Malcolm X, scarred prophet of black pride
His death 50 years ago robbed the civil rights movement of a powerful Muslim leader,
WHEN Malcolm X was assassinated, Time magazine wrote he had been “a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred.” The New York Times, America’s liberal bible, called him “an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose”.
Fifty years on and Malcolm’s reputation is very different. Thanks to a better understanding of what he really stood for, he now stands out as a prophet of the civil rights era and the embodiment of black pride.
If the man originally named Malcolm Little was angry, he had good cause. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925 into a society in which he felt that black people had no personhood. He became a career crim- inal, including a gay prostitute, before landing in jail in 1946. There he was picked up by the Nation of Islam. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X.
The Nation teaches that black and white people do not share an ancestry — that black people are divine and righteous whereas white people are devils. To someone with Malcolm’s history it contained a certain logic. First, it inverted a centuries-old prejudice that blackness was inferior to whiteness. Second, if white, mainstream American culture would not let black people succeed on equal terms, then any claim to the US being racially equal was nonsense and blacks would never obtain their rightful equality within it. Better to separate from whites and try to build communities that would stand on their own. The Nation urged African-Ameri- cans to quit the mainstream and live clean and disciplined lives.
As a high-profile preacher for the Nation, Malcolm was not just despised by conservatives. Liberals had little time for him. Their goal was to integrate black people into those parts of American life from which they had been excluded. Malcolm’s suggestion that black people should go it alone ran entirely counter to the liberal ethos, and he poured scorn on Martin Luther King Jr’s strategy of peaceful resistance.
So why, then, has Malcolm’s reputation among historians improved dramatically since the years following his assassination? Partly, his biography became better understood. In 196364, Malcolm began to split with the Nation in an argument over personalities and tactics — and there was a revolution in his politics. Critical to this was his conversion from the Nation of Islam to mainstream Sunni Islam. He went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and was struck by the racial harmony among Muslims: “There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colours, from blue-eyed blonds to blackskinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood . . . that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and nonwhite.”
Islam helped transform Malcolm from a black leader who preached separation into a proponent of the hope that AfricanAmericans could advance as part of a broader coalition with oppressed people. Now advocating democratic participation, he said: “It’s time for us to submerge our differences and realise that it is best for us to first see that we have the same problem, a common problem — a problem that will make you catch hell whether you’re a Baptist, or a Methodist, or a Muslim, or a nationalist.”
Had Malcolm lived beyond 1965, it is fascinating to imagine how he might have informed the civil rights revolution. His evolving philosophy might have seen him eclipse King as the natural leader of the new phase of civil rights activism. For it was moving, necessarily, away from the liberal ideal of biracial campaigning and towards assertion of black pride.
It wasn’t to be. On February 21 1965, the 39-year-old was preparing to address his Organisation of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan when a man rushed forward and shot him in the chest with a sawn-off shotgun; two other men fired at him with semiautomatic handguns. He died in hospital.
Some say the establishment benefited from the division within the civil rights ranks that resulted from his death, others point out that Malcolm’s murder robbed African-Americans of one of its brightest and best leaders. That latter point is certainly true. Time magazine was quite accurate when it described him as “a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief”. But his evolution into the embodiment of black pride reminds us that the struggle for personal moral uplift has always been at the heart of the civil rights movement. It was a movement that didn’t just change laws but also transformed individuals — and the rebirth of Malcolm Little as Malcolm X personalised the struggle of millions of AfricanAmericans. —
In Mecca he was struck by racial harmony among Muslims