The Ambiguous Legacy of Malcolm X

...All of this is, of course, speculation...

...The problem in Selma is less difficult than the problem of Harlem, less complex than the conditions that produced Malcolm X-ism...

...It was a relief for them to know that extremism existed on both sides, and that the false equation could be made between Eastland and Malcolm X. And what of the whites who were attracted to Malcolm...

...Who can say that the visible eruptions are more damaging than the ongoing assaults on the spirit...

...His voice and words were cathartic, channeling into militant verbiage emotions that might otherwise have run a violently self-destructive course...

...If, as was so often charged, Washington was appointed the Negro leader by white philanthropists, certainly Malcolm's public image was largely the creation of the white press, which grossly exaggerated his actual strength...

...As a matter of practical politics, one may ask whether the kind of white people who will masochistically sit for hours hearing "white devils" denounced really make the sturdiest allies in the fight for freedom...

...The guarantee of voting rights is of crucial importance...

...We could have profited mightily from his talents, now so wastefully silenced...

...Malcolm's killing is but the most notorious and shocking example of a pattern stamped on ghetto life: Negroes slashing Negroes in Harlem on a Saturday night to even the score in a card-game, to avenge a passing insult, or for reasons so trivial as to inspire a degraded mockery...

...to create new jobs in the servicing of human needs...

...We have got to eliminate, not push back, the slums...

...The only alternative is passivity, and it is found not only among the Negro "lumpen proletariat" but among affluent sections of the black bourgeoisie whose egos are excessively bound up with property and a phoney dignity that is gravely offended when "an important representative of the race like Dr...

...And his ethical Calvinism was of a piece with his economics, for Malcolm was the most compelling advocate in decades for the resurrection of Booker T. Washington's brand of self-help...

...What kind of political action is uncertain...

...It is probably true that in the public mind, the militance of SNCC and CORE faded, by comparison with Malcolm, from extremism to mainstreamism...

...He could not succeed because these are not problems that can be exorcized by religious mysticism or denunciatory rhetoric What is required is a strategy for social change, and Malcolm was not willing (except perhaps when it was too late) to abandon premises which had made him and his program a maze of contradictions...

...It's only the niggers cutting each other up," the white cops would say when violence broke out in the ghetto...

...Malcolm X was a child of the ghetto and he was dedicated to the preservation of the ghetto, which he thought could be either transformed from within or transplanted to a happier environment...

...We need to reallocate the nation's enormous resources to achieve these ends...

...Do Negroes concur in this definition of their worth, or has their manhood been rendered so fragile by the total society that they dare not endure the slightest assault on it from a peer, lest they lose it irrevocably...

...What will it take to dissipate them...

...That was his central error, and he cannot be easily forgiven it...

...Malcolm spoke at every major white college, but only at one or two Negro schools...

...The parallel between these two men runs farther...

...The ambivalent, the ironic and the tragic—all of which he symbolized—are the governing elements in our common experience here...

...But there must be more steps, and they must lead to a massive program of national reconstruction...

...At this writing, each day's newspaper brings fresh reports of atrocities from Selma...

...Like a pendulum, he swung from one extreme to its opposite—from pimping, thieving, and dope-peddling to the renunciation of smoking, liquor, and all frivolity...

...No one familiar with the less savory aspects of Negro church life— or for that matter, with the internal struggles in other minority institutions— will fail to understand the ferocity with which power and recogniion are sought by egos otherwise deprived...

...If further advancement in the hierarchy of the Black Muslims was barred, as seems likely, and if Malcolm recognized that his talents were too great to be squandered on a myriad of tiny nationalist sects, as also seems likely—then the construction of a political power base might well have been the only alternative...

...Every Negro, however far he wanders, carries a piece of the ghetto with him...

...The total society wanted Malcolm to break with violence, but there has to be a break on the other side, away from business as usual...

...It is the necessary first step toward realizing the Negro's potential political power...

...Aside from certain sectarian groups on the Ultra-Left who saw Malcolm as the personification of a stage in the unfolding of their own political logic, there were guilt-ridden liberals who subjected themselves to Malcolm's speeches as a kind of initiation rite, who sought admission to a black brotherhood as an escape from sterility, who felt there was a price to be paid and that it could be paid...

...If only he had cast his lot with the civil rights revolution...

...Even assuming that decisive federal action is forthcoming, what of the present emotions being generated in ghettos throughout the country...

...to revolutionize our educational institutions...

...Public opponents of Malcolm often stated that, despite their differences with him, they were glad he was around—because he frightened white folks...

...And while all the Civil Rights groups began perceiving the need for a more fundamental movement that would encompass and activate broader sections of the Negro community, many hostile or indifferent whites were let off the hook...

...What need did the white press have for Malcolm...

...But the movement we build, while deriving from the ghetto, must be dedicated to its destruction...

...The dual standards persist, and, inevitably, they generate their counterparts in the Negro community...

...As for the moods Malcolm X articulated, they remain...

...What is terrible about Malcolm's murder is not any resemblance to President Kennedy's, nor is it that he who takes up the sword will perish by it, for that has not always happened...

...But having blown the trumpet, he could summon, even at the very end, only a handful of followers .. . His death is deeply felt among Negroes because Malcolm was a child of the ghetto...

...Unless we are prepared to do this—not haphazardly and piecemeal, but under a comprehensive national plan and timetable—nothing will change...

...What can surpass the vulgar hypocrisy of the white newspapers which condemned Malcolm for his ugly remark about "chickens coming home to roost" after President Kennedy's assassination, and then decorated their own editorials with the same contemptible words after Malcolm's assassination...

...But whom did Malcolm really frighten...

...Malcolm's appeal to inert and insulated segments of the black bourgeoisie should not be underestimated...

...Surely not Goldwater or Eastland or the racist power structure...

...So much of the debate underway in the Negro movement today reflects not merely conflicting group philosophies but the internal crisis of identity, which takes its toll of every black man in America...

...We shall never know how he would have resolved it...

...With skill and feeling he articulated angry subterranean moods more widespread than any of us like to admit...

...It is not proposed that Dr...

...And so they would turn their violence inward, on each other...

...His conception of manhood and dignity—at least during his career with the Black Muslims—was thoroughly petty bourgeois...

...What is terrible is that the event in the Audubon Ballroom has happened before, countless times down the centuries, whenever oppressed people could not see the road to freedom because it was obscured by rhetoric and demagogery, by frustration and despair, by hopeless isolation, and perhaps by objective circumstances...

...Malcolm X-ism will persist as a brooding, angry alienation punctured more or less frequently by shootings, bombings, and street violence...

...Malcolm frightened and worried white liberals, those most in sympathy with the movement but troubled by guilt-feelings...

...Malcolm's life was cut off in the midst of a persenal crisis...

...King just stands there and lets some trashy white sheriff poke a finger in his face...

...Malcolm strove to retrieve the Negro's shattered manhood from the wreckage of slavery, from the debris of matriarchy and family instability, from poverty and narcotics, from conditioned aimlessness, selfhatred and chaos...

...Indeed, here was an opportunity to affect something—if not the long-range organizational structure of the Negro community, then certainly one of the currents within it...

...Every prostitute or dope addict he and the Muslims claimed to reform, the ghetto replaced many times over...

...Non-violence is denounced as incompatible with manhood and dignity, though the violence is purely verbal...

...More, of course, was involved in Malcolm's assassination than the ingredients of a street fight...

...The moral transformation he advocated could never take place, because there is a limit to what the will can alone achieve...

...deprived of the outlet he gave them, perhaps they will become more destructive...

...Harlem life and politics being what they are, a political career for Malcolm was not inconceivable...

...A sad fact about the American scene is that only the civil rights movement comes near providing a rational, meaningful alternative to the void...

...From the depravity of his early years Malcolm could be extricated only by an all-embracing totality, by an intensely apocalyptic vision which would leave a void in no part of his life...

...Just as Washington called upon Negroes to acquire handicraft and agricultural skills at a time when industrialization was rendering these obsolete, so Malcolm primed the same ancient fantasies, advocating that Negroes pool their resources into small business establishments at a time when these are declining under the pressures of big business...

...Which was all to the good...

...Yet all too much in the larger society militates against the rational...

...The underclass for which Malcolm spoke will always be with us, growing in desperation...

...But having described the evil, he had no program for uprooting it...

...For all of his militance, Malcolm was in many respects a conservative force in the Negro community...

...It was not essentially different from what one hears in Harlem bars after midnight...

...And violence is intuitively recognized, if not in language then in deeds, as impracticable...

...The indisputable fact is that the kind of people caught up in the maelstrom of factions and grouplets revolving around Malcolm and his antagonists have little chance of making it anywhere else...

...Yet there is a continuity...

...To succeed, a modification in his racial dogma would have been required...

...His violent rhetoric was a "copout...

...There is evidence that toward the end Malcolm was seeking a new role for himself, that his theological (for lack of a better word) views were changing, that his hostility to whites was becoming less absolute, and that he was turning his attention to the possibilities of political action...

...it is his burden and his sustenance...

...In their economic fantasies, both in effect withdrew from the struggle for political equality and for integration, yet both were feted, though in different ways, by the white world...

...But in all of this there is an agonizing and desperate pursuit of manhood, or its image, that transcends the very value of life and survival...

...If Washington failed to grasp the significance of industrialization and urbanization at the end of the last century, Malcolm refused to understand the radical changes the current technological revolution is creating in the structure of the national economy...

...It appears that all of the protagonists in the event were "lower class" Negroes engaged, probably for the first time in their lives, in a series of power plays which offered a larger arena for the achievement of status and position than any available to them in the outside world...

...King strike the sheriff, but that he go home so that our collective dignities will be spared further embarrassment...