Malcolm X and Racism

Malcolm X and Racism

Pascal Bollschweiler

Introduction

"My whole life has been a chronology of changes."(¹)

Malcolm X (actually "Malcolm Little") was a man of transformations. During his life he changed his religion, his names, his attitude towards women, his thinking about drugs and - perhaps most important - his thought about racial questions. This is also the aspect, the following text will deal with. To understand - at least partly - Malcolm's changes and to see the coherences, I think it is indispensable, to give first a short overview of Malcolm Little's turbulent and much too short life.

Malcolm's life in short

Born as a black child without big hopes in Omaha, Nebraska, and with many brothers and sisters, Malcolm soon had to face his father's violent death (he was murdered by some members of the Ku Klux Klan) and his mother's madness. Though he was fairly good integrated by his white fellows (or perhaps justthisintegration was the cause, for Malcolm's father was a black nationalist), Malcolm saw no future in country life and decided to escape to his sister Ella who lived in Boston.

There he quickly turned to be a "homeboy", took his first jobs and made first experiences with women and drugs. How it is typical for Malcolm, he couldn't stay long in the same city and so he moved to Harlem in New York City and became a "hustler" (a "bigger" homeboy, which means a more criminal homeboy). It was only a question of time until "Detroit Red" - this was how they called him in Harlem - had to be caught by the police and sent to prison.

There was a very important turning point in his life; there the atheistic and uneducated "Satan" (the name they gave him in prison) got into first contact with "The Nation of Islam" and transformed to "Malcolm X", the "X" in his name standing for his unknownrealfamily name, that got lost when black people from Africa were "moved" to America to be slaves for the white people - the "white devils", how they are called by disciples of the Nation of Islam. In prison, Malcolm also finished his education, especially by reading lots of books and taking part in every "forum" (in prison!) he could.

So Malcolm changed his religion (or better: Malcolm hadreallya religion for the first time in his life) and when he was out of prison, he became a member of the Nation of Islam, an Islamic movement in the United States. Through his nearly fanatical commitment, Malcolm X managed soon to gain quite a big influence within the Nation of Islam.

This success made of course a lot of jealous people stepping in who finally were able to exclude him from the "Black Muslims" (so was the Nation of Islam called in - "white" - American media).

After this shock, Malcolm X decided to do his "Hajj", his pilgrimage to Mecca. It's there, where the black nationalist Malcolm X transformed again - perhaps the last big change in his life - and started to think more moderate and also began to call himself "El-Hajj Malik El- Shabazz". The following years he travelled through some "Black African" countries, such as Nigeria, Ghana or Liberia. Malik El-Shabazz' importance as a political figure now grew bigger and bigger, especially in the United States but also in the United Nations.

In the winter of 1965, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was assassinated - alleged by some fanatic members of the Nation of Islam; but there were also some voices in the ghettos, who accused the FBI to have murdered "their shining black prince", for El-Shabbaz had become a too dangerous individual for the "system", because his power and his influence had grown too big. Short before Malcolm X was assassinated, he was able to finish his autobiography, with the assistance of Alex Haley. This autobio graphy, written from 1963 until 1964, is also the fundament for this essay.

Racism in Malcolm's childhood All his life, racism threatened Malcolm. Already in his early childhood, Malcolm and his family were victims of racism, just as most other black people in the United States at this time. For example, their house was burnt down by some riders of the Ku Klux Klan and it was also the KKK who murdered Malcolm's father in a brutal kind of way. Malcolm's father was a Baptist minister and organizer for Marcus Aurelius Garvey's U.N.I.A. (Universal Negro Improvement Association). In his masses, he preferred to talk about Africa:

"Africa for the Africans. No one knows when the hour of Africa's redemption cometh. It is in the wind. It is coming. One day, like a storm, it will be here."(²)

This "back to Africa" ideology is one of the main aspects of the U.N.I.A. movement, which surely had an influence on Malcolm's ideas, that should not be underestimated. The most momentous event in little Malcolm's life was perhaps his father's death. This led the family into a dependency on welfare, which means a dependency on white people - the thing Malcolm's father always wanted to avoid. It also led Malcolm's mother into madness and implied so first symptoms of hate against white people in Malcolm. He and his brothers were now "state children", which Malcolm called "legal, modern slavery - however kindly intentioned". (³)

In school, Malcolm got the "normal dose" of racism:

"They called us "nigger", "darkie", Rastus" so much we thought those were our natural names. But they didn't think of it as an insult; it was just the way they thought about us."(⁴)

His (of course white) teachers were the bigger racists than his classmates. Because Malcolm resisted once and played his teacher a trick, he had to go to a reform school, where he was quite good integrated. He was the only black in his class and his grades were under the best, so he was unique and felt like "a pink poodle" (⁵).

This made him proud and he tried to integrate more and do everything to be white. But he soon remarked, that he was only a pet - "a mascot" (⁶)- for his environment.

What made him finally leaving school and moving to his sister Ella in Boston, was a remark of his teacher concerning Malcolm's future:

"You've got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer - that's no realistic goal for a nigger."(⁷)

In the black ghetto of Boston, Malcolm found the counterpart to the life at the reform school, that he was longing for:

"I know now that it was the sense of being a real part of a mass of my own kind, for the first time."(⁸)

He soon got into contact with the underworld, took first jobs, started dancing and also got his first girl, Laura. But Malcolm also started there his "self-degradation", for which "conking" his hair (way of straightening the hair with the help of lye, potatoes, eggs, and Vaseline) can be seen as a symbol:

"I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are "inferior" - and white people "superior" - that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look "pretty" by white standards."(⁹)

His adaptation to the "integration-mad niggers" went on and the following years, he was a typical "hustler" in the streets of Harlem in New York City, drugs and crimes inclusive - until he was caught and sent to prison for ten years. But he wasn't really sentenced for his crimes in the streets - his drug-dealing jobs, his burglaries, his robberies (but Malcolm never was a murderer) - no, he was actually (but of course unofficially) sentenced, because he lived together with a white woman, who was his accomplice:

"Later, when I had learned the full truth about the white man, I reflected many times, that the average burglary sentence for a first offender, as we all were, was about two years. But we weren't going to get the average - not forourcrime."(¹⁰)

The Nation of Islam

Malcolm was nearly twenty-one years old, when had to go to prison. During all this twentyone years, he was being discriminated by white people. So it was only logical, that he was susceptible to an ideology such as the one of the Nation of Islam, which deals with the "devil white man" and the "brainwashed black man".

The Nation rejects "white" values and attaches importance to "black" history and culture. This ideology has some similarities to the one of the U.N.I.A., the organization Malcolm's father was a part of. That was surely also a reason for Malcolm - thinking of his nightmarelike childhood - to follow the Nation of Islam.

In prison, Malcolm started to write letters to Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. To improve his skills in writing and to enlarge his basic knowledge, Malcolm wrote off a whole dictionary, page by page.

He was also one of the most frequent visitors of the prison's library and took part in many courses and discussions. So he was an educated man when he left prison:

"I finished the eight grade in Mason, Michigan. My High School was the black ghettoof Roxbury, Massachusetts.My college was in the streets of Harlem, and my masters' was taken in prison."(¹¹)

Out of jail, he immediately joined the Nation of Islam and rose quickly in the Nation's hierarchy. The reason for his success - besides his intelligence - was surely his nearly fanatical zeal, when he was "fishing" new members for the Nation in the streets of the ghettos. Due to his commitment, Malcolm received the title "Minister" and was from then on called "Minister Malcolm X". The ideology of the Nation attracted many black people, just as it had attracted Malcolm when he was in jail, so the Islamic movement in America grew steadily.

But within the organization, Malcolm had some enemies who were envious of his success. They started to intrigue against Minister Malcolm X, so that he had to fear to be killed by some fanatic members of the Nation every minute. He also found out, that Elijah Muhammad didn't live according to his own rules. But Malcolm didn't want to believe in the failures of his master as failures; he considered them as a part of Elijah's mission. Although, Minister Malcolm X was officially excluded of the nation because a remark concerning the assassination of J.F. Kennedy.

Enlightenment

After his break with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm did his Hajj - his pilgrimage to Mecca, just as every Muslim has to do at least once in his life (when he is able to). On his trip, he got into contact with Muslims from all nations and of all colours, too. And all were friendly and frank to him, "even" the white ones, which surprised him most. Already before on his trip, when he was in Germany, he had realized, that even white people can handle a black man with respect. The longer he was travelling, the more he recognized the Oneness of man:

"Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God."(¹²) And concerning his meeting with a white Arabian, Malcolm thought:

"I was speechless at the man's attitude, and at my own physical feeling of no difference between us as human beings."(¹³)

After some days travelling, Malcolm felt that he was changing and that his view up to then was quite restricted:

"That morning was when I first began to perceive that `white man', as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, `white man' meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about `white' men."(¹⁴)

When he had finished his Hajj, Malcolm changed his name into the Arabic name "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz". The time after his pilgrimage, he travelled through some African countries and the idea in him developed, to reunite first all black people and then the whole world, which means to internationalise the "struggle of the races":

"[...] that the struggle of the American black man is international."(¹⁵)

To reach his goals, Malik El-Shabazz founded the Organization of African-American Unity (OAAU). It was not possible for white people to join this organization, because of Malcolm's fear of being dependent on (and with that being controlled by) white patrons. But anyway, the OAAU worked closely together with "white" organizations.

Conclusion

It is obvious, that Malcolm had undergone a lots of changes throughout his life - from

"Malcolm Little" to "Detroit Red" to "Satan" to "Minister Malcolm X" to "El-Hajj Malik ElShabazz". In his early years, Malcolm was a victim of racism but he never thought of doing anything to change it. As Red (later "Detroit Red"), he just joined the masses of "integrationmad niggers", "hustling" in the streets of Boston and later New York City. In prison, the apparent solution to America's blacks (and with it to his own) problems was presented to him in form of the Nation of Islam, that he joined as soon as he was out of jail.

Full of enthusiasm, Minister Malcolm X helped the Nation to grow, but he was disillusioned by his idol, the Nation's leader Elijah Muhammad and finally excluded of the movement by an intrigue. On his following trip to Mecca, he was - after a life-long search for identity and the sense of life - enlightened and recognized the unity of mankind and the senselessness of racism in all forms.

Malcolm found a violent death, just as he had predicted. With Malcolm's death in 1965, America (and the world) has lost an important and charismatic leader, a leader that the people in the ghettos today would need so urgently, for the situation there is worse than ever: overpopulation, lack of schools, epidemics, etc. Never or only seldom can these facts be heard in the news. Today, we hear about things such as "war on terrorism" or "infinite justice" - war on racism and poverty and infinite justice and equality for all people seem to be illusions and dreams.

People like Malcolm X or also Martin Luther King had those dreams. Did with the dreamers' death also die their dreams? I really hope not. At least, there are some slight indications, that this is not the case. Especially the youth in the United States seems to be interested in the life and thinking of Malcolm and King.

They are also part of lyrics in Rap songs - the music out of the ghetto - a sign that they are still in (especially in black) people's minds. To be fair, it has to be said, that the American government is doing something, too: they declared a national holiday for Martin Luther King. Therefore there are signs of hope - let's hope that they won't have the same fate as the leaders of the Civil Right movement in the 1960's!

Reference:

Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: Penguin Books, London, 2001, first published in the USA, 1965

Malcolm X and Racism Page / 4 Pascal Bollschweiler, May 2002

(All footnotes refer to: "The Autobiography of Malcolm X")

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