The Meaning Of Malcolm X

Books by C. Eric Lincoln

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Books by & About Malcolm X

Malcolm X: The Man and His Times / Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X / Martin and Malcolm and America

Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean

The Black Muslims in America / The Autobiography of Malcolm X / Malcolm X Speaks / By Any Means Necessary

February 1965: The Final Speeches

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The Meaning Of Malcolm X

By C. Eric Lincoln

The assassination of Malcolm X upset a good part of the American public. We were upset, and we tend to remain a bit on edge, not because Malcolm was a martyr to the cause of civil rights or because of any inherent contributions he may have made to the solution of our race problems, but because he was the symbol of violence and the spokesman for the violent “Black Man” in America. We remain uneasy because the murder of Malcolm X may well set off a Chinese-type “tong war” within the black nationalist factions striving for leadership of the masses in the Harlems of America.

We were aghast and dismayed by last summer’s riots, by the looting and the wanton destruction of property, but at that time we were fortunate in at least two respects: the riots were not organized and led by any recognized leader, and they were riots against property rather than against people. True they expressed the resentment and the hatred of the frustrated, penned-up Harlem lower class; but there were few instances of attacks against the human objects of this fury, which included the disinterested Negro middle class no less than the hated Jew and the “blue-eyed devils” whose commercial presence in Harlem is exasperatingly ubiquitous and universally resented.

Return to Wary Expectancy

For several months there had been an uneasy calm hanging over the dirty tenements and gaudy storefronts of Harlem. The return of Malcolm X from his Afro-Asian junket was eyed with genuine apprehension by popular Negro leadership and with jubilant expectation by the black nationalist fringe. Malcolm was as cagey as always. Some Negro leaders thought they saw signs of a “constructive change” in his attitude toward racial goals and the proper techniques for attaining them. The more impatient activists were equally certain that Malcolm had brought them a kind of black-lettered message from Garcia, and they were waiting for the word to be given.

Malcolm X himself was having other problems. He had left the country in disgrace and disharmony with the one black nationalist organization with a significant following, and on returning to Harlem he found himself in direct competition with the Black Muslims for leadership of the black dissidents for whom integration and assimilation are not viable solutions. His first order of interest was to stay alive, an interest neither he nor his followers nor the New York police proved adequate to protect.

The leadership of the Harlem masses is, at least in potential, an office of extraordinary power. It is also a hazardous undertaking. Thus far, with the possible exception of Marcus Garvey, no one has successfully mobilized the masses of America’s most populous (and most shameful) black ghetto. Various self-styled leaders, usually oriented toward black nationalism or some other chauvinistic negritude, have had varying degrees of success in isolating a following, invariably small when measured against the numbers of potential converts who live in that steaming ghetto.

For the past decade or so the Black Muslims have had the largest and by far the best organized following among the black nationalist groups in Harlem. For most of that period Malcolm himself had been their de facto leader, although policy was set by Elijah Muhammad in Chicago. So it was that Malcolm’s defection from the Muslims and his subsequent return to Harlem as head of his Organization for Afro-American Unity brought him into direct conflict with the Black Muslim organization.

Negro leaders kept a wary eye on Malcolm precisely because they anticipated what did in fact occur, a black nationalist “tong war” which threatened the peace of the whole Harlem community and, indirectly, the leadership control responsible Negro leadership claimed to have. The exposure of the pro-Sino-Cuban revolutionary Action movement caught most Americans of both races oft guard because we are not accustomed to thinking in terms of Negro subversion. The myth of the satisfied Negro has spawned the myth of absolute loyalty. Both are fictions. While the overwhelming majority of the Negro population are loyal to the American flag and the American way of life, so is the overwhelming white majority. There are exceptions in both cases; the number of exceptions is related to the population ratio, the frequency of opportunity and the quality of incentive, not to race.

Until just yesterday, there were no nonwhite world powers of significance. And, more important, Negroes and their cause stood to gain nothing whatever by playing footsie with another white power. Times have changed; while we are shedding our negative stereotypes about the Negro we may as well be disabused of some other stereotypes as well.

The death of Malcolm X left Elijah Muhammad in temporarily unchallenged control of the largest black nationalist organization in the country. Nobody knows how many Black Muslims there are. Some defected to Malcolm X when he left the movement more than a year ago; others simply defected because Malcolm’s ouster seemed to provide a good opportunity to get out and return to what ex-Muslim Aubrey Barnette calls “the outside world of reality.”

Integration or Revolution?

It is a moot question whether Malcolm made any contributions to the Negro’s struggle for freedom, whether he was a “catalyst to the cause” or just a loud and strident voice crying in some personal wilderness foreign to the real needs and aspirations of the nation’s Negroes. It is even a silly question, for it presupposes a consensus among Negroes as to where they want to go and by what means they want to get there. Such a consensus o course does not exist—any more than does an American consensus on our role in (or out of) Vietnam.

Consensus obtains on the proper goals (but not on the proper methodology) among America’s responsible” middle class leaders, and collectively they represent the organized thrust of the American Negro’s determination to be free. But we may not safely ignore the dissident masses merely because they are less articulate or more violent in their articulation, or because they are fragmented into many small groups of undetermined membership. There is a consensus among these groups, too, and it is not the consensus of the responsible middle class. To the various black nationalist fronts in Harlem and elsewhere Malcolm X was a potential “liberator,” a man on a black horse who would someday lead them in a revolutionary struggle against the hated blue-eyed devils.

It does not promote the cause of responsible leadership to deny the importance of Malcolm X to the particular segment of people whose political and or ideological leader he was, or sought to be; to do so is to deny by implication the threat he represented to the tranquility and effectiveness of the more sophisticated procedures advanced by more acceptable leaders. Milton Galamison, for example, exists and has a following, however annoying that fact may be to more orthodox leadership; the Revolutionary Action Movement is a fact, despite its embarrassing and treasonable implications. Similarly, Malcolm X made an impact on the minds of the black masses irrespective of his criminal past or his chauvinistic ideology. Had his turbulent life not been cut short the chances are that his impact would have widened.

There are many Negroes who are not impressed by Christian philosophies of nonviolence because Christianity itself has so frequently been violent, and because the yoke of oppression was for so long sanctioned by the church. Tens of thousands of others simply have not reached the level of sophistication which would enable them to understand the value and the dignity of nonviolent resistance.

Indeed, relatively few Americans whatever their race are ideologically or psychologically prepared to suffer with the James Farmers and the Martin Luther Kings of today’s’ black revolution. Certainly the men with the crash helmets and the cattle prods do not know or do not care what nonviolence is all about. So long as men like these are the accepted guardians of the status quo, Malcolm X and the Malcolm Xs waiting to be discovered will have meaning for the black masses who live in the black ghettos of America.

Demagogue or Martyr?

As soon as Malcolm was dead his critics turned on him with the fervor of self-righteousness and his defenders sought to elevate him to sainthood and martyrdom. On the one hand it was pointedly suggested that as a demagogue and a spokesman for violence Malcolm somehow deserved what he got at the Audubon ballroom that Sunday, the day before Washington’s Birthday. He had been a thug, an addict and a thief, it was argued; he had made no contributions whatever to society.

There is a non sequitur here which honesty compels us to examine. It is contrary to the “American ideal” and Christian morality to hold a man’s past against him if it can be shown that he has overcome that past. Man is redeemable; if he is not, surely preaching is in vain. Malcolm X rose above the errors of his youth. Whether or not one agrees with his solution to the race problem, it must be admitted that during the years he presumed himself a race leader he was, under the constant scrutiny of a hostile public, far more circumspect than many of our more “respectable” leaders and politicians. If anything, his past seemed to give him a unique insight into the nature of the problems with which he sought to deal. We owe it to him and to ourselves to acknowledge the facts.

On the other hand, those who saw in the returned pilgrim to Mecca a “new” Malcolm X were at best probably premature in their judgments. The underlying cause of the breach between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad was not so much a contest of power within the movement as a conflict of ideology. Malcolm X was a true revolutionary. It is not inconceivable that, given the time, the means and the opportunity, Malcolm X would have committed an act of violence.

He was indoctrinated to believe that racial strife is the inevitable means of bringing about a reversal in the black man’s status, and he passionately believed in ad longed for that reversal. True, his conversion to Islam and his desire to be acceptable to orthodoxy may have ameliorated his aggressive tendencies; but the evidence that at the time of his death he was prepared to join the nonviolent crusade is scanty, if indeed it exists at all.

Malcolm X must be taken for what he was. He was a remarkably gifted and charismatic leader whose hatreds and resentments symbolized the dreadful stamp of the black ghetto, but a man whose philosophies of racial determination and whose commitments to violence made him unacceptable as a serious participant in peaceful social change. He had ideological followers – far more than the handful of men and women who belonged to the Organization of Afro-American Unity. His spirit will rise again, phoenix-like – not so much because he is worthy to be remembered as because the perpetuation of the ghetto which spawned him will not let us forget.

Source: The Christian Century (April 7, 1965)

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updated 3 October 2007