King’s legacy is viewed as most useful when promoting an unalloyed optimism about the possibilities of American social transformation, which peaked during his “I Have a Dream” speech. What is not often discussed—and is perhaps deliberately ignored—is how King dramatically revised his views, glimpsed most eloquently in his Vietnam era antiwar rhetoric and in his War on Poverty social activism. Corporationsponsored commercials that celebrate King’s memory—most notably, television spots by McDonald’s and Coca-Cola aimed at connecting their products to King’s legacy—reveal a truncated understanding of King’s meaning and value to American democracy. These and other efforts at public explanation of King’s meaning portray his worth as underwriting the interests of the state, which advocates a distorted cultural history of an era actually shaped more by blood and brutality than by distant dreams.
Many events of public commemoration avoid assigning specific responsibility for opposition to King’s and the civil rights movement’s quest for equality. On such occasions, the uneven path to racial justice is often described in a manner that makes progress appear an inevitable fact of our national life. Little mention is made of the concerted efforts—not only of bigots and white supremacists, but, more important, of government officials and average citizens—to stop racial progress. Such stories deny King’s radical challenge to narrow conceptions of American democracy. Although King and other sacrificial civil rights participants are lauded for their possession of the virtue of courage, not enough attention is given to the vicious cultural contexts that called forth such heroic action.
Most insidious of all, consent to these whitewashed stories of King and the 1960s is often secured by the veiled threat that King’s memory will be either celebrated in this manner or forgotten altogether. The logic behind such a threat is premised on a belief that blacks should be grateful for the state’s allowing King’s celebration to occur at all. These realities make the battle over King’s memory—waged by communities invested in his radical challenge to American society—a constant obligation. The battle over King’s memory also provides an important example to communities interested in preserving and employing Malcolm’s memory in contemporary social action. As with King, making Malcolm X a hero reveals the political utility of memory and reflects a deliberate choice made by black communities to identify and honor the principles for which Malcolm lived and died.
For many adherents, Malcolm remained until his death a revolutionary black nationalist whose exclusive interest was to combat white supremacy while fostering black unity. Although near the end of his life Malcolm displayed a broadened humanity and moral awareness—qualities overlooked by his unprincipled critics and often denied by his true believers—his revolutionary cohorts contended that Malcolm’s late-life changes were cosmetic and confused, the painful evidence of ideological vertigo brought on by paranoia and exhaustion.
All these interpretations are vividly elaborated in John Henrik Clarke’s anthology Malcolm X: The Man and His Times.10 Clarke’s book brings together essays, personal reflections, interviews, and organizational statements that provide a basis for understanding and explaining different dimensions of Malcolm’s life and career. Although its various voices certainly undermine a single understanding of Malcolm’s meaning as a father, leader, friend, and husband (after all, it includes writers as different as Albert Cleage and Gordon Parks), the book’s tone suggests an exercise in hero worship and saint making, as cultural interpreters gather and preserve fragments of Malcolm’s memory.
Thus even the power of an individual essay to critically engage an aspect of Malcolm’s contribution or failure is overcome by the greater urgency of the collective enterprise: to establish Malcolm as a genuine hero of the people, but more than this, a sainted son of revolutionary struggle who was perfectly fit for the leadership task he helped define. But moments of criticism come through. For instance, in the course of a mostly favorable discussion of Malcolm’s leadership, Charles Wilson insightfully addresses the structural problems confronting black protest leaders as he probes Malcolm’s “failure of leadership style and a failure to evolve a sound organizational base for his activities,” concluding that Malcolm was a “victim of his own charisma.”11
At least two other writers in the collection also attempt to critically explore Malcolm’s limitations and the distortions of his legacy by other groups. James Boggs deplores both the racism of white Marxist revolutionaries who cannot see beyond color and the lack of “scientific analysis” displayed by Malcolm’s black nationalist heirs whose activity degenerates into Black Power sloganeering. And Wyatt Tee Walker, King’s former lieutenant, criticizes Malcolm for “useless illogical and intemperate remarks that helped neither him nor his cause,” while emphasizing the importance of Malcolm’s pro-black rhetoric and his promulgation of the right to self-defense.12 At the same time, Walker uselessly repeats old saws about the vices of black matriarchy.
But these flutters of criticism are mostly overridden by the celebrative and romantic impulses that are expressed in several essays. Fortunately, Patricia Robinson’s paean to Malcolm X as a revolutionary figure stops short of viewing black male patriarchy as a heroic achievement. Instead, she sees Malcolm as the beginning of a redeemed black masculinity that helps, not oppresses, black children and women. But in essays by W. Keorapetse Kgositsile, Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, and Albert Cleage, Malcolm’s revolutionary black nationalist legacy is almost breathlessly, even reverentially, evoked.
Cleage especially, in his “Myths About Malcolm X,” seeks to defend Malcolm’s black nationalist reputation from assertions that he was becoming an integrationist, an internationalist, or a Trotskyist Marxist, concluding that “if in Mecca he had decided that blacks and whites can unite, then his life at that moment would have become meaningless in terms of the world struggle of black people.”13 Clarke’s book makes sense, especially when viewed against the historical canvas of late ’60s racial politics and in light of the specific cultural needs of urban blacks confronting deepening social crisis after Malcolm’s death. But its goal of redeeming Malcolm’s legacy through laudatory means makes its value more curatorial than critical.
Similarly, Oba T’shaka’s The Political Legacy of Malcolm X is an interpretation of Malcolm X as a revolutionary black nationalist, and The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X, edited by Benjamin Karim, attempts to freeze Malcolm’s development in the fateful year before his break with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.14 T’shaka is an often perceptive social critic and political activist who believes that “the scattering of Africans throughout the world gave birth to the idea of Pan-Africanism,” and that the “oppression of Blacks in the United States cannot be separated from the oppression of Africans on the African continent and in the world.”15
Such an international perspective establishes links between blacks throughout the world, forged by revolutionary black nationalist activity expressed in political insurgency, material and resource sharing, and the exchange of ideas. In this context, T’shaka maintains that Malcolm was a revolutionary black nationalist who “identified the world-wide system of white supremacy as the number one enemy of Africans and people of color throughout the world.” He argues that Malcolm’s internationalist perspective on revolutionary political resistance was specifically linked to African experiments in socialist politics, contending that Malcolm rejected European models of political transformation. Not surprisingly, T’shaka is sour on the notion that after his trip to Mecca, Malcolm accepted and expressed support for black-white unity, and he characterizes beliefs that Malcolm began to advocate a Trotskyite socialism as “farfetched statements.”16
Although he gives a close reading of Malcolm’s ideas, T’shaka’s treatment of Malcolm is marred by largely uncritical explorations of Malcolm’s rhetoric. He fails to challenge Malcolm’s philosophical presuppositions or even critically to juxtapose contradictory elements of Malcolm’s rhetoric. In effect, he bestows a canonical cloak on
Malcolm’s words. Nor does T’shaka give a persuasive explanation of the social forces and political action that shaped Malcolm’s thinking in his last years. Understanding these facts might illuminate the motivation behind Malcolm’s utopian interpretations of black separatist ideology, which maintained that racial division was based on blacks possessing land either in Africa or in the United States. Although T’shaka, following Malcolm’s own schema, draws distinctions between his long-range program (that is, return to Africa, which he claims Malcolm never gave up) and short-term tactics (that is, cultural, psychological, and philosophical migration), he doesn’t prove that Malcolm ever resolved the ideological tensions in black nationalism.
Karim’s The End of White World Supremacy is an attempt to wrench Malcolm’s speeches from their political context and place them in a narrative framework that uses Malcolm’s own words—even after his break with the Nation of Islam—to justify Elijah Muhammad’s religious theodicy. Such a move ignores Malcolm’s radically transformed self-understanding and asserts, through his own words, a worldview he eventually rejected. Karim, who as Benjamin Goodman was Malcolm’s close associate through his Nation of Islam phase until his death, says in his introduction that Muhammad gave Malcolm “the keys to knowledge and understanding,” that this is “one key point in Malcolm’s life that is still generally misunderstood, or overlooked,” and that these speeches “represent a fair cross section of his teaching during that crucial last year as a leader in the Nation of Islam.”17
Karim’s introduction to the speeches winks away the ideological warfare that helped drive Malcolm from the Nation of Islam, and ignores evidence that Malcolm grew to characterize his years with Muhammad as “the sickness and madness of those days.”18 Here we have Malcolm the master polemicist telling twicetold tales of Mr. Yacub and white devils, a doctrine he had long forsaken. Here, too, is Malcolm the skillful dogmatist deriding Paul Robeson for not knowing his history, when in reality Malcolm grew to admire Robeson and tried to meet him a month before his own death.19 The political context Karim gives to the speeches attempts to transform interesting and essential historical artifacts from Malcolm’s past into a living document of personal faith and belief.
Karim’s shortcomings reveal the futility of examining Malcolm’s life and thought without regard for sound historical judgment and intellectual honesty. Serious engagement with Malcolm’s life and thought must be critical and balanced. The most useful evaluations of Malcolm X are those anchored in forceful but fair criticism of his career that hold him to the same standards of scholarly examination as we would any figure of importance to (African-) American society. But such judgments must acknowledge the tattered history of vicious, uncomprehending, and disabling cultural criticism aimed at black life, a variety of criticism reflected in many cultural commentaries on Malcolm’s life.20
The overwhelming weakness of hero worship, often, is the belief that the community of hero worshipers possesses the definitive understanding of the subject—in this instance, Malcolm—and that critical dissenters from the received view of Malcolm are traitors to black unity, inauthentic heirs to his political legacy, or misguided interpreters of his ideas.21 This is even more reason for intellectuals to bring the full weight of their critical powers to bear on Malcolm’s life. Otherwise, his real brilliance will be diminished by efforts to canonize his views without first considering them, his ultimate importance as a revolutionary figure sacrificed to celebratory claims about his historic meaning. Toward this end, Malcolm’s words best describe the critical approach that should be adopted in examining his life and thought:
Now many Negroes don’t like to be criticized—they don’t like for it to be said that we’re not ready. They say that that’s a stereotype. We have assets—we have liabilities as well as assets. And until our people are able to . . . analyze ourselves and discover our own liabilities as well as our assets, we never will be able to win any struggle that we become involved in. As long as the black community and the leaders of the black community are afraid of criticism and want to classify all criticism, collective criticism, as a stereotype, no one will ever be able to pull our coat. . . . [W]e have to . . . find out where we are lacking, and what we need to replace that which we are lacking, [or] we never will be able to be successful.22
THE VOCATION OF A PUBLIC MORALIST
Within African-American life, a strong heritage of black leadership has relentlessly and imaginatively addressed the major obstacles to the achievement of a sacred trinity of social goods for African-Americans: freedom, justice, and equality. Racism has been historically viewed as the most lethal force to deny black Americans their share in the abundant life that these goods make possible. The central role that the church has traditionally played in many black communities means that religion has profoundly shaped the moral vision and social thought of black leaders’ responses to racism.23 Because freedom, justice, and equality have been viewed by black communities as fundamental in the exercise of citizenship rights and the expression of social dignity, a diverse group of black leaders has advocated varied models of racial transformation in public life.
The centrality of Christianity in African-American culture means that the moral character of black public protest against racism has oscillated between reformist and revolutionary models of racial transformation. From Booker T. Washington to Joseph H. Jackson, black Christian reformist approaches to racial transformation have embraced liberal notions of the importance of social stability and the legitimacy of the state. Black Christian reformist leaders have sought to shape religious resistance to oppression, inequality, and injustice around styles of rational dissent that reinforce a stable political order. From Nat Turner to the latterday Martin Luther King, Jr., black Christian revolutionary approaches to racial transformation have often presumed the fundamental moral and social limitations of the state. Black Christian revolutionary leaders have advocated public protest against racism in a manner that disrupts the forceful alliance of unjust social privilege and political legitimacy that have undermined African-American life.
In practice, black resistance to American racism has fallen somewhere between these two poles. At their best, black leaders have opposed American racism while appealing to religion and politics in prescribing a remedy. Whether influenced by black Christianity, Black Muslim belief, or other varieties of black religious experience, proponents of public morality combined spiritual insight with political resistance in the attempt to achieve social reconstruction. Any effort to understand Malcolm X, and the cultural and religious beliefs he appealed to and argued against in making his specific claims, must take these traditions of prophetic and public morality into consideration.
Of the four books that largely view Malcolm’s career through his unrelenting ethical insights and the moral abominations to which his vision forcefully responded, Louis Lomax’s When the Word Is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World and James Cone’s Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? treat the religious roots of Malcolm’s moral vision. Peter Goldman’s The Death and Life of Malcolm X and Lomax’s To Kill a Black Man expound the social vision and political implications of Malcolm’s moral perspective. Moreover, both Lomax’s and Cone’s books are comparative studies of Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm’s widely perceived ideological opposite. The pairing of these figures invites inquiry about the legitimacy and usefulness of such comparisons, questions I will take up later.24
Lomax’s When the Word Is Given is a perceptive and informal ethnography of the inner structure of belief of the Nation of Islam, a journalist’s attempt to unveil the mysterious concatenation of religious rituals, puritanical behavior, and unorthodox beliefs that have at once intimidated and intrigued outsiders. Although other, more scholarly critics have examined Black Muslim belief, Lomax is a literate amateur whose lucid prose and imaginative reporting evoke the electricity and immediacy of the events he describes.25
Lomax i
s also insightful in his description of the cultural forces that helped bring Black Muslim faith into existence. He artfully probes how the Nation of Islam proved essential during the 1950s and 1960s for many black citizens who were vulnerably perched at the crux of the racial dilemma in the United States, seeking psychic and social refuge from the insanity of the country’s fractured urban center. In Lomax’s portrait, it is at the juncture between racist attack and cultural defense that Malcolm X’s moral vocation emerges: he voices the aspirations of the disenfranchised, the racially displaced, the religiously confused, and the economically devastated black person. As Lomax observes, the “Black Muslims came to power during a moral interregnum”; Malcolm “brings his message of importance and dignity to a class of Negroes who have had little, if any, reason to feel proud of themselves as a race or as individuals.”26
Despite the virtue of including several of Malcolm’s speeches and interviews, which compose the second half of the book (including an interview during Malcolm’s suspension from the Nation), the study’s popular purposes largely stifle a sharp analysis of Malcolm’s moral thought. Lomax provides helpful historical background of the origins and evolution of the Black Muslim worldview, linking useful insights on the emergence of religion in general to Islamic and Christian belief in Africa and in the United States. But his study does not engage the contradictions of belief and ambiguities of emotion that characterized Malcolm’s moral life. In fairness to Lomax, this study was not his final word on Malcolm. But his later comparative biography of Malcolm and King is more striking for its compelling personal insight into two tragic, heroic men than for its comprehension of the constellation of cultural factors that shaped their lives.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 43