would require the transformation of the African-American institutions that had made possible previous gains. Rather than simply a movement toward the assimilation of white cultural values, the struggle was becoming by 1964 a movement toward the political, economic, and cultural transformation of white and black America.

Many black leaders of the mid-1960s continued to insist that black nationalism and integrationism represented mutual exclusive, antagonistic ideologies, but Malcolm and King were among those who began to recognize the limitations of their perspectives. Malcolm, even more than King, was willing to modify his views in order to bridge the nationalist-integrationist ideological conflict. As he did so, his black nationalism became less strident but also more potent. The FBI closely observed the shift in his ideological orientation and increasingly saw him an important element in an upsurge of racial militancy.

Malcolm X's affiliation with Elijah Muhammad attracted the attention of the FBI, but during the 1950s and early 1960s, the federal government did not view the Nation of Islam or black nationalists in general as major threats to national security. Instead, during the Cold War era, leftist internal subversion was the nation's major concern. Malcolm's advocacy of racial separatism and his anti-white public statements alarmed many white Americans
who became aware of them, but, until the late 1950s, most government officials who knew of him considered him a minor cult figure. Even during the early 1960s, Malcolm's black nationalist rhetoric did not cause much concern among whites, because it was not seen as an major element within African-American politics. As late as 1966, a
Newsweek
opinion survey indicated that most blacks supported the civil rights organizations and their leaders, and only five percent of the respondents indicated approval of black nationalism. A similarly small proportion of blacks expressed positive opinions about the “Black Muslims” and Elijah Muhammad. The large proportion of “not sure” responses regarding the Nation of Islam reflected wide-spread uncertainty among blacks regarding its policies.
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After a decade of civil rights protests, black militancy was still commonly defined as approval for confrontational tactics rather than separatists strategies. In 1967, when the FBI officially extended its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) beyond leftist organizations to include “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups,” the Nation of Islam was targeted but so too were King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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The FBI's increasing concern about black nationalist agitation was clearly a result of the increasing militancy, during the first half of the 1960s, of blacks who were not black nationalists. Malcolm's significance as a subversive threat reflected his gradual movement from the margins of African-American politics toward active support for militant grass roots activism.