MalcolmX

[Stavros]

How do people react today to MalcolmX and the idea that Black Americans will never be equal in America and should create lives separate from the rest of the country? This is a book review which I hope will generate a lively discussion.

When I was an undergraduate and studying American political history I was puzzled by MalcolmX, a figure for whom I have no sympathy or admiration. I understand how his articulate rage attracted and upset a lot of people in the civil rights era. An impressive speaker, yes, but was this Preacher Man articulating the wrong message at the wrong time? Does the separatist strain in Black American politics that reaches back to Marcus Garvey and Timothy Drew continue to matter to Black Americans? And what, from a hypothetical MalcolmX context, has Civil Rights achieved for Black Americans?

So I was impressed earlier this year when I read Manning Marable’s biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Marable, who died before the book went to print, assembled a research team that over ten years re-assessed the Autobiography Malcolm co-wrote with Alex Haley; conducting interviews with relevant people still alive, and scrutinising a mass of new and previously uninspected evidence. He has done an outstanding job in giving depth to a complex man who was, in my opinion, doomed to fail as long as he embraced a separatist creed in the USA.

Marable shows how Malcolm Little became Detroit Red, converting to Malcolm X, ending his life as Malik el-Shabbazz. He shows how Malcolm grew up in a chaotic, political family whose father Earl Little, a follower of Marcus Garvey and an activist in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, was killed when –according to Marable, disputed by others- the Klan threw him under a trolley car in Lansing, Michigan. Marable chronicles the efforts made by his elder half-sister Ellen to improve his life, fetching him from Lansing to Boston where, in his late teens he worked as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland where the jazz greats of the days used to play, before working on the New Haven railroad, which gave him his first taste of the destination city, New York, and Harlem in particular. The first place he rushed to when he arrived was the integrated night-club Small’s Paradise.

Marable documents the intimate relationships that Malcolm had in Boston with an Armenian woman, Bea Caragulian, and a homosexual, William Paul Lennon for whom he worked as a ‘butler and occasional house worker’. Of the two Caragulian was more important, the longest relationship that Malcolm had with a woman other than his wife, and a petty crook who got Malcolm involved in the robberies in Boston that landed him in gaol. Marable argues that while Detroit Red was a womanising, hard-drinking and occasionally a thieving pimp, hustler and drug pusher, it was occasional rather than habitual as the Autobiography suggested.

Marable shows how Detroit Red, like many young black men before and since, ended up in prison, where he re-evaluated his life and decided to convert to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, and though it is difficult for an outsider to comprehend the fantastic drivel of Yacub’s Book, the founding text of the Nation, bitterness and resentment may also explain his rejection of White America as much as the Nation’s belief that black people lost their pre-eminence in the world due to the trickollogy of White Devils and their ‘filthy religion’ Christianity. It’s all in the nomenclature: Lost-Found: for if the story of the lost Black Arabian tribe, the Shabazz sounds like a fairy tale, ponder the popularity of stories in which unhappy children perplexed by their domestic situation receive a revelation that shows that in fact they have special powers and a special status: she is in fact a Princess, not a kitchen maid; he is in fact a uniquely gifted Magician, not a spotty little twit in glasses.

Being special rather than ordinary was a key value in the narrative presented by the Nation’s founder, Wali/Wallace Far’d and his successor, Elijah Mohammed –although they were in a sense echoing earlier feelings about Black identity expressed by Edward Blyden and WEB Du Bois.

Marable shows how Malcolm became crucial to Elijah Mohammed as the man who developed the Nation as a national organisation on the East Coast and the West Coast, but how the growth of Malcolm’s reputation and his following became a threat to what had become a lucrative and, in essence, a family business.

Malcolm was a charming man, a persuasive talker in small groups; in large gatherings he deployed the aggressive language of the Nation to scintillating effect. But in spite of the violent language that was used to threaten or intimidate anyone who took the lives of Black people, such as the LA police, almost all of the violence in the Nation was inflicted by its para-military force, the Fruit of Islam, on its own members, usually for infractions of ‘Muslim’ regulations on gambling, alcohol and fornication. This sub-culture of violence in the Nation was to prove fatal to its own organisation as well as to Malcolm himself.

Marable charts the growing rift between Malcolm and Elijah Mohammed, some of it personal, some of it political or ideological. As Malcolm was allowed to travel, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, he became aware that the Nation did not practise true Islam, and that there was, in 1960s Africa, real power among newly independent African states that offered more direct and satisfactory political expression for black people than segregated America had to offer –indeed he met expatriate Americans in Ghana (Maya Angelou for example) in the early 1960s who helped to change his views and bring him closer to the politics Malcolm and the Nation claimed to have no interest in.

Thus, by 1964, Malcolm had to confront his religious and political contradictions: so a cult follower who had recognised Elijah Mohammed as ‘God’s messenger’ rejected the Nation to become an orthodox Muslim; a man who had ridiculed politics, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, whose organisation with his support had made common cause with the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan, became interested in the radical politics of liberation.

By the time that Malcolm broke his bond with the Nation, he was a public figure trying to create a new movement, one that threatened Elijah Mohammed’s family business, and with the sub-culture of violence in the Nation so deeply ingrained, when the issue became the survival of the business or the survival of Malcolm, assassination was the logical outcome, with or without the collusion of the FBI whose leader, J Edgar Hoover was ‘concerned’ enough about Malcolm’s provocative speeches and popularity to have him tailed and bugged on a regular basis (including the day of his assassination) –and one of Mohammed’s top lieutenants was an FBI informer.

Marable writes from a liberal perspective and has no sympathy for the Nation, to some extent exposes the bogus ideology behind the Nation before it was dissolved by Elijah Mohammed’s son, who followed Malcolm into the orthodox world of Islam (Louis Farrakhan subsequently resurrected the business as the Nation of Islam on his own terms). He does not follow through the other legacy of Malcolm’s separatist politics, namely the violent rejection of ‘America’ in the 1960s by armed groups such as the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and eventually the Symbionese Liberation Army; even Timothy Leary in the 60s claimed of the counter-cultural movement: our awowed aim is to bring down the American Empire.

More positively, Marable sees Malcolm as part of the same tradition of Black American Preachers as Martin Luther King, people who celebrated being Black, and who took the positive view that there was nothing that Black people could not achieve on their own merits. He was also instrumental in giving Islam in the USA a more coherent profile than it had previously had with strange cults like the Nation, and the controversial Ahmadiyya sect that was and remains strong in the USA.

Yet it is clear that for much of his career, Malcolm was living in denial of his own growth as a political figure, incapable of severing his ties to Elijah Mohammed even when he discovered that Mohammed had fathered numerous children by different women, many of whom were underage at the time, and one of whom was a former girlfriend. Malcolm had to confront the reality of American politics he claimed to have no interest in it, while the overtures to both the Nazi Party and the Klan who murdered his father only make sense in the twisted logic of the Nation’s Apartheid and the tired doctrine -my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

But Marable doesn’t really tackle the hypocrisy of a man who made a career out of attacking White Devils, when on Marable’s own evidence the most intense relationships Malcolm had before his conversion were with a white woman and a white homosexual –and there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that Malcolm showed any resentment or hostility towards them after his conversion; he remained in touch with Caragulian into the 1950s (she died in the 1990s).

Malcolm was an inspiration to many Black Americans; he gave them an alternative narrative of their own history, asking the potent question: What is your name? And revealing in the answer that every Black American has a name endowed by slavery. It seems to me that Malcolm allied himself to a doomed cause and was doomed to die by its hand when he bit it –so was this inspiring figure also someone who in effect, wasted his gifts on segregation?

And Marable asks: can Black Americans disentangle their destiny from the USA as a whole? He suggests that the concept of segregation in the USA has died and that this is part of the victory that the civil rights movement has achieved.

But while Malcolm was foolish to dismiss the civil rights movement as an irrelevance to Black Americans, the question of what it is that has been gained has returned to the agenda recently through Michelle Alexander’s explosive book -The New Jim Crow- which argues that the ‘war on drugs’ which began during the Nixon administration, has criminalised a third of male Black Americans and has in effect, been a deliberate attempt to prevent the full flowering of civil rights in America. On this reading, Malcolm’s hostility to ‘white America’, based on a crushing, fundamental lack of trust, could yet feed the same kind of alienation that took this solitary figure into the wilderness of segregation, and an early, violent death.


Book review of Alexander's The New Jim Crow:
New Jim Crow, The: Amazon.co.uk: Michelle Alexander: Books@@AMEPARAM@@http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41sG3gaNuZL.@@AMEPARAM@@41sG3gaNuZL

[hippifried]

So... Are you looking for comment, or opening up a bookstore?

[martin48]

So... Are you looking for comment, or opening up a bookstore?

Advertising a book, I think!

[buttslinger]

Mindreading again. I was just googling to find a Malcolm Ten quote about walking down a Mecca street and for the first time in his life he felt like somebody wasn't watching him. Lots of Americans like Hemingway, F Scott, and Orson Welles go overseas, and when they get back, people have changed!!!

[Stavros]

I have said at the beginning it is a book review intended to generate discussion, I can't help it if it fails to generate any.

Buttslinger, Malcolm wrote letters from his Hajj which probably deliver what you are looking for: in one he wrote: "I had come out of an organization that says Mecca is the only place in the world where a white man can't go'; and in another, printed in full or in part in the New York Times I think in 1964, Malcolm wrote: "I have eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God...with fellow Muslims whose skin was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue...for the first time in my life I didn't see them as 'white men'...".

[Prospero]

The idea being that religion trumps difference? I think that many of the most devout contemporary Christians might feel the same as Malcolm X did about islam.

But I also know that many Arab Moslems feel that the Black Muslims of America - as they are now under the present leadership - have no real shared sense of Moslem identity. Salafi Muslims don't see them as true believers.

[Prospero]

Oh... and the Ahmadidya "sect" - as you call them - have an even larger following in the UK. The largest mosque in Europe is in South West london (an ahmadiyya mosque). You see cars belonig to followers with the slogan "Love for all, Hatred for none" on them. They y are not seen as true Muslims either... but as apostates....because they have belief in a prophet who came after Mohammed. The only Muslim to ever win a Nobel prize for physics was an Ahmadiya from Pakistan.. and he was without honour in his homeland

[Dino Velvet]

Enjoyable read, Stavros. Thank you.

[Stavros]

The Ahmadiyya I used to know would have fainted had he been told he was not a 'true' or a 'proper' Muslim, but I know that when Zia al-Haq died in that plane crash he was delighted and said that God had answered their prayers. But I don't know how to get round the problem when someone claims to have succeeded Muhammad as the 'prophet' or 'messenger' of Islam -they know they must run the risk of being labelled an apostate -wasn't this a problem with the Ba'hai in its early years? And yet I am not sure if the translation of the Qu'ran is that Muhammad is the 'last' or the 'latest' of the so-called 'Prophets' or 'Messengers'.

Elijah Mohammed claims that before he 'disappeared', Far'd 'confessed' that he was in fact almighty God, which means we not only have proof of God's existence, but also photos, although I guess a lot of people will be disappointed to find out that God looks like an Arab and doesn't have a beard. The Lost-Found Nation of Islam was a confidence trick, not a religion, but it played on the need some people have to believe they are special; I still can't quite understand why Malcolm devoted so much of his life to it. But then I guess one could say the same of Communists and Fascists.

[Prospero]

it was a problem for the Bahai in iran who were singled out after the revolution their and many were slaughtered by the new theocrats.