Malcolm X at 100: the forgotten legacy

The Hate That Hate Produced shocked Americans of all creeds and colours. Broadcast in July 1959, this five-part documentary brought the Nation of Islam (and, to a lesser extent, the United African Nationalist Movement) to wider public attention for arguably the first time. Few Americans had hitherto been exposed to the black nationalism and even black supremacism of the Nation of Islam – a religious and political organisation that called for black and white Americans to live in separate states. The Hate That Hate Produced achieved something else, too: it catapulted a then little-known Malcolm X to national prominence.

The Hate That Hate Produced featured various Black Muslims, as Nation of Islam followers are sometimes called, finding white people guilty of various crimes. In the dramatic words of Malcolm X himself:

‘I charge the white man with being the greatest murderer on Earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest kidnapper on Earth.‘

Given views being expressed like this, it’s hardly a surprise that The Hate That Hate Produced unnerved a great many. But it also inspired a significant minority of black Americans. Indeed, within weeks of the documentary being broadcast, the number of people attending Nation of Islam meetings increased significantly, and the group’s membership doubled to 60,000. By 1961, there were an estimated 100,000 Black Muslims in the US (1).

Malcolm initially appeared on the The Hate That Hate Produced to introduce the then leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. He also appeared in a later episode as part of a panel discussion. He had enjoyed a minimal public profile up until then, but that changed almost overnight. From that point on, Malcolm X became a major public figure, not to mention a source of quotes guaranteed to outrage conservative America.

He had been on quite a journey up until then. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska on 19 May 1925. He was the seventh child of his father, Earl Little, and the fourth child of his mother, Louise. His father was a tall, dark-skinned man from Georgia, and his mixed-race mother was from Grenada, in the British West Indies. Both of his parents were strong advocates of Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), the Jamaican-born black separatist who, in the 1920s, led a back-to-Africa movement – that is, a movement calling for the descendants of black slaves to return to Africa.

Shortly after Malcolm’s birth, Earl Little moved his family out of Nebraska, before ultimately settling in Lansing, Michigan. When Malcolm was six years old, his father was killed in what the family deemed suspicious circumstances. Whereas official reports stated that he had been killed in a streetcar accident, the insurance company refused to pay out on what they categorised as a suicide. Malcolm later surmised that his father had been killed by white racists.

In the seventh grade, Malcolm enrolled in a predominantly white junior high school in Mason, Michigan, where he excelled academically and was even elected president of his class. Yet, by the end of the following school year, he had dropped out, aged 15. The reason he gave was a discouraging counselling session with a teacher, who advised him to train as a carpenter instead of a lawyer because carpentry was more appropriate for a ‘nigger’.

At the same time, Malcolm’s family life had been plunged into chaos. In 1938, his mother was committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital after having a breakdown. A then 13-year-old Malcolm and his siblings were housed in various foster homes before he eventually went to live with his half-sister in Boston, Massachusetts. He soon became a street hustler and petty criminal. Having been arrested for robbery in 1944, he was charged, found guilty and eventually given a seven-year prison sentence in 1946, which he served at Boston’s Charlestown Prison.

Prison – or more accurately, the prison library – liberated Malcolm. ‘My alma mater was books, a good library’, he later explained: ‘I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.’ There he changed his name to Malcolm X, on the grounds that ‘Little’ was a ‘slave name’ given to his ancestors.

It was during his time in prison that Malcolm came into contact with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, which was then a small, urban-prophet cult committed to religious and racial segregation, with branches in Detroit, Chicago and New York. At the time it had no more than a few hundred members. Malcolm’s brother was already a Black Muslim, and convinced Malcolm to convert, too. While in prison Malcolm began communicating with Muhammad via mail. After being released on parole in 1952, Malcolm visited him in Chicago, before setting to work recruiting Black Muslims in Detroit.

At six foot three, Malcolm was an imposing, impressive figure. One historian was moved to describe him as ‘mesmerisingly handsome… and always spotlessly well-groomed’ (2). He was also a talented speaker and soon became the chief spokesman and organiser for the Nation of Islam. His speeches were virtuoso performances of rhythm, improvised cadences, silences and eruptions. Having heard Malcolm X speak at a debate at Oxford University in 1964, British radical Tariq Ali remarked that his ‘speeches were like word-jazz, with gestures but no other accompaniment, except the response of the crowd’.

Malcolm’s rise to political prominence coincided with that of Martin Luther King, the other pivotal African American leader of the era. Though hostile to each other, the two shared many characteristics. Both were hugely talented and intellectually capable. Where they differed was in their vision of America. King’s optimism moved him to embrace the nation’s liberal promise, and push it to extend the same rights and freedoms enjoyed by white Americans to black Americans. Malcolm gave vent to a considerably more pessimistic and cynical view. He thought the US was incapable of ever fulfilling its promises to its most significant minority.

Indeed, for a time, Malcolm was King’s polar opposite. His pessimism and championing of black separatism challenged the optimistic vision King had of a racially integrated United States. Malcolm repeatedly pointed to black Americans’ lack of freedom, particularly in the South – despite it being over 100 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, which pledged to free black Americans from slavery. ‘Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American’, he told an audience in 1964. Or, as he put it more succinctly, referring to the first pilgrims who landed in Massachusetts on the Mayflower: ‘We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us.’

Understandably, mainstream civil-rights organisations repeatedly challenged the Nation of Islam. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – the leading civil-rights group in the 1950s – denounced Muhammad and his followers as extremists who did not have the interests of the black majority at heart. As King put it in 1961:

‘A doctrine of black supremacy is as dangerous as a doctrine of white supremacy. God is not interested in the freedom of black men or brown men or yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race, the creation of a society where every man will respect the dignity and worth of personality.’

Malcolm returned the compliment. He publicly called King a ‘chump’ and condemned civil-rights leaders as ‘stooges’ of the white establishment.

Many of Malcolm’s criticisms of King and the civil-rights movement hit home. Of their advocacy of non-violent tactics, he said that it was ‘criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks’. He also criticised the now famous Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, where, in 1963, civil-rights activists encouraged school children to actively protest against segregation. As Malcolm remarked at the time, ‘real men don’t put their children on the firing line’. He once mocked King himself as ‘a 20th-century Uncle Tom’, an ugly, racialised insult still thrown around to this day.

Malcolm was the master of the provocative and pithy quote. A case in point: ‘A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.’ Like WEB DuBois, he was an autodidact, who venerated learning: ‘Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world.’ Nowhere was his intellect and ear for a provocative line better illustrated than in his response to the assassination of President John F Kennedy in November 1963. Coining a now widely used phrase, Malcolm said that ‘the chickens have home to roost’. The subsequent uproar prompted Muhammad to suspend Malcolm from the Black Muslims. Although as the New York Times report suggested at the time, Muhammad may have wanted to silence Malcolm because he ‘was exerting more influence than Mr Muhammad’ himself.

At around the same time, Malcolm was beginning to have doubts about the leadership of Muhammad, especially after revelations of Muhammad’s sexual misconduct and a subsequent cover-up. But the split went deeper than the internal politics of the Nation of Islam. It was clear as the 1960s progressed that Malcolm’s views were changing. He began to see the anti-white, black separatism for the dead end it always was. Indeed, his views were converging with those of King, who was simultaneously becoming increasingly frustrated with what he saw as a lack of urgency on civil rights.

Malcolm soon left the Nation of Islam after his suspension. Then, on 26 March 1964, he and King met for the first time, with Malcolm announcing: ‘I’m throwing myself into the heart of the civil-rights struggle.’

The sight of blue-eyed, fair-skinned pilgrims at Mecca later that year, which Malcolm welcomed, helped him complete his ideological break with his former Black Muslim colleagues. On 3 December 1964, while speaking at the Oxford Union, he seemed to have put black separatism behind him. He said he saw no problem with racial intermarriage and that black and white people had to join together and fight the system.

As his riveting The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) shows, Malcolm really was moving towards a rapprochement with white America. His thinking was now tending towards universalism, and away from the racial particularism that fuelled the black nationalist-separatist movement. We will never know how his thinking would have developed, however. Because on 21 February 1965, Malcolm was gunned down by members of the Nation of Islam at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City.

King, for his part, continued to become more radical, in the universalistic sense. He became a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and started to focus his political efforts on tackling poverty. But just three years after Malcolm’s assassination, King, too, was murdered. Aged 39, he was the same age as Malcolm was when he was killed.

Much of Malcolm’s later trajectory has been wilfully ignored or forgotten. It was the Malcolm X of The Hate That Hate Produced, the Malcolm X who embraced black separatism and self-defence, who significantly influenced the Black Power movement that emerged in the mid-to-late 1960s. Furthermore, it was his ideas of black pride and black power that shaped President Richard Nixon and his affirmative-action programmes. Nixon preferred such ideas to the universalist ideas of racial integration that motivated King and, belatedly, Malcolm X himself.

Today, Malcolm X tends to be celebrated by reactionary identitarians, eager to divide people up into a hierarchy of racial blocs. They recognise something of their own thinking in his earlier black nationalism and black separatism. And in doing so, they effectively celebrate the ideas and the person that Malcolm himself was trying to leave behind.

Malcolm X is used today to critique whiteness, to justify veiled visions of black supremacy and separatism. Gone is his later, expansive, universalist vision and his increasing willingness to work together with white Americans for genuine social change. Instead, he’s celebrated by those who think rejecting hair straighteners and embracing their African roots is the height of radicalism.

One hundred years on from his birth, it is more necessary than ever to recall a different Malcolm X to the one championed today. It is time to remember him as a towering black leader who discovered truths about himself and his country and who constantly tried to challenge his own thinking. The words of Barack Obama, recalling his experience of reading Malcolm’s autobiography, hit home: ‘His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.’

The Malcolm X we should remember is the one he was yet to become – universalist and expansive in vision and committed to integration not segregation. Because through repeated acts of self-creation, through sheer force of will, that’s where he was heading.

Kevin Yuill is emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland and CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide.

(1) The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, by Douglas T Miller and Marion Nowack, (Doubleday, 1977), p209

(2) ‘Rediscovering Malcolm’s Life: A Historian’s Adventures in Living History’, by Manning Marable, Black Routes to Islam, Manning Marable and D Hishaam (eds), (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p301