by Omar Tyree
“Yes, I would like to make a collect call,” he told the operator. After he gave his name and the number, the operator put him through.
“Hey, Mom, it’s me … Yeah, I’m OK. I just wanted to tell you that I’m sending away for applications to some Black schools.
“Iknow you told me, Mom. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home for the holiday. We don’t want to run up the phone bill … I love you, too.”
Troy sat up in bed, staring at his blank walls and feeling like a fool. He had been sucked into a White university simply to show the government that the school had a Black enrollment. It was not as if the administration really cared. Black students were numbers in the system. But so were most of the White students.
Troy felt embarrassed for not trusting his own people to do a good job in instruction. His mother had always suggested that a Black school would have been best. Their argument of two years ago stuck clearly in his mind. And suddenly, he wished she had won.
“Troy, I think you should go to a Black college. Your aunt Cookie went to a White school and she didn’t like it at all,” Charlotte had said.
“Aw, Mom, that’s her experience. How you know I’m gon’ feel the same way she did?”
“Troy, now look. College is more than education; it’s a social experience as well. And I think you’ll feel more comfortable at a Black school.”
“No I won’t. All they do is party and whatnot. They don’t get noreal education. Black schools don’t make no sense. I don’t even see why people go to ’em. I’m tellin’ you now, Mom, I’m not going to no Black school. You’re just wasting your breath.”
Troy covered his face in shame, remembering the argument all too well. White schools could never replace the environmental comfort and the positivity of learning at a Black institution. No wonder so many Blacks from the White colleges would disappear after graduation. They had been burned out, fighting or succumbing to daily dosages of American racism.
“Damn, I’m stupid!” Troy shouted to himself. “And I’m stuck in this school for another semester!”
That Monday morning, he had an interview with Professor Jameson, the White instructor of Black literature.
“So, Mr. Potter, what do you want to do for your project?”
“I was always interested in finding out about Malcolm X. So I would like to read his autobiography and explain his character.”
After receiving the OK, Troy dedicated every spare moment of his time to reading one of the most important books in Black history. It took six days to complete, more than five hundred pages’ worth.
Troy read from early in the morning until late at night. He got addicted to the book and couldn’t put it down. Neglecting all his other studies, he then concentrated on doing his paper.
Why was Malcolm X viewed in such a controversial manner? What was America’s position on his character? Why was he not an acceptable hero like Martin Luther King Jr.? And how come Malcolm had no holiday in litigation?
Troy Potter
Black Literature
November 12, 1988
The Analysis of Malcolm X
Even in the early years of life, Malcolm Little was deemed as special. His father, being a dark-skinned religious activist, favored his lightest son. This individual was to be a fast and active learner in his racist environment. He was one to speak the bold truth, control his own destiny, and startle those who might oppose him. Malcolm discovered the meaning of his Black world in America through self-evaluation and practice. As a kid, he learned to make noise in order to get what he wanted. He was able to see all the challenges that his youthful world had to offer. From the beginning of his time, Malcolm captured his goal no matter what it was.
In school, this young individual observed with the ability of great sight and detailed memory. Outside of school as well as in the academic realm, he was a skilled learner. His dominating and extroverted personality made him an intriguing person to know. He was not your average Joe Blow.
Malcolm’s passion to learn made him wise. He was destined to be the best and to work toward human perfection. Being such a man as described, he was a leader and one with the determination and dignity to be followed.
A person must understand that Malcolm was not at all gifted, and did not see himself as such, but was rather a man who put body and mind, heart and soul, and one-hundred-percent effort into everything he did. With such drive, it was easy for him to become a top student even among the Whites he attended school with. With such drive his color should have been irrelevant.
As a youth in White schools, while living with a White family, in a world where people of White skin ruled, Malcolm tried his best to be White. He went to White parties and acted White to integrate himself. If any Black individual having color to his skin, kinks on his head, wide meat on his nose, and with full lips could have been accepted by the White majority, that person was Malcolm Little. But after years of academic excellence, class leadership, social compatibility, and total politeness to White individuals, there was no crossover.
Malcolm had been a Black student at the top of a White class. He was a poor individual from an oppressed Black family, and was a descendant of a people who were seen as utterly unintelligent. Above all odds, he was supreme.
In his view of the world, nothing was too far to reach. He truly believed that he could accomplish anything with hard work and determination. It was no surprise that Malcolm would go against all odds of the Black man’s integrity to claim himself as a predestined lawyer before being crushed by the hands of racist America in a response that he, a Black boy, could never be a lawyer. He could possibly be a farmer, but not a lawyer. He could be a carpenter, but not a lawyer. He could possibly be a mechanic, but never a lawyer.
His favorite subjects were English and history. He disregarded math because of the lack of argument or proof. He displayed a great desire to explain, argue, and comprehend complex abstractions of social studies and was interested in speech and reactions. All of the above would have made him perfectly suitable for the task of being a lawyer. Malcolm’s mastery of these skills would have made him a great lawyer, but he was a Black man in White America.
Malcolm had overtly experienced where he was to be placed as a Black male youth. He now projected an attitude that Whites were only out for their own race, while pretending to help Black people. Whites had planned all along that his place was to be among the Blacks and that all other progress would be halted. Now he could see how he had been tricked into believing that he could be an able Black man in White America. Tricked into believing that his White family and peers accepted and liked him as a person of human flesh, human emotions, dreams and thoughts of success and self-worth. What he found to be true was that the Whites gained from him a sense of enjoyment. The Whites gained from him a sense of pride from their faked pity and concern.
Greatness could not help Malcolm to escape the weight of the heavy Black world which was made by White American authority. Hard work was not enough for Malcolm to overcome, like some kind of Black American Hercules, this mighty weight which held them down. Determination would still fall short of what was needed for Malcolm to lift the weight of the Black earth which had been so fertilized by many failures before him. So he was humiliated and angered. Though he was angered, he was no longer confused.
Whites had killed his father, oppressed his Black community, caused his mother to go out of her mind, and then blamed it on her. White people had taken him from his home and had allowed him to show his intellect while gaining pride for himself, only to throw him back down to the hard earth that he would again have to adjust to. “Adjust” was a fitting word to describe Malcolm’s life. He had to adjust to the slick Black ghetto streets of Harlem.
Malcolm was always a lover of action and always a doer instead of a watcher. He was a man of actions instead of idle plans. A man of true words as compared to practiced words.
He never saw himself as being better than the rest. However, because of
his fast-lane experiences, great biological growth, and speedy understanding, it was only natural for him to look upon those who were older than he and more experienced. He wanted to attain more knowledge from those who knew the Harlem streets.
He had a subliminal bond and a submissive desire to be involved with the hipsters of the streets up north. He admired and was greatly attracted by their style and glamour. They possessed the ability to take the streets and drain a sense of importance for themselves among Black peoples. They possessed poetic dialect and were involved in the action world, which Malcolm felt such a great need to be a part of. He felt at home with the wild lifestyles that the slicksters lived, and disregarded those Blacks who felt themselves better than the majority. Malcolm had been through the White desert and came across an ocean of Black Power in the New York streets.
He took to the slick ghettos up north with the same drive that he pursued everything in his life. An average Black youth, Malcolm received an average conked hairstyle with an average black zoot suit to start his slickster days. He did not have any great name and there was no particular reason to know him. But in due time, Malcolm, “the Activist,” would once again show his greatness in progression and assertion. He became a hustler, a hood, a thief, a con man, and a hit man. He became a skilled dancer, a pimp, a numbers runner, a drug dealer, and a junky. Once again, he was highly sought after.
He maintained the cunning and passionate thrust toward being a Harlemite from the trying lessons which he had learned as a kid. He had learned that “if someone was doing something better than you in a certain task, they were obviously doing something that you were not.” He would do any-and everything to be on top.
Even before becoming a complete man at the age of twenty-one, his lifestyle was more complete than most people’s entire lives. He had escaped death, outsmarted cops, feared more than several times for his life, took more chances than the average slickster, and had arrived as a premier Harlemite gangster, “Harlem Red.” Was it the red hair inherited through near-White blood which gave him his fire? What was the part of Malcolm which enabled him to become tops of a game which so many had played and failed in? This was a game of slickster kill-or-be-killed, hoodlum rob-or-be-robbed, as well as dealer deal-more-than-the-next-guy.
Malcolm was a true character who was so entrenched in the Black ghetto world that he was unafraid to die, not willing to lose, and convinced that he could do anything and outclass anyone. So the X-man, on that long, wild, youthful road to peril and destruction, had gained his fame as one of the top gangsters of New York.
He was to be respected, feared, hunted, and finally imprisoned, luckily, instead of being killed before even becoming what society considers a man. But the imprisonment, he believed, was more a sentence for being involved with White women than for robbery and theft.
Malcolm had recognized the light in Negroes’ eyes when in the presence of White girls. And he believed that every Negro’s desire was to have one, as he himself had. White girls gave a brother prestige and they were honored when accompanied by one. However, he also believed that White women were corrupt and deceptive as they ran about with Black men and had White husbands at home. He had been in a predicament where his life could have been lost over the corruption of his White female cheating on her husband. Yet it was true, and the pimps had the gift to know, that the White girls could fool the strongest of men.
From the beginning of the Bible, Adam was tricked by Eve, which set the tone for women’s tricky hold over men. Malcolm was well aware of this history yet he was being sentenced to jail and mocked for his involvement with two White girls who had helped set up a crime.
Now a prisoner from the hard-core streets of Black America, he was an antireligious man with a disrespect for religious followers. He had always rejected religion and considered it a cop-out and a healing for the weak-minded. He was a man who had known too much, carried too heavy a burden, and lived too hard a life to accept the passive ways of the Christian faith.
The Christian faith taught Negroes to be happy and wait for good things to come in the afterworld, like death, heaven, and rejoicing in the Lord. Those Blacks lived in a realm of hope. These Black criminals were the individuals who had tasted the world’s true flavors and had gotten captured. What could religion do for them?
These men had followed a path of destruction established by the White oppressors. They were trapped like all those who tried, as the slicksters had, to get over in White America. Here lay Harlem Red, who once again received a nickname for himself as “Satan” for his greatly expressed antireligious attitudes. He had thought that Christianity was established to further en-slave Blacks in America as well as other colored people around the world. He had lived a solid life that most feebleminded Christians could never even imagine. His present circumstances were just right for a Black man to accept the teachings of the Nation of Islam.
“The White man is the devil.” What statement could have stirred Malcolm X more, a man filled now with bitter hatred of the White world, besides this one? This statement easily summed up the devastation that Malcolm had felt as a result of White oppression in youth, in school, in the ghetto, and while in prison. He began to think of all the unjust acts which had been inflicted on him and his family. His dad’s death, his mother’s craziness, his education in the White school, the ghettos of Harlem, and the total disregard of Black people in America.
His desire to find out more about the Nation of Islam and the truths of the world influenced him to read countless books from the prison library. He found that he did not understand many concepts or words and could not get any meaningful detail from his readings. He then decided that he would learn every word he possibly could in order to understand all that he read. So he began witha , and read the entire dictionary.
He read books on history, science, politics, and theology. And he sent letters of gratitude to the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, for his work to uplift lost Black souls in America. Reading absorbed all of his time in prison as he confined himself to the silence of his cell. He read late into the morning without lights, causing him to need glasses.
This was typical of a man who, from the start of life, had done things exceptionally well. Malcolm X was a character who had gained the most attention as a kid, a student, a hoodlum, a dancer, and even a prisoner. Now, in the next phase of his life, he would put one hundred percent of his worthy effort into the project of setting up a stronghold following of the Nation of Islam, bringing truth and dignity to his Black brothers and sisters all across America.
He became a great speaker, and never had a man spoken with such bold truths of racism across the world, infiltrating “the white devils.” He had learned the story of the blue-eyed devil and his creation, as well as the purity and greatness of the ancient African kingdoms. He had learned the truth about Jesus Christ, Egypt, and the great messengers of Allah. He soon would know a great deal of things and could convey his knowledge convincingly.
Malcolm spoke of the infliction of pain and hate of the Black man and all people of color. He spoke of the reality of supposed nonviolent co-existence among Blacks and Whites. He spoke of the belief in Christianity, which he still felt was used to trap and confuse people of color. He spoke about the Black-on-Black hatred and distrust among Negroes. He spoke of the wars where “a black man was sent to kill a yellow man by a white man and for a white man.” Blacks would kill for the right to be enslaved and discriminated against in America.
He had set up Muslim temples and gave speeches across the country in the name of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, to whom he gave respect and honor. The people arrived in the truth of their own heritage from blindness. Temples were built in the name of the Nation of Islam to teach the people self-respect and dignity. Malcolm was great in his work once again.
As he spoke out on Black activism in honor of the Nation of Islam, he had received unwanted credit from the White media and “Black stooges” who opposed him. Contin
ually he was misquoted. Time after time he received the credit from the White media which should have been contributed to the Nation of Islam.
He was labeled a hater of White people and a reverse racist from “Black stooges.”
The Nation of Islam tried to uplift the spirit of brothers and sisters across the country, and Malcolm played a major part in its goal. Maybe Malcolm helped too much, spoke too diligently, taught too impressively, and was too dedicated to the upbringing of Black America. It seems that he was too great for his own good. He caused too much emotion, anger, pride, dignity, fear, and guilt among those who followed and of those who opposed him.
Malcolm, however, was still merely a man. He was a great man, a respectable man, a challenging man, yet just a man. Because of his great political and public prowess, tension was high between him, Elijah Muhammad, and other followers within the Nation. Malcolm X had become a name to fear and one of great concern and awareness. He had gained too firm a reputation from his efforts. Being in an unescapable predicament and sensing the great pressure of his people as well as those against him, he was due to make a mistake. He was thought to be a troublemaker, had influenced Black America to be self-supportive, and slipped up when he scorned the death of a most loved American president, John F. Kennedy. This was it, and Malcolm could feel the end approaching.
He knew that his sentence of a ninety-day silence was the end, and he would not be accepted again by the Nation. He had once again been set up to fail because of his greatness, which, in simple words, was too much. Once again he was to adjust to a new task and position in life. This time he had the backing of Black America, who admired and expressed a desire to follow him. So the X-man adjusted to a different role, to set up his own house of worship to continue the uplifting of Black people. But he would have to watch his back from forces out to kill him.
Being an intelligent and wise man, he decided to go to the holy land of Mecca to find all that he could learn from the Qur’an. He went to Africa, witnessing people of all colors with humility, pride, honor, justice, truth, worship, and cohabitation. Whites, Yellows, Reds, Browns, and Blacks were in a singular worship of Allah. He learned that the White man in America had set himself up to be supreme. He arrived once again in a new truth that White men could be just and honest. They could actually feel true pity and be trusted and respected. Malcolm then traveled to other parts of Africa to experience the pleasure that the African brothers had for him, only to come home and soon be gunned down.