Malcolm X (88 page)

Malcolm’s strength was his ability to reinvent himself, in order to function and even thrive in a wide variety of environments. He carefully crafted his physical presentation, the manner in which he approached others, drawing upon the past experiences from his own life as well as from African-American folklore and culture. He wove a narrative of suffering and resistance, of tragedy and triumph, that captured the imaginations of black people throughout the world. He lived the existence of an itinerant musician, traveling constantly from city to city, standing night after night on the stage, manipulating his melodic tenor voice as an instrument. He was consciously a performer, who presented himself as the vessel for conveying the anger and impatience the black masses felt. Impoverished African Americans could admire Dr. King, but Malcolm not only spoke their language, he had lived their experiences—in foster homes, in prisons, in unemployment lines. Malcolm was loved because he could present himself as one of them.

One great gift of such remarkable individuals is the ability to seize their time, to speak to their unique moment in history. Both Martin and Malcolm were such leaders, but they expressed their pragmatic visions in different ways. King embodied the historic struggles waged by generations of African Americans for full equality. He established predominantly black political organizations, such as the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1955 and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, but their emphasis was the achievement of desegregation and interracial cooperation. King never pitted blacks against whites, or used the atrocities committed by white extremists as a justification for condemning all whites. By contrast, throughout most of his public career Malcolm sought to place whites on the defensive in their relationship with African Americans. He keenly felt, and expressed, the varied emotions and frustrations of the black poor and working class. His constant message was black pride, self-respect, and an awareness of one’s heritage. At a time when American society stigmatized or excluded people of African descent, Malcolm’s militant advocacy was stunning. He gave millions of younger African Americans newfound confidence. These expressions were at the foundation of what in 1966 became Black Power, and Malcolm was its fountainhead.

Malcolm came to occupy a central space in the rich folk tradition of black outlaws and dissidents, fighting against the established social hierarchy. In the antebellum era, such men of resistance were Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner. In African-American music, this tradition includes the notorious folklore of Stagger Lee, the inventive blues guitarist Robert Johnson, and the charismatic hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. What these black outlaws all had in common was a cool contempt for the bourgeois status quo, the system of white supremacy and its law and courts. More significantly, the tradition of the black outlaw was to transgress the established moral order. In this respect, Detroit Red as Malcolm constructed him was the antihero, the hepcat who laughed at conventional mores, who used illegal drugs and engaged in illicit sex, who broke all the rules. A close examination of the
Autobiography
illustrates that many of the elements of Detroit Red’s narrative are fictive; despite this, the character’s experiences resonate with black audiences because the contexts of racism, crime, and violence are integral aspects of ghetto life.

The other dimension of Malcolm’s appearance was his identity as a righteous preacher, the man who dedicated his life to Allah. Again, this was a role that resonated deeply with African-American culture. Through his powerful language, Malcolm inspired blacks to see themselves not as victims, but possessing the agency to transform themselves and their lives. Like Marcus Garvey, Malcolm boldly insisted to blacks that racism would not define their futures; that, instead, people of African descent were destined for greatness. He developed a profound love for black history, and he integrated into many of his lectures insights taken from the heritage of African-American and African people. Malcolm encouraged blacks to celebrate their culture and the tales of black resistance to European colonialism and white domination. And despite his genuine conversion to orthodox Islam, his spiritual journey was linked to his black consciousness. Only weeks following the assassination, the poet Amiri Baraka proclaimed, “Malcolm’s greatest contribution was to preach Black Consciousness to the Black Man. Now we must find the flesh of our spiritual creation.” To Baraka, Malcolm represented a black aesthetic, a set of values and criteria for cultural representations that affirmed the genius and creativity of people of African descent. Malcolm provided the template for what black artists should aspire to achieve. “The Black artist is needed to change the images his people identify with, by asserting Black feeling, Black mind, Black judgment,” Baraka asserted. In March 1965, Baraka left Greenwich Village and migrated to Harlem, where he established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School (BARTS). This became the foundation for the flowering of the modern black arts movement, involving thousands of poets, playwrights, dancers, and other cultural producers. Malcolm became their muse, the ideal expression of blackness. Even the
New York Times
, measuring his continuing influence in Harlem, observed that “the central idea of Malcolm’s that has taken hold since his death is that Negroes must hold fast to and nurture their own black culture, and not have it ‘integrated out of existence.’ ”

Stokely Carmichael, perhaps Black Power’s most important architect, traced his own development directly back to Malcolm. In his autobiography, Carmichael explains that as an undergraduate at Howard University in the early 1960s he had first viewed Bayard Rustin as his political mentor. He attended the public debate between Rustin and Malcolm in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 1961, expecting Bayard “to win the debate hands down.” But like others there he was overwhelmed by Malcolm’s advocacy. “What Malcolm demonstrated that night . . . was the raw power, the visceral potency, of the grip our unarticulated collective blackness held over us. I’ll never forget it.” Three decades after Malcolm’s triumph over Rustin, Carmichael was still inspired by the proud man who personified blackness: “A spotlight picked him out as he strode, slim, erect, immaculately tailored, to the mike on an otherwise darkened stage.”

There is now a tendency of historical revisionism, to interpret Malcolm X through the powerful lens of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: that Malcolm was ultimately evolving into an integrationist, liberal reformer. This view is not only wrong, but unfair to both Malcolm and Martin. King saw himself, like Frederick Douglass, first and foremost as an American, who pursued the civil rights and civic privileges enjoyed by other Americans. King struggled to erase the color bar of stigmatization and exclusion that had relegated racial minorities to second-class citizenship. As in the successful 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, King wanted to convince white Americans that “race doesn’t matter”—in other words, the physical and color differences that appear to distinguish blacks from whites should be meaningless in the application of justice and equal rights.

In striking contrast, Malcolm perceived himself first and foremost as a black man, a person of African descent who happened to be a United States citizen. This was a crucial difference from King and other civil rights leaders. When he was a member of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm saw himself as a member of the tribe of Shabazz, the fictive Asiatic black clan invented by W. D. Fard. But by the final phases of his career, and especially in 1964-65, Malcolm linked his black consciousness to the ideological imperative of self-determination, the concept that all people have a natural right to decide for themselves their own destiny. Malcolm perceived black Americans as an oppressed nation-within-a-nation, with its own culture, social institutions, and group psychology. Its memories of struggles for freedom were starkly different from those of white Americans. At the end of his life he realized that blacks indeed could achieve representation and even power under America’s constitutional system. But he always thought first and foremost about blacks’ interests. Many blacks instinctively sensed this, and loved him for it.

King presented a narrative to white Americans that suggested that Negroes were prepared to protest nonviolently, and even die, to realize the promise of the nation’s Founding Fathers. By contrast, Malcolm proposed that the oppressed had a natural right to armed self-defense. His narrative was that of the history of structural racism—from the transatlantic slave trade to ghettoization—and his remedy was black reparations, compensation for the years of exploitation blacks had endured. This is why Malcolm, had he survived to the 1990s, would not have been an enthusiastic defender of affirmative action as a centerpiece for civil rights reforms. Affirmative action was never designed to promote full employment or to transfer wealth to African Americans. What Malcolm sought was a fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in the United States—not a violent social revolution, but radical and meaningful change nevertheless.

Another critical difference between the two leaders was their relationship to the African-American middle class. King was the product of Atlanta’s well-educated, affluent black petite bourgeoisie. He was a graduate of More-house College and Boston University; Malcolm had left school without completing the ninth grade. His “university” was Norfolk Prison Colony. More than any other twentieth-century black leader, Malcolm demanded that blacks in the professional and managerial classes should be more accountable to the masses of poor and working-class African Americans. In speeches like “Message to the Grassroots,” he sharply condemned middle-class black leaders for their compromises with white power brokers. He demanded greater integrity and accountability from privileged blacks, as an essential element in the strategy for achieving black freedom.

In his 2003 oral history, Ossie Davis was asked why, in his famous eulogy, he had referred to Malcolm as a “black shining prince.” “Because a prince,” Davis said, “is not a king.” He implied that Malcolm’s premature death cut short his maturity and full potential as a leader. Another way of examining Davis’s insight is asking whether Malcolm’s vision of racial justice was fully realized or achieved. Again, a comparison between Martin and Malcolm is illuminating. Following his assassination, King’s image evolved from an anti-Vietnam protester and controversial civil rights advocate into a defender of a color-blind America. His birthday was celebrated by the U.S. government as a national holiday dedicated to public service. Politicians of all ideological stripes praise King’s nonviolence but rarely examine his fierce impatience with racial injustice and its relevance to our times. By contrast for several decades Malcolm was pilloried and stereotyped for his racial extremism. However, to most black Americans he became an icon of black encouragement, who fearlessly challenged racism wherever he found it and inspired black youth to take pride in their history and culture. These aspects of Malcolm’s public personality were indelibly stamped into the Black Power movement; they were present in the cry “It’s our turn!” by black proponents of Harold Washington in the Democrat’s successful 1983 mayoral race in Chicago. It was partially expressed in the unprecedented voter turnouts in black neighborhoods in Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988 and in the successful electoral bid of Barack Obama in 2008. Malcolm truly anticipated that the black electorate could potentially be the balance of power in a divided white republic.

Malcolm’s revolutionary vision also challenged white America to think and talk differently about race. In an era when some white entertainers still blackened their faces to perform, Malcolm challenged whites to examine the policies and practices of racial discrimination. Before postmodernists wrote about “white privilege,” Malcolm spoke about the destructive effects of racism upon both its victims and its promulgators. Toward the end of his life he could imagine the destruction of racism itself, and the possibility of creating a humane social order devoid of racial injustice. He offered hope that whites could overcome centuries of negative socialization toward blacks, and that a racially just society was achievable. He did not embrace “color blindness” but, like Frantz Fanon, believed that racial hierarchies within society could be dismantled.

Malcolm also changed the discourse and politics of race internationally. During a period when many African-American leaders were preoccupied with efforts to change federal and state policies about race relations, Malcolm saw that for the domestic struggle for civil rights to succeed, it had to be expanded into an international campaign for human rights. The United Nations, not the U.S. Congress or the White House, had to be the central forum. Equally important were the distinctions he made between black politics inside the United States versus liberation politics in Africa and the Caribbean.

Despite his radical rhetoric, as “The Ballot or the Bullet” makes clear, the mature Malcolm believed that African Americans could use the electoral system and voting rights to achieve meaningful change. His position calling for massive black voter education and mobilization was virtually identical to SNCC’s, and would later be embraced by the Black Panther Party in Oakland in the 1970s. But outside of the United States, despite his respect for Nkrumah, he did not see electoral politics and gradual social change as a viable approach for transforming postcolonial societies. He endorsed revolutionary violence against the apartheid regime in South Africa, and guerrilla warfare against the neocolonial regime in Congo and in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. Nelson Mandela, who in 1961 founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation), the secret armed wing of the African National Congress, was a hero to Malcolm because of his identification with guerrilla attacks against white South Africa. Although today Mandela is perceived as a racial reconciliator, much like King, a half century ago the future president of South Africa largely shared Malcolm’s views about the necessity of armed struggle in Africa. So the view that there were “two Malcolm Xs”—one who advocated violence when he was a Black Muslim, and a second who espoused nonviolent change—is absolutely wrong. To Malcolm, armed self-defense was never equated with violence for its own sake.