The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (49 page)

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—MALCOLM X: THE LAST SPEECHES

THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF MALCOLM X have traced a curious path to black cultural authority and social acceptance since his assassination in 1965. At the time of his martyrdom—achieved through a murder that rivaled in its fumbling but lethal execution the treacherous twists of a Shakespearean tragedy—Malcolm was experiencing a radical shift in the personal and political understandings that governed his life and thought.
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Malcolm’s death heightened the confusion that had already seized his inner circle because of his last religious conversion. His death also engendered bitter disagreement among fellow travelers about his evolving political direction, conflicts that often traded on polemic, diatribe, and intolerance. Thus Malcolm’s legacy was severely fragmented, his contributions shredded in ideological disputes even as ignorance and fear ensured his further denigration as the symbol of black hatred and violence.

Although broader cultural investigation of his importance has sometimes flagged, Malcolm has never disappeared among racial and political subcultures that proclaim his heroic stature because he embodied ideals of black rebellion and revolutionary social action.
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The contemporary revival of black nationalism, in particular, has focused renewed attention on him. Indeed, he has risen to a black cultural stratosphere that was once exclusively occupied by Martin Luther King Jr. The icons of success that mark Malcolm’s ascent—ranging from posters, clothing, speeches, and endless sampling of his voice on rap recordings—attest to his achieving the pinnacle of his popularity more than a quarter century after his death.

Malcolm, however, has received nothing like the intellectual attention devoted to Martin Luther King Jr., at least nothing equal to his cultural significance. Competing waves of uncritical celebration and vicious criticism—which settle easily into myth and caricature—have undermined appreciation of Malcolm’s greatest accomplishments. The peculiar needs that idolizing or demonizing Malcolm fulfill mean that intellectuals who study him are faced with the difficult task of describing and explaining a controversial black leader and the forces that produced him.
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Such critical studies must achieve the “thickest description” possible of Malcolm’s career while avoiding explanations that either obscure or reduce the complex nature of his achievements and failures.
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Judging by these standards, the literature on Malcolm X has often missed the mark. Even the classic
Autobiography of Malcolm X
reflects both Malcolm’s need to shape his personal history for public racial edification while bringing coherence to a radically conflicting set of life experiences and coauthor Alex Haley’s political biases and ideological purposes.
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Much writing about Malcolm has either lost its
way in the murky waters of psychology dissolved from history or simply substituted—given racial politics in the United States—defensive praise for critical appraisal. At times, insights on Malcolm have been tarnished by insular ideological arguments that neither illuminate nor surprise. Malcolm X was too formidable a historic figure—the movements he led too variable and contradictory, the passion and intelligence he summoned too extraordinary and disconcerting—to be viewed through a narrow cultural prism.

My intent in this chapter is to provide a critical path through the quagmire of conflicting views of Malcolm X. I have identified at least four Malcolms who emerge in the intellectual investigations of his life and career: Malcolm as hero and saint, Malcolm as public moralist, Malcolm as victim and vehicle of psychohistorical forces, and Malcolm as revolutionary figure judged by his career trajectory from nationalist to alleged socialist. Of course, many treatments of Malcolm’s life and thought transgress rigid boundaries of interpretation. The Malcolms I have identified, and especially the categories of interpretation to which they give rise, should be viewed as handles on broader issues of ideological warfare over who Malcolm is, and to whom he rightfully belongs. In short, they help us answer: Whose Malcolm is it?

I am not providing an exhaustive review of the literature, but a critical reading of the dominant tendencies in the writings on Malcolm X.
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The writings make up an intellectual universe riddled with philosophical blindnesses and ideological constraints, filled with problematic interpretations, and sometimes brimming with brilliant insights. They reveal as much about the possibilities of understanding and explaining the life of a great black man as they do about Malcolm’s life and thought.

In the tense and confused aftermath of Malcolm’s death, several groups claiming to be his ideological heirs competed in a warfare of interpretation over Malcolm’s torn legacy. The most prominent of these included black nationalist and revolutionary groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, under the leadership of James Farmer and especially Floyd McKissick), the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
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They appealed to his vision and spirit in developing styles of moral criticism and social action aimed at the destruction of white supremacy. These groups also advocated versions of Black Power, racial self-determination, black pride, cultural autonomy, cooperative socialism, and black capitalism.
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Malcolm’s death also caused often bitter debate between custodians of his legacy and his detractors, either side arguing his genius or evil in a potpourri of journals, books, magazines, and newspapers. For many of Malcolm’s keepers, the
embrace of his legacy by integrationists or Marxists out to re-create Malcolm in their distorted image was more destructive than his critics characterizing him in exclusively pejorative terms.

For all his nationalist followers, Malcolm is largely viewed as a saintly figure defending the cause of black unity while fighting racist oppression. Admittedly, the development of stories that posit black heroes and saints serves a crucial cultural and political function. Such stories may be used to combat historical amnesia and to challenge the deification of black heroes—especially those deemed capable of betraying the best interests of African-Americans—by forces outside black communities. Furthermore, such stories reveal that the creation of (black) heroes is neither accidental nor value neutral, and often serves political ends that are not defined or controlled by black communities. Even heroes proclaimed worthy of broad black support are often subject to cultural manipulation and distortion.

The most striking example of this involves Martin Luther King, Jr. Like Malcolm X, King was a complex historic figure whose moral vision and social thought evolved over time.
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When King was alive, his efforts to affect a beloved community of racial equality were widely viewed as a threat to a stable social order. His advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience was also viewed as a detrimental detour from the proper role that religious leaders should play in public. Of course, the rise of black radicalism during the late 1960s softened King’s perception among many whites and blacks. But King’s power to excite the social imagination of Americans only increased after his assassination.

The conflicting uses to which King’s memory can be put—and the obscene manner in which his radical legacy can be deliberately forgotten—are displayed in aspects of the public commemoration of his birthday. To a significant degree, perceptions of King’s public aims have been shaped by the corporate sector and (sometimes hostile) governmental forces. These forces may be glimpsed in CocaCola commercials celebrating King’s birthday, and in Ronald Reagan’s unseemly hints of King’s personal and political defects at the signing of legislation to establish King’s birthday as a national holiday.

King’s legacy is viewed as most useful when promoting an unalloyed optimism about the possibilities of American social transformation, which peaked during his “I Have a Dream” speech. What is not often discussed—and is perhaps deliberately ignored—is how King dramatically revised his views, glimpsed most eloquently in his Vietnam era antiwar rhetoric and in his War on Poverty social activism. Corporationsponsored commercials that celebrate King’s memory—most notably, television spots by McDonald’s and Coca-Cola aimed at connecting their products to King’s legacy—reveal a truncated understanding of King’s meaning and value to American democracy. These and other efforts at public explanation of King’s meaning portray his worth as underwriting the interests of the state, which advocates a distorted cultural history of an era actually shaped more by blood and brutality than by distant dreams.

Many events of public commemoration avoid assigning specific responsibility for opposition to King’s and the civil rights movement’s quest for equality. On
such occasions, the uneven path to racial justice is often described in a manner that makes progress appear an inevitable fact of our national life. Little mention is made of the concerted efforts—not only of bigots and white supremacists, but, more important, of government officials and average citizens—to stop racial progress. Such stories deny King’s radical challenge to narrow conceptions of American democracy. Although King and other sacrificial civil rights participants are lauded for their possession of the virtue of courage, not enough attention is given to the vicious cultural contexts that called forth such heroic action.

Most insidious of all, consent to these whitewashed stories of King and the 1960s is often secured by the veiled threat that King’s memory will be either celebrated in this manner or forgotten altogether. The logic behind such a threat is premised on a belief that blacks should be grateful for the state’s allowing King’s celebration to occur at all. These realities make the battle over King’s memory—waged by communities invested in his radical challenge to American society—a constant obligation. The battle over King’s memory also provides an important example to communities interested in preserving and employing Malcolm’s memory in contemporary social action. As with King, making Malcolm X a hero reveals the political utility of memory and reflects a deliberate choice made by black communities to identify and honor the principles for which Malcolm lived and died.

For many adherents, Malcolm remained until his death a revolutionary black nationalist whose exclusive interest was to combat white supremacy while fostering black unity. Although near the end of his life Malcolm displayed a broadened humanity and moral awareness—qualities overlooked by his unprincipled critics and often denied by his true believers—his revolutionary cohorts contended that Malcolm’s late-life changes were cosmetic and confused, the painful evidence of ideological vertigo brought on by paranoia and exhaustion.