Who Was Malcolm X?

...SUMMER • 1993 • 345 Malcolm himself was almost completely lacking in organizational ability, and the Organization of Afro-American Unity never really got off the ground...

...Nor was the process by which he remade himself any less remarkable...

...David Bradley argues that "he did not give up hating or his accusations of racism...

...For bell hooks it "revolutionized my thinking about race and politics...

...Attempts by scholars to reconstruct a coherent philosophy from his hundreds of speeches, however, were largely unsuccessful...

...Al Sharpton and Sonny Carson...

...Others were more perceptive...

...The teenaged Malcolm of the Autobiography is a young lion, subjugating anyone and everything to his will, but saved ultimately from a life of degradation by his prison conversion to the Nation of Islam...

...Despite his efforts to make himself more palatable to the civil rights establishment, even the movement's most militant wing regarded him with suspicion...

...For those to whom Malcolm is less a historical figure than a mythic presence, it has become irrelevant...

...a man for whom anything was possible...

...Unfortunately, Bradley acknowledges, as the facts are more generally known, subtlety is likely to be the first casualty...

...What is indisputable is that his early life in a depression-era welfare family was profoundly shaped by racism...

...Accounts that treat Malcolm as a product of the northern ghetto ignore the extent to which his early life in largely rural communities had been intertwined with the lives of white people...

...Malcolm was only thirty-nine when he was murdered, and was survived by his wife, mother and numerous siblings, friends, and associates who had witnessed the events described in the Autobiography...

...For a generation of black writers, students, and activists, reading the Autobiography was a transforming experience...

...With the collapse of the civil rights movement, the disaffection in the urban north that Malcolm had expressed became increasingly widespread...

...Next to Barry Goldwater he was the most sought-after speaker on the college circuit...

...One of the framing devices of the Autobiography is a series of dramatic confrontations with racism...

...In the twenty-five years since Malcolm's apotheosis these sources had gone largely unconsulted, a curious circumstance given the intensity of interest about him...

...Malcolm had emerged in the late fifties as the most vocal spokesman of the Nation of Islam, a radically separatist, inward-looking, uncompromisingly anti-white sect, whose puritanical tenets were expressions of a fundamentally millenarian outlook—the new dispensation they awaited would be brought about not by human agency but by divine operation...

...The full extent of the omissions and distortions that gave it shape was not known, however, until the publication in 1991 of Bruce Perry's Malcolm, The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (Station Hill Press...

...Malcolm was paying the price for his early notoriety...

...Although these discoveries have been widely publicized, less remarked upon are those concerning Malcolm's central epiphany during the Hajj to Mecca, which Perry scrutinized skeptically, ultimately casting considerable doubt on its genuineness...

...He could remain in the public eye and maintain his hold on his followers only by taking extreme positions that further isolated him from the mainstream...

...Malcolm himself acknowledged to a reporter that "I'm man enough to tell you that I can't put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now...

...Nor was his appeal limited to black audiences...

...A less sanguine Marlon Riggs notes however that "at some point the lie becomes disabling...

...James Farmer, who asked Malcolm why his new outlook was not reflected in the speeches he gave every Saturday at Harlem Square, was told: "Brother James, you must be enough of a politician to understand that if a leader makes a sudden right angle turn, he turns alone...

...The book states that Malcolm's Garveyite father was ultimately murdered by whites, who threw his body on the street-car tracks to make his death appear accidental...

...Crucial to the creation of Malcolm's posthumous reputation was the appearance, six months after his death, of Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book that Malcolm had said he would not live to see published...

...He made no secret of his ambition to fashion a new political identity for himself and to appeal to a broader constituency...

...Noting the methodical way Malcolm undertook to publicize this change of heart, writing scores of postcards to newsmen, and giving his puzzled subordinates elaborate instructions about how he wanted the press handled, Perry argues convincingly that his pilgrimage provided the pretext for abandoning a racial ideology that for some time had been politically burdensome...

...Charles 37X Kenyatta, Malcolm's closest assistant, is convinced that Malcolm was never reconciled to his separation from the Nation and that even "ten or fifteen minutes before he was assassinated, if Elijah Muhammad had asked him to come back, he would have come back...

...And while the chapters SUMMER • 1993 347 recounting his career as the zoot-suited, fast talking, lindy-hopping, reefer-smoking Detroit Red are among the most engaging, the austere Minister Malcolm, looking back, saw only vanity and empty striving...

...Like much else in the book, this is a romance...

...Even after his house was firebombed, he seems to have understood that arming his followers would have provoked their slaughter...

...persecution follows them and when Malcolm is an adolescent, their house near Lansing, Michigan, is burned down by the Black Legion, a KKK-type organization...

...David Bradley correctly notes that we are left with "a subtly altered figure—more intriguing, more intelligent, certainly more human...

...Perry convincingly demonstrates that these events either did not occur or were fundamentally misrepresented...

...To answer the needs of the present, a figure out of the shared past is transformed into a moral exemplar—with varying degrees of violence to the historical record...

...Man, I'd be the last one out of that library every night...

...The story, however, of how this was accomplished would have required someone with considerably more self-knowledge than Malcolm to tell it...

...Hunted by prison-seasoned cadres of the Fruit of Islam, he seemed overwhelmed by the despairing recognition that he was helpless to protect himself...

...Particularly disturbing were statements he made just weeks after his return from Mecca that appear to countenance an attack by a gang of black teenagers during the course of a robbery of a white-owned Harlem clothing store, in which the shopkeeper's wife was stabbed...

...Peter Goldman believed that at his death Malcolm was as convinced as ever that all white people were the enemies of all black people...

...One NAACP official labeled him "the best thing that happened to the KKK since the invention of the bedsheet...

...As a result he had returned a changed person, both more worldly and with a more profound understanding of society and human nature...

...Malcolm relates how his parents were driven from their home in Nebraska by hooded night riders...

...It traces the stages of his life story: his boyhood in impoverished circumstances, early criminal career and prison conversion to the Nation of Islam, gradual absorption in the political struggles of black people, break with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, embrace of orthodox Islam, and tentative acceptance of a more sophisticated, liberal, and humane outlook...

...C. Eric Lincoln noted that the "projections of what he was about to do range from a seat on the board of the Urban League to a Castro-type armed revolution...

...To have suggested in 1964 that within ten years Lenox Avenue, where his street-corner audiences had regularly clashed with the police, would be renamed Malcolm X Boulevard, his autobiography incorporated into high school curricula, and Malcolm himself enshrined in the pantheon of twentieth-century African-American heroes would have seemed absurd...

...To read Peter Goldman's excellent The Death and Life of Malcolm X (1973) is to be struck again by the pathos of Malcolm's last months...

...That Haley's account was at variance with the more pedestrian actuality of Malcolm's life has long been suspected by literary scholars, who recognized in Malcolm's narrative a kinship to hortatory works ranging from the Confessions of St...

...At the conclusion of his appearance before the Oxford Union he received a standing ovation...

...While the men with whom Malcolm surrounded himself had been invaluable in building the Nation of Islam, they were not skilled political operatives...

...Malcolm found in Harlem and Roxbury, Massachusetts—both still energetic black communities—an identity denied him by the predominantly white environment in which he was raised...

...records...

...He now wanted to work with the leaders of the major civil rights organizations in a "common approach," undoubtedly ignorant of the movement's organizational dynamics, for the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and Urban League were less a coalition than competing factions whose leaders were barely on speaking terms...

...He simply learned to hate institutions...

...His uncompromising vision on occasion made him a powerful critic not only of white America but of the black integrationist leadership, whose insistence on the efficacy of nonviolence and the redemptive power of Christian love had been increasingly discredited...

...James Baldwin, recalling one of these performances, recognized that "nothing could have been less reckless, more calculated, even to those loopholes he so often left dangling...

...In all Perry interviewed over four hundred people, conducting, in addition, a similarly exhaustive search of police, prison, court, and F.B.I...

...Moreover, he was unable to halt his increasing marginalization and complained, on more than one occasion, of being boxed into an ideological corner...

...At the time of his death, his Moslem Mosque, which even on a good night seldom drew more than twenty-five people, was in the process of being evicted from its 116th Street storefront...

...The portrait that emerges is of someone who had put behind him the racism of the Nation of Islam (an event movingly portrayed in Spike Lee's film...

...Modeling his delivery on the televised sermons of Billy Graham, Malcolm developed his skills in thousands of incendiary speeches on street corners and at mosques...

...In fact, although the guilt of several of those convicted is apparently still at issue, there was never any doubt on whose behalf the gunmen had acted...

...Paradoxically, these very ambiguities ultimately enhanced his influence...

...People who knew him best, however, described him as quick tempered and suspicious, with a personal reserve few were able to overcome...

...This familiarity may explain the comparative equanimity with which, even during his days as a Muslim firebrand, his personal dealings with the white devil were conducted...

...For most of his last year, Malcolm was able to stay alive solely by remaining out of the country...

...Part of Malcolm's tragedy, if one regards it as that, is that there was no Aaron to his Moses...

...His movement died with him...

...For Malcolm X this is unlikely to happen anytime soon...

...Ron Simmons, in an interview in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image argues that "many a people have been united and have grown strong on premises that were basically a lie...

...If the cases of John F. Kennedy, Robert E. Lee, and Abraham Lincoln are any indication, in time, the connection becomes so remote, the memory of failure or sense of loss so attenuated, that for a new generation the exemplar no longer has a meaning and is returned to history...

...350 • DISSENT...

...This phenomenon is hardly unprecedented...

...With the resurgence of interest in Malcolm, his speeches and writings received the sort of respectful attention they had never had before...

...For Time magazine he was "an unashamed demagogue" whose "gospel was Hatred" and who "in life and in death was a disaster to the civil rights movement...

...People as varied as Eldridge Cleaver and Clarence Thomas described it as a decisive influence...

...This judgment was largely shared by the civil rights community...

...By any means necessary...

...Above all, he was a superb orator and debater...

...As his opponent equivocated and backtracked, Haley noted, Malcolm would sit and listen with a foxlike grin...

...These ambitions went almost wholly unrealized...

...his words were often contradictory, reflecting the expectations of his audiences, which were as varied as the Socialist Workers party, the Harvard Law School, and street-corner meetings on 125th Street...

...an enigmatic, in a sense unfinished, character...

...Malcolm possessed an incisive intelligence that seldom revealed the gaps in his eight-grade and prison education, the deficiencies of which he was acutely conscious...

...One writer has described his speeches as a "loosely strung set of positions that were changing even as he announced them...

...The New York Times described him as an "extraordinary and twisted man" who had put "true gifts to evil purpose...

...The cult surrounding Malcolm reflects the failures in our time of black nationalism, and a consequent yearning, Adolph Reed argues, "for a different reality in lieu of engaging the one that actually confronts us...

...Kahn and Rustin noted that "his voice and words were cathartic," with 346 • DISSENT "skill and feeling he articulated angry subterranean moods more widespread than any of us like to admit...

...Malcolm's descriptions of his life in the Roxbury and Harlem ghettos are similarly exaggerated...

...Each stage involved a repudiation of what had gone before it...

...for Thulani Davis it "opened my mind, moved it away from provincial, frightened thinking...

...This vivid narrative was fashioned from approximately fifty interviews that Malcolm had taped during his last year...

...In 1959 Malcolm had traveled extensively in the Middle East and experienced many of the same things he later claimed struck him with the force of revelation...

...Whatever ambitions he may have harbored, personal enrichment had not been one of them: his pregnant widow and four small daughters were left without enough money to pay his funeral expenses...

...When the New York Times, in a July, 1964 poll, asked "New York Negroes" who was "doing the best" for them, 73 percent named Martin Luther King, Jr., 22 percent Roy Wilkins, and 6 percent Malcolm X. As Tom Kahn and Bayard Rustin noted after Malcolm's assassination, "Having blown the trumpet, he could summon, even at the very end, only a handful of followers...

...In a last futile, retaliatory gesture several nights later, a group of unknown followers succeeded in setting the Nation of Islam's Lenox Avenue mosque on fire...

...Baldwin, who had harshly criticized the Muslims for battening on the despair of black people, and who, shortly before Malcolm was murdered, had told an interviewer, "I would never have sent any child of mine to school to Malcolm, and I would—for myself—rather die than become that kind of theologian," five years later proclaimed that "in some church someday, so far unimagined and unimaginable, he will be hailed as a saint...

...His death rescued him from his own inconsequentiality...

...Although this experience could not have been other than deeply embittering, his white schoolmates had been sufficiently aware of the young Malcolm's exceptional qualities to elect him class president, and he apparently had had an affectionate relationship with a white foster family...

...Nevertheless, a number of troubling episodes are difficult to reconcile with the larger and more humane vision his admirers later ascribed to him...

...Although marred by reductive psychoanalyzing and deficient in other respects, Perry's book represented an impressive piece of research...

...These were not loopholes at all, but hangman's knots, as whoever rushed for the loophole immediately discovered...

...It would be wrong, of course, to describe such beliefs as racist, although when translated into street-corner oratory, the distinction can seem elusive...

...As it was, when Malcolm walked onto the stage of the Audubon Ballroom on that February afternoon in 1965, confronting the danger that, Robert Penn Warren noted, he had "more shrewdly estimated than anyone else," it was with "nerve, confidence, style...

...and other slogans extolling black pride and assertiveness took on an emblematic clarity...

...Nietzsche argued that after death men are understood worse than men of the moment, but heard better...

...About the only SUMMER • 1993 • 349 thing that can be said with any degree of certainty is that, as Kahn and Rustin noted, "his hostility to whites was becoming less absolute...

...Even the Nation dismissed him as "the highly intelligent, courageous leader of one segment of the Negro lunatic fringe...

...The degree to which Malcolm failed to alter his reputation as an anti-white extremist is apparent from the obituaries in the national press...

...Ironically, although advocacy of self-defense had been his most controversial teaching, for Malcolm himself it had remained entirely theoretical...

...Elijah Muhammad derided him as a "General without an army...

...He once confided to Alex Haley: "Man, lots of times I just wish I could start back in school, from about the Sixth Grade...

...The canonization of Malcolm X was abetted by virtually every segment of black political opinion, from campus radicals to more cautious officeholders...

...Similarly, although he had often claimed that everything he had accomplished in life he owed to Elijah Muhammad, he later emphasized that his pilgrimage to Mecca, where he had worshipped with Moslems of different races, had enabled him to appreciate for the first time the true universalist spirit of Islam...

...Despite Malcolm's undeniable talents, had he lived, novelist David Bradley persuasively suggests in a recent issue of Transition, the avenues to legitimate power would have remained closed to him, and "in all probability he would have gone gentle into the good night of the seventies...

...It represents a curious acknowledgment of the force, if not the persuasiveness, of his legacy, and says as much about the failure of black nationalism to achieve tangible results in the seventies and eighties as it does about Malcolm himself...

...White reporters assigned to cover him acknowledged that although being the sole white face at his rallies was not always a comfortable experience, in his personal dealings Malcolm was unfailingly cordial, with a modesty that almost everyone found engaging...

...His private feelings about whites were undoubtedly more complicated than his rhetoric as a minister for the Nation would suggest...

...Of more significance than his private racial beliefs is the extent to which he had succeeded in renouncing racist political appeals...

...The most visible apostate from the Nation of Islam, he was taunted by his former associate Louis Farrakhan, who described him as a "cowardly hypocritical dog . . . worthy of death" and dared him to come back and "face the music...

...Augustine to Up from Slavery...

...The transformation of popular attitudes toward Malcolm was remarkable...

...His break with Elijah Muhammad in 1963 freed Malcolm from the Nation's organizational and doctrinal constraints...

...Even those who saw him as an rabblerouser acknowledged that he was a man of unusual ability...

...Their worldview and the severity of the life their adherents, in particular women, were required to lead, ensured that although Malcolm, as poet Sonia Sanchez notes, was "saying out loud what African-Americans had been saying all along behind closed doors," his impact on the larger black community would be limited...

...Conspicuous for their resoluteness and personal loyalty, not afraid to resort to strong-arm tactics, they were a not wholly unfamiliar combination of idealist and small-time racketeer, the sort of men that a generation earlier had gravitated to Sufi Abdul Hamid and thirty years later would be found with Rev...

...Especially provocative is the disclosure that as a young man one of the expedients to which Malcolm turned was homosexual prostitution...

...Yet this hardly begins to do justice to the extent of his posthumous fame...

...In addition, he accounts for what he apparently felt was the incongruity of advocat348 • DISSENT ing black pride while possessing a light skin color by explaining that his West Indian grandmother had been raped by a white man...

...The book that resulted contains a number of revelations...

...The poverty he experienced was a good deal more demoralizing and the remedies to which he resorted more desperate than his account would indicate...

...In later years, speculation was widespread that his murder had been part of a CIA-directed conspiracy to eliminate a dangerous threat to the racial status quo (a fantasy elaborated most recently in the Spike Lee film...

...The symbol of an ill-defined alternative, in the face of what Baldwin called the "bitter, unanswerable present," Malcolm's words took on a new resonance...

...In awe of Malcolm as a daring conceptual thinker— a homily of Malcolm's that condemned the eating of pork had for one of them precipitated a severe religious crisis—they were unable to create a new broad-based movement...

...Does the truth about Malcolm in fact matter...