This is Malcolm’s meanings. The Malcolm X that we see represented in today’s mass media is a Malcolm that Malcolm himself wouldn’t recognize. He’s portrayed today as a civil rights activist, a kind of Martin Luther King figure, except he was Muslim. In a sense, popular culture has softened his image and burnished his rawness. Malcolm wouldn’t recognize this new Malcolm.
To listen to Malcolm or to read his speeches is to find a man who was a revolutionary. He called himself a human rights activist because he had little trust that the U.S. government would fairly protect the rights of Black folks. He was a Black nationalist who was also an internationalist, in essence a pan-Africanist. During his years as a hardworking minister in the Nation of Islam, he was a bitter critic of civil rights leaders who struggled for integration. In his defense, he said, “It is not integration that Negroes in America want, it is human dignity.” To be sure, integration was a means, not an end, and as we survey today’s landscape broadly, we must admit that millions of Black folks live in, or go to school in communities and institutions that are economically and structurally segregated 40 years later.
Malcolm moves many today because of his extraordinary integrity and his determination to learn, to grow, to develop. What touches many young people is Malcolm’s rise from hustler and prisoner to minister and later spokesman for an emerging revolutionary movement. Malcolm had a tremendous impact on Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party. In fact, Newton later wrote he would have joined the Nation of Islam, except as a son of a preacher he tired of religion.
Many of us like to try to minimize Malcolm’s years in prison, yet these were truly formative years, which shaped him in ways that affected the rest of his life. Once, while in prison, Malcolm and other prisoner debaters held a debate against students of MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the issue of the death penalty. Malcolm was leader of the prison debating team and beat MIT by arguing that, while English authorities were hanging people for stealing, English pickpockets were hard at work on the crowd stealing. His years of hard work and study while in prison prepared him for an extraordinary career as a minister and movement leader. It is precisely this role that made him a target of the state.
One need only read Clayborne Carson’s book, Malcolm X: The FBI File published in 1991 by Carolyn Graff, to see how the FBI shadowed Malcolm X from place to place, from day to day, for years. They even record his trips abroad, like his lecture at Oxford Union, where he denounced U.S. domestic policy. The file showed Malcolm’s speech earned long applause, but there is an even more foreboding memo on February 21, 1965, the day of his assassination. The Malcolm X file reflects a conversation between a reporter for the now defunct magazine Life and an unnamed person in Washington, DC. During this conversation, one told the other that it was believed that Malcolm’s killers were imported to New York from elsewhere. One person advised to the other that they should check out Washington and the CIA, because Malcolm snafued U.S. relations with African nations.
If anything, Malcolm X became a bigger presence in Black life in death than before. It’s been 42 years since his assassination. He’s as alive today as he was on February 20, 1965. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
