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Books by C. Eric Lincoln
The Black Experience in Religion /
The Black Muslims in America /
The Avenue, Clayton City /
My Face Is Black
The Black Church in the African-American Experience /
Coming Through Fire /
Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile
The Negro Pilgrimage in America /
Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma
Reclamation of Black Prisoners /
A Pictorial History of the Negro in America
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Books by & About Malcolm X
Malcolm X:
The Man and His Times /
Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X
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Martin and Malcolm and America
Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England,
and the Caribbean
The Black Muslims in America
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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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C. Eric
Lincoln—born 23 June 1924 and died 14 May 2000—
wrote
The Black
Muslims in America, the first scholarly examination of
the movement, and was a co-author of
The Black Church in the African-American Experience,
a landmark study of the political and social
influence of religious institutions in black
America. Dr. Lincoln, professor emeritus of religion
and culture at Duke University in Durham, N.C.,
where he taught from 1976 to 1993, wrote or edited
more than 20 other books, including
The Avenue, Clayton City, a novel published
in 1988, for which he won the Lillian Smith Book
Award for Best Southern Fiction, and a series of
books in the 1970's called the C. Eric Lincoln
Series in Black Religion.
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An
ordained United Methodist minister, his
friendships and expertise were truly
ecumenical. He was a friend of the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X
and Alex Haley, and in 1990 was cited by
Pope John Paul II for ''scholarly
service to the church.''
Charles Eric Lincoln was born in Athens,
Ala., on June 23, 1924. He was abandoned
first by his father, then by his mother,
and was brought up by his maternal
grandmother, Mattie Sowell Lincoln. . .
. Dr. Lincoln's last book,
Coming Through the Fire: Surviving Race
and place in America, published
in 1996, was a distillation of his
thoughts on race. In the book, he calls
for ''no-fault reconciliation—the
recognition that we are all of a kind,
with the same vulnerabilities, the same
possibilities and the same needs for God
and each other.''—NYTimes |
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Malcolm X
artifacts unearthed—Police docs and more found among
belongs of 'Shorty' Jarvis—1 February 2012—Documents
outlining the crime that landed Malcolm X in prison in
the 1940s are among some 1,000 recently unearthed items
purchased jointly by the civil rights leader's
foundation and an independent collector of
African-American artifacts. The documents and other
artifacts belonged to late musician Malcolm "Shorty"
Jarvis, who served in prison with Malcolm X and was one
of his closest friends. Jarvis' 1976 pardon paper also
is part of the collection, which was recently discovered
by accident. The items had been in a Connecticut storage
unit that had gone into default, and were initially
auctioned off to a buyer who had no idea what he was
bidding on. The Omaha, Nebraska-based Malcolm X Memorial
Foundation, which oversees the Malcolm X Center located
at his birthplace, will house and display the
just-arrived archives. It split the cost with Black
History 101 Mobile Museum, based in Detroit—the
birthplace of the Nation of Islam.—Mobile Museum founder
and curator Khalid el-Hakim declined to identify the
original buyer or the price the two organizations paid
for the trove. Still, even after splitting the cost, he
said it's the largest acquisition to date for his mobile
museum, which includes Jim Crow-era artifacts, a Ku Klux
Klan hood and signed documents by Malcolm X and Rosa
Parks. . . . The collection also reveals an enduring
connection between the two Malcolms after their
incarceration, Malcolm X's conversion to Islam and his
rise to prominence. There's a 72-page scrapbook of
Malcolm X's life that was maintained by Jarvis until
after his friend's 1965 assassination. One of the civil
rights era's most controversial and compelling figures,
Malcolm X rose to fame as the chief spokesman of the
Nation of Islam, a movement started in Detroit more than
80 years ago. He proclaimed the black Muslim
organization's message at the time: racial separatism as
a road to self-actualization and urged blacks to claim
civil rights "by any means necessary" and referred to
whites as "devils."—TheGrio
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The Avenue, Clayton City
By C.Eric
Lincoln
The Avenue in
C. Eric Lincoln’s fictional town is the principal
residential street of the black community in Clayton
City, a prototypical southern town languishing
between the two world wars. Unpaved and marked by
ditches full of frogs, snakes, and empty whiskey
bottles on one side of town, it is the same street,
though with a different name, that originates
downtown. Only when it reaches the black section of
Clayton City do the paving stop and the trash-filled
ditches begin. On one side, it provides a
significant address for the white people who live
there. On the other, despite its rundown air, it is
still the best address available to the town’s black
population. Some of them, in fact, are willing to go
to any extreme, including murder, to get there.
In this novel,
originally published in 1988, Lincoln creates with
deft skill the drama that rises from the lives of
the people of Clayton City. In turn amusing,
disgusting, enraging, wistful, and, as one hears the
secrets hidden deep in their hearts, shocking, they
exist in a place whose vibrant personality is itself
a unique configuration of geography, relationships,
patterns of behavior, and events. It is also a place
whose unspoken and hidden power lies in its crushing
compulsion to maintain itself as it already is—a
power that forces everyone to succumb to an
inflexible social order.—Duke
University Press |
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John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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