Malcolm X (89 page)

Malcolm envisioned a modern version of Pan-Africanism, based on a global antiracism. The United Nations World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, was in many ways a fulfillment of Malcolm’s international vision. Hundreds of religious, social justice, and civil rights nongovernmental organizations engaged in transnational dialogues, examining racism from a truly global perspective. Of the 11,500 delegates and observers, about three thousand were Americans, and nearly two-thirds of that number were black Americans. Malcolm believed that black freedom in the United States depended on internationalist geopolitical strategy.

The unrealized dimension of Malcolm’s racial vision was that of black nationalism. A political ideology that originated before the Civil War, black nationalism was based on the assumption that racial pluralism leading to assimilation was impossible in the United States. So cynical were many nationalists about the incapacity of whites to overcome their own racism that they occasionally negotiated with white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, in the mistaken belief that they were more honest about their racial attitudes than liberals. Yet as Malcolm’s international experiences became more varied and extensive, his social vision expanded. He became less intolerant and more open to multiethnic and interfaith coalitions. By the final months of his life he resisted identification as a “black nationalist,” seeking ideological shelter under the race-neutral concepts of Pan-Africanism and Third World revolution. He had also come to reject violence for its own sake, but he never abandoned the nationalists’ ideal of “self-determnation,” the right of oppressed nations or minorities to decide for themselves their own political futures. Given the election of Barack Obama, it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens. If legal racial segregation was permanently in America’s past, Malcolm’s vision today would have to radically redefine self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be “post-racial.”

Finally, and perhaps most important, Malcolm X represents the most important bridge between the American people and more than one billion Muslims throughout the world. Before immigration law reform in 1965, the most prominent group of self-identified American Muslims was the heretical Nation of Islam. As Malcolm learned more about orthodox Islam, he became determined to propagate the meaning of that faith to audiences regardless of race. Even before his death, Malcolm became widely known and well respected across the Islamic and Arab diasporas. He reached out to Islamic sects and organizations reflecting widely divergent opinions and theological tenets—Wahhabi Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Nasserite socialists in Egypt, African Sufis in Senegal, the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, the Palestine Liberation Organization. He avoided arguments that pitted Muslims against one another; he emphasized Islam’s capacity to transform the believer from hatred and intolerance toward love. His own remarkable life story personified this reinvention.

And what of Malcolm X’s future life after death? As hip-hop culture was decisive in promoting his second renaissance in the 1990s, it seems probable that Islam will influence his future legacy.

The process of jihadist reinvention began with the Iranian revolution. The government of Ayatollah Khomeini was the first to issue a postage stamp featuring a likeness of Malcolm, which was released in 1984 to promote the Universal Day of Struggle Against Race Discrimination. Less than two decades later, his influence was discovered in the mountain caves of Afghanistan, in the radicalism of Islamic convert and Talibanist John Walker Lindh. An upper-middle-class white American from affluent Marin County, California, Lindh was introduced to Malcolm when his mother took him to Spike Lee’s film. After reading the
Autobiography
, Lindh’s fascination grew into fierce dedication. In October 2001, as American forces stormed into Afghanistan, Lindh was captured among the Taliban combatants and is now serving a twenty-year sentence. Lindh’s religious adviser, Shakeel Syed, is convinced that Lindh could “become the new Malcolm X.”

The al-Qaeda terrorist network is also sufficiently aware of American racial politics to make sharp distinctions between mainstream African-American leaders and black revolutionaries like Malcolm. An al-Qaeda video released following the election of Barack Obama in November 2008 described the president-elect as a “race traitor” and “hypocrite” when compared to Malcolm X. “And in [Barack Obama] and Colin Powell, [Condoleezza] Rice and your likes, the words of Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him) concerning ‘house Negroes’ are confirmed,” declared al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Malcolm was described as central to the political traditions of “honorable black Americans.” What is truly ironic is that Malcolm would certainly have condemned the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, as representing the negation of Islam’s core tenets. A religion based on universal compassion and respect for the teachings of the Torah and the Gospels, Malcolm would have known, holds no common ground with those who employ terror as a tool for politics. Malcolm’s personal journey of self-discovery, the quest for God, led him toward peace and away from violence.

But there is one more legacy that may shape the memory of Malcolm: the politics of radical humanism. James Baldwin’s first real encounter with Malcolm occurred in 1961, when he was asked to moderate a radio program panel that included the Nation of Islam leader. Malcolm had been invited to debate a young civil rights activist who had just returned from desegregation protests in the South. Baldwin feared that the celebrated firebrand would take the young protester apart. Baldwin later wrote that he had come “to throw out the lifeline whenever Malcolm should seem to be carrying the child beyond his depth.” To Baldwin’s amazement, Malcolm “understood that child and talked to him as though he was talking to a younger brother.” Baldwin was profoundly moved. “I will never forget Malcolm and that child facing each other, and Malcolm’s extraordinary gentleness. And that’s the truth about Malcolm: he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met.”

A deep respect for, and a belief in, black humanity was at the heart of this revolutionary visionary’s faith. And as his social vision expanded to include people of divergent nationalities and racial identities, his gentle humanism and antiracism could have become a platform for a new kind of radical, global ethnic politics. Instead of the fiery symbol of ethnic violence and religious hatred, as al-Qaeda might project him, Malcolm X should become a representative for hope and human dignity. At least for the African-American people, he has already come to embody those loftier aspirations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND RESEARCH NOTES

T
he origins of this book date back to the winter of 1969, my freshman year at Earlham College in Indiana, when I first read
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. Malcolm had become the icon of the Black Power movement, and I eagerly devoured the edited volumes of his speeches and interviews. Like others, I did not question the inconsistencies between some parts of his speeches and recordings and the printed texts of these same speeches in publications. Nearly all of the scholarly work on Malcolm was based on a very narrow selection of primary sources, his transcribed speeches, and secondary sources, such as newspapers articles.

Nearly two decades later, in 1988, I was teaching a course in African-American politics that included
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
as part of the required reading, at Ohio State University. A close reading of the text revealed numerous inconsistencies, errors, and fictive characters at odds with Malcolm’s actual life history. There also seemed to be missing sections of analysis. Chief among them was the absence of any detailed discussion of Malcolm’s two groups formed in 1964—Muslim Mosque, Incorporated, and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
The Autobiography
had been long accepted as Malcolm’s political testament, yet it was largely silent on major political issues. There was also a strange yet unmistakable fissure within the body of the text, separating chapters one through fifteen from a second “book” consisting of chapters sixteen through nineteen. About two-fifths of the book focused exclusively on Malcolm’s childhood and juvenile years, describing the criminal exploits of the teenage Malcolm, “Detroit Red.” It was only years later that I would learn that much of Detroit Red was fictive, that Malcolm’s actual involvement in burglaries and hard-core crime was short-lived.

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I taught from 1989 to 1993, I began work on what I thought would be a modest political biography of Malcolm X. The study was first designed to map the evolution of his political and social thought. I hired a team of student researchers, led by then Ph.D. candidate Eleanor Hubbard, and we began to construct a bibliography of nearly one thousand works about the black leader.

Opportunities rarely come in life without a certain cost. In 1993, I accepted the appointment as director of the newly established Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. For the next ten years my primary focus was building the Institute; the Malcolm X biography project was placed on hold. It was only in 1999-2000, after meeting on several occasions with one of Malcolm’s children, Ilyasah Shabazz, that I decided to return to the biography. But in reading nearly all of the literature about Malcolm produced in the 1990s, I was struck by its shallow character and lack of original sources. Many Malcolmites had constructed a mythic legend to surround their leader that erased all blemishes and any mistakes he had made. Another version of “Malcolmology” simplistically equated Martin Luther King, Jr., with Malcolm, both advocating multicultural harmony and universal understanding. I decided to write a full, comprehensive study of Malcolm’s life.

The historical Malcolm, the man with all his strengths and flaws, was being strangled by the iconic legend that had been constructed around him. There were several reasons for this. Inexplicably, Betty Shabazz, and later the Shabazz estate, did not make available to the public hundreds of documents—personal correspondence, photographs, texts of speeches—by Malcolm X until 2008. Following Malcolm’s 1965 assassination, many of his closest associates went underground, fled the country, or simply refused to speak to scholars. The Nation of Islam, accused of murdering Malcolm, obviously had no incentive to go on the record explaining its reasons for opposing the former Black Muslim leader. NOI leader Louis Farrakhan had made speeches and statements about his relationship with Malcolm, but had never given a detailed life history of himself related to the subject. And finally, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department continued to suppress thousands of pages of surveillance and wiretapping related to Malcolm. At times these multiple roadblocks were so difficult to navigate around that it seemed no serious life history could be written.

My initial breakthrough came when I finally realized that critical deconstruction of the
Autobiography
held the key to reinterpreting Malcolm’s life. In this process, I was aided tremendously by Jonathan Cole, then Columbia University’s provost, and Vice Provost Michael Crow, who provided the financial support in 2001-2004 to fund the development of a multimedia version of the
Autobiography
. At one point more than twenty graduate and undergraduate students were employed by the Malcolm X Project, writing hundreds of profiles and abstracts of important individuals, institutions, and groups that were mentioned in the
Autobiography
. The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, directed by Frank Moretti, produced our extraordinary website,
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/malcolmx/
, which greatly accelerated the early development of the biography. A more recent multimedia resource presenting materials on Malcolm X is available at
http://mxp.manningmarable.com
.

As we deconstructed the
Autobiography
, I came to appreciate the book as a brilliant literary work, but more of a memoir than a factual and objective reconstruction of a man’s life. Consequently, the book focused largely on personalities rather than on deeper ideological or political differences that increasingly divided Malcolm from the Nation. It also said little about Malcolm’s extensive travels across the Middle East and Africa, in July-November 1964.

Another important element in the making of this biography was the critical advice of Clayborne Carson, the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University. I visited the Stanford campus in 2001 to observe how Clay had organized his project, and assigned specific responsibilities to student researchers. Clay suggested that the key to writing a full biography of Malcolm X would be the construction of an extremely detailed chronological grid of his life; in covering his last two years, 1963 to 1965, there would be almost daily entries. Each entry would indicate where the information came from and, whenever possible, would contain multiple sources of documentation. Over a six-year period, a massive chronology was developed, which became the foundation for this biography.

One additional detail in reading this work is the issue of names. Most of the central figures in Malcolm’s life changed their names two or three times, or even more. Malcolm’s invaluable and crusty chief of staff, James Warden, was usually called James 67X when he belonged to Mosque No. 7, and was often referred to as James Shabazz in 1964-65. However, there was at the same time another James Shabazz, James 3X McGregor, head of the Newark mosque, a deadly opponent of Malcolm’s. Consequently, Warden is referred to throughout the text as James 67X. There are similar problems with others’ names: Malcolm’s trusted assistant minister, Benjamin 2X Goodman, was also Benjamin Karim after embracing orthodox Islam; Thomas 15X Johnson, who was unjustly convicted of Malcolm’s murder, was later Khalil Islam; Louis Walcott, also named Louis X, the minister of Boston’s NOI mosque, is known throughout the world today as Louis Farrakhan. Wallace Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad’s son who inherited the leadership of the Nation of Islam in 1975, changed the spelling of his name to Warith Mohammed. With the partial exception of Farrakhan, I have tried to be consistent in the identification of key personalities throughout the text. This guideline also extends to individuals such as Maya Angelou, who was for several years in the 1960s known as Maya Maké.