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legacy of malcolm x
Feb. 22, 2003 marks the 38th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. Gunned down as he was about to give a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, NY in 1965, his death was a devastating blow to the Black liberation movement. One of Black America’s most dynamic, articulate, and principled fighters was cut down just when it needed him most.
The price of this tragedy is still being paid today. According to the annual “State of Black America” reports put out by the National Urban League of America, “The poverty rate among African Americans was a staggering 33 percent.” The annual reports state that almost 50 percent of Black children grow up in poverty, nearly 30 percent of all Black families are poor, and over 55 percent of Black female-headed households are impoverished.
In the time since Malcolm’s death, the median income for Black families increased by a miniscule $272; while for white families it has risen by $2434.
The stark disparity in the rate of unemployment between Blacks and whites – maintained with institutionalized regularity – is unchanged. African Americans today, just as in 1965, are unemployed at more than twice the rate of white Americans.
Unlike in 1965, the rulers of America are incapable of making concessions to the demands of an insurgent Black community with programs like the “War on Poverty” and “The Great Society” that they instituted in the 60s.
The political backdrop today is an unremitting onslaught against the living standards of all working people, with African Americans bearing the brunt of the attack.
Slandered while alive
While he was alive, Malcolm X was slandered and vilified by politicians, big business, and the media because he called capitalist society in America by its proper name: racist. If he were alive today he would have to level the same charge.
Over the last several years, The New York Times, one of the main mouthpieces of the ruling class in America, has published articles about the life of Malcolm X, carefully omitting his condemnations of capitalism and the role of the Democratic and Republican parties.
The Times editors, however, sang a much different tune at the time he was killed, breathing an audible sigh of relief in an editorial published on the day of his burial.
“He was a case history, as well as an extraordinary and twisted man,” the Times pontificated. “His ruthless and fanatical belief in violence . . . marked his for fame, and for a violent end . . .
“He did not seek to fit into society or into the life of his own people. The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still with his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of that darkness that he spawned and killed him.”
But what made Malcolm X a candidate for assassination was not his “exaltation of fanaticism” but his uncompromising opposition to U.S. capitalism and the connection he was making between the struggle for Black emancipation and the need for fundamental social change.
Indeed, far from refusing to “fit into the life of his people,” he sought to organize “his people” around a program of action to fight politically against centuries of racist oppression. The logic of his positions led inexorably to revolutionary conclusions and this was why he was assassinated.
In the early 1960s, Malcolm X’s ideas about which road to take for Black equality and freedom represented the left wing of the civil rights movement. And his strategy for getting results – constantly evolving and expanding – is as applicable today as it was in 1965.
Malcolm X first came into prominence as a dynamic and eloquent spokesperson for the Nation of Islam. He was the Nation’s most effective speaker and talented organizer, and was responsibly for that organization’s rapid growth in the early 1960s.
In 1964, however, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam. There were many reasons for this painful schism, but the main one was the Nation’s abstention from the Black struggle for civil rights.
A product of his time
Malcolm X was a product of his time and he was deeply influenced by revolutionary events on a world scale – the upsurge of the colonial revolution in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the massive civil rights struggle against “Jim Crow” racism in the United States.
He was the foremost articulator of Black nationalism, the nationalism of an oppressed people who were seeking self-determination in a society that had consigned the to pariah status. One legacy of Malcolm X’s powerful message is the fact that even today the Nation of Islam is the most powerful Black nationalist organization in America.
What made Malcolm X so popular with Black America – and so dangerous to the ruling rich – both before and after his split with the Nation?
Malcolm X believed that political organization and action was the most effective means to win Black liberation. Malcolm X’s bottom line was:
-African Americans will only get their freedom by fighting for it.
-The U.S. government is a racist government and an enemy of African Americans.
-The strategy of slow reform, the program of the liberals – Black and white, Democrat and Republican – is the road to betrayal and defeat, not justice and equality.
-Black people must rely on their own power, control their own struggle, determine their own strategy and tactics, and select their own leaders.
-African Americans have the right to self-defense in the face of racist attacks.
“There can be no Black-white unity until there is Black unity,” he stated.
Malcolm X was labeled a “Black racist” because he disagreed with the “turn the other cheek” approach of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and most of the other more “acceptable” leaders of the civil rights struggle. But he parried these hypocritical charges with an undeniable logic:
“If we react to white racism with a violent reaction,” he said, “to me that’s not Black racism. If you come to put a rope around my neck, and I hang you for it, to me that’s not racism. Yours is racism . . . My reaction is the reaction of a human being reacting to defending and protecting himself.”
He exposed the double-talk of the liberals, who cautioned Black people to “go slow” and be non-violent. “They want you to be non-violent here,” he pointed out, “but they want you to be very violent in South Vietnam.”
But in his last year, Malcolm X changed his approach to the mainstream civil rights organizations. He treated his differences with Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement as subordinate to their common struggle against racism in America. He declared that he was willing to work with anyone in a common struggle and form a Black united front against the racist ruling class.
Tragically, the assassinations of both these central Black leaders cut short this promising alliance, which would have become a powerful combination for social change.
The international connection
Malcolm X connected the struggle of Black people in America to the revolutionary events taking place all over the world at the time. “We are living in an era of revolution,” he told students at Columbia University, “and the revolt of the American Negro is part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era.
“It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”
During the last year of his life, Malcolm X made two separate trips to Europe and the Middle East, odyssies that expanded his political horizons considerably. On his return from the second trip, he announced that he and his organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), planned to petition the United Nations to take up the question of the Black struggle in the United States as a human rights issue similar to the fight of the Black majority in South Africa.
“It’s not a Negro problem or an American problem any longer,” he said. “It’s a world problem . . . And so we’re striving to lift it from the level of civil rights to the level of human rights.”
Such a project was like a dagger pointed at the throat of the U.S. government, which was on a campaign to pose as the protector of “freedom and democracy” in every other part of the world, especially South Vietnam.
Malcolm X was an implacable foe of both the Democratic and Republican parties. “Any Negro who registers as a Democrat or a Republican is a traitor to his people,” he said.
When Malcolm was asked by the Freedom Now Party in Michigan (an independent Black party) to be their candidate in the 1964 elections, he gave it serious consideration. He declined only because it would have shortened his second trip to Africa.
The fiery Black revolutionary had no illusions that there was any fundamental difference between the Democrats and the Republicans: “One is the wolf, the other is the fox. No matter what, they’ll both eat you.”
During the 1964 presidential elections, when the candidates were Democrat Lyndon Johnson (the “peace” candidate) and Republican Barry Goldwater (the “war” candidate), Malcolm X exposed the phony game:
“The shrewd capitalists, the shrewd imperialists, knew that the only way people would run towards the fox (Johnson) would be if you showed them the wolf (Goldwater). So they created a ghastly alternative. And at that moment Johnson had troops invading the Congo and South Vietnam.”
From a firebrand who focused his eloquence against white America, Malcolm X became a remorseless prosecutor of capitalist America.
What was responsibly for race prejudice? “Ignorance and greed,” he said. “And a skillfully designed program of miseducation that goes right along with the American system of exploitation and oppression.”
“Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but today it is more like a vulture, sucking the blood of people. You can’t have capitalism without racism,” he concluded.
Ultimately, the very system of exploitation that propelled Malcolm X to leadership will create many another revolutionary fighter in the working class as a whole.
