Malcolm X: A tribute to a fallen warrior ten years after his death

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, ex-Muslim and revolutionary black leader, was felled by assassins' bullets as he began a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. Fifty weeks after he had broken with the Black Muslims and had begun to emerge from a black nationalist approach to a Third World internationalist approach, he was shot down. Certainly, the fact that he was killed at such a crucial ideological turning point in his life and in the life of the black liberation movement was no coincidence. In commemorating that day ten years ago when Malcolm's life was put to an end, we are not simply paying tribute to a man; we are analyzing the development of three political eras in the Black community the era of assimilation, the era of nationalism, and the era of internationalism. We are examining Malcolm as a product of the first era, even as he was a forerunner of the latter two.

Throughout his life, Malcolm was an activist. As he remarked in 1964, anything I get in, I'm in it all the way." In his evolution from hustler to convicted robber to Black Muslim to revolutionary internationalist, he was never content to hypothesize or simply talk about what he wanted; he was concerned with the concrete strategies for action which would enable a goal to become a reality. Constantly evolving, never stagnating. Malcolm continually revised his outlook to accommodate existing conditions. The first of these changes was his conversion to the Black Muslim faith. While in Charleston prison serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery, Malcolm became a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammed, the "messenger" of Allah. The intense racial pride of the Muslims, their strict moral code, and their tight discipline gave Malcolm a positive self-image. For the first time, he felt pride in himself as a black man. The Muslim teachings enabled him to see his apparent failure in life as being a result of his oppression as a black man in white American society. After his release from prison in 1952, Malcolm joined the Muslim movement and became a top minister by the early sixties. His weekly lectures as minister of Temple Number 7 in New York City, which dealt with black history and the death of white society, drew everflowing crowds. Malcolm, in his desire for practical strategies for solving problems, introduced the concept of political nationalism into the Muslim movement, he brought the supernatural Muslim dogma about the downfall of white society and the reinstatement of black world dominance down to earth, seeking practical instruments for the liberation of his race that could be employed immediately. He began to realize that the Muslim mysticism which sounded so enchanting in the serenity of the temple was bankrupt as a political strategy. As he remarked retrospectively in 1965, "The Black Muslim movement took no part in things political, civic--it didn't take too much part in anything other than stopping people from doing this drinking, smoking, and so on. Moral reform it had, but beyond that it did nothing.

In an era when the leadership of assimilation pacifists such as Martin Luther King was being imposed upon the black movement by the white media, the intensely nationalistic Muslim line was a relatively progressive alternative. Malcolm began to see, however, that neither the Muslims' utopian separatism nor the integrationists' reformism were actually doing anything to bring about fundamental improvements in the material conditions of black people in the United States. He began to see that it was not the "evil" of the entire white race, but the oppression perpetrated by a certain segment of the white race, which kept the black man in chains. It became apparent to him that religious mysticism and supernatural explanations of oppression, whether they be Black Muslim or Christian, put forth no program for actually changing the conditions faced by an oppressed people. The Muslim faith had served its purpose for Malcolm it had provided him with confidence in his own dignity as a black man. But as he became aware of the need for a real strategy for grasping political power, he grew away from the Muslims and became a liability to Elijah Muhammed, who had no intention of actually carrying out his separatist dogma. Malcolm left the Muslims in March of 1964, after being suspended by Muhammed in December of 1963, supposedly for a remark he made about President Kennedy's assassination.

Progressing from the romanticism of the Muslims' religious nationalism to a more concrete form of struggle. Malcolm saw that it was, in fact, in the interest of blacks to work for change in American society. In the Muslims, he had learned that black nationalism, without a concrete strategy and a willingness to unite with allies, is not revolutionary. In the last years of his Muslim career he had denounced the non-violence exemplified by King as a betrayal to the black cause. He correctly observed that when a group is repressed and controlled through violence it cannot hope to free itself without the use of violence. It was this very observation which eventually compelled Malcolm to begin formulating a strategy for the overthrow of the particular economic and political system under which black people are oppressed.

In identifying the capitalist system as the source of the oppression of American blacks. Malcolm realized that blacks have allies in fighting capitalism. He recognized the system of capitalism as an international structure which united American blacks with other peoples of the Third World. He made two visits to Africa, taking a strong interest in the struggle of its colonized and neo-colonized population against imperialism. He called upon the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to bring charges against the United States in the United Nations for its domestic oppression of blacks. He drew parallels between the colonized status of Africans and Afro-Americans. "Travel broadens one's scope," Malcolm was fond of saying. As he learned that the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were exploited by the same international economic system, and therefore faced a common enemy, he extended his black nationalism to the next logical stage: internationalism. He developed a Third World, anti-imperialist analysis.

By the time of his historic "Message to the Grass Roots," one of his last speeches as a Muslim, Malcolm had already developed a Third World perspective. The content of the speech, carefully put into terms which he deemed acceptable to a militant black audience, was solidly anti-imperialist. He called for unity among all peoples of color "on the basis of what we have in common," namely, exploitation by the international capitalist system. By this time, Malcolm had long since discarded the race analysis of the Muslims, and realized that the enemy was not the white race per se, but the whites who happen to constitute the international ruling class.

Malcolm was now calling for revolution instead of condemning it as impossible. He realized that the domestic black struggle was only one facet of the world revolution against imperialism. Through his fledgling Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) Malcolm was hammering home to American blacks the message that they were part of a world-wide struggle, a struggle in which they were in the majority as peoples of color. The attempts of the white media to smear him as a "hate-monger" who taught "racism in reverse" (as if an oppressed nationality acting in self-defense is capable of institutionalizing "racism in reverse"!) increased in intensity, with added accusations of his being a communist. His legendary charisma as a leader, when coupled with an internationalist perspective, made him an even greater threat to the American power structure. On February 14, 1965, Malcolm and his family narrowly escaped being injured in the early-morning fire-bombing of their home. A week later, the assassins succeeded in terminating his career.

Malcolm was killed, and the American proletarian black community temporarily deprived of leadership, but not before he had planted the seeds of Third World internationalism in the fertile soil of the developing Black nationalist movement. In the long run, conditions, not leaders, generate resistance and rebellion; leaders only help the process along. Since 1965, we have seen increasing black self-pride, and cultural dignity, increasing identification by American blacks with the struggle in Africa and the rest of the Third World, and increasing solidarity between Third World peoples in general. The victims of international capitalist plunder are coming together on a world scale, uniting against their common enemy. In retrospect, we can see that Malcolm's ideological development, his evolution from self-hate to nationalistic self-pride to internationalistic solidarity, was ahead of its time. While it is pointless to whine about "what he could have done" had he not died, it is essential to study, grasp, and put into practice the things he showed us while he lived.

Bruce Jacobs is a sophomore living in Currier House.