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The text below is by William F. Warde
and originally appeared in the Spring 1965 issue of International Socialist
Review.
Afro-Americans have produced many remarkable leaders from
Crispus Attucks to Frederick Douglas. Malcolm X was the latest and not the
least of these revolutionary representatives of the black people. His
sensitivity enabled him to establish instant communion with the oppressed
millions who impatiently await the emancipation and equality they have been
promised. He was faultlessly attuned to their feelings of frustration,
indignation and rebellion.
“He made it plain, he tells it as it is,” was their
spontaneous response to his indictments from the platform, on TV and in the
streets of Harlem, of the torments capitalist America inflicts on its Negro
citizens— and to his summons to resist and abolish them by any available
means.
Malcolm’s intransigence had the same powerful appeal to
the rebel youth, black and white, in the United States as the personalities
of Fidel Castro and Hugo Blanco in Latin America. He merited such
admiration.
Malcolm’s life of 39 years passed through three distinct
periods. In his youth he was the victim of the cruelties and deprivations
of the Northern big city ghettos. But he was not an unresisting one. He hit
back by resorting to jungle methods in order to survive in the asphalt
jungle.
The prison he entered did not further corrupt him but
served as a school in which he first learned about the Black Muslims. His
conversion to their doctrines and practices regenerated and steeled his
character, arming him with a gospel of racial salvation opposed to the
hypocritical white man’s Christianity which sanctified the black man’s
servitude.
He rose to national prominence as the foremost spokesman
and organizer of Elijah Muhammad’s brotherhood. His call for Negro
self-reliance, his condemnations of the moderate Negro leaders tied to the
established power structure and his outspoken justification of the right
and duty of self-defense against racist violence made him the target of
vilification and misrepresentation. Malcolm was crucified by the paid press
long before he was martyred by the assassins’ bullets.
Regardless of their beliefs, most Negroes welcomed
Minister Malcolm’s message. He expressed what they really felt and thought
about white America. At the same time the Freedom Now movement could not be
channeled within a narrow religious sectarianism which turned away from
social and political struggles. The insurgent black masses had to be united
around a social program which combined methods of vigorous mass action with
the building of independent power on all levels of national life.
Political Sagacity
Malcolm demonstrated his exceptional political sagacity
by recognizing that the theocratic cultism of Elijah Muhammad ran counter
to the imperative needs of the Negro revolt. Early in 1964 he parted from
the man he had revered as Allah’s messenger and the fountainhead of wisdom.
This rupture ushered in— and possibly prepared the
termination of— the final chapter of Malcolm’s brilliant and too brief
career. To cut loose from the tutelage and ties of the Nation of Islam
required personal, moral and intellectual courage of a high order. Malcolm
had to repudiate the anti-political, sectarian and anti-white teachings of
the Black Muslims. He had to construct a new organization from the ground
up while adding more enemies to an already extensive aggregation of
opponents.
Well aware of the risks, Malcolm moved forward
fearlessly on his new course. He separated the religious side of his
activity from the projected Organization of Afro-American Unity. He started
to assemble his numerous and scattered supporters. He made a pilgrimage to
Mecca and visited the Near East and Africa where he discussed the problems
of liberation struggle with some of the principal figures of the
anti-imperialist forces, from Premier Nkrumah of Ghana to Muhammad Babu of
Tanzania and Che Guevara of Cuba. He sought support for the human rights
appeal he was to submit to the United Nations on behalf of the 22 million
American Negroes.
He set about to formulate a program and outlook which
could redirect the Freedom Now movement along more effective lines. He was
about to announce the first results of his thinking when he was gunned down
in the Audubon Ballroom.
During these last months Malcolm was shedding old ideas,
absorbing and emitting new ones with astonishing rapidity. He was learning,
growing, changing. He adopted not only the official Muslim creed but also
many ideas shared by the most uncompromising African, Asian and Latin
American freedom-fighters and by the revolutionary socialists of the United
States. He became willing to collaborate with everyone who refused to cower
before the ruling powers and stood ready to battle for the rights of the
Negro population.
Unfortunately he was not given 35 time to formulate a
comprehensive program, impart it to his followers and build a strong
nationwide organization. In a discussion with him and his colleague James
Shabazz at his Harlem headquarters several weeks before his murder, we
referred to the speeches he was planning to give in February. “ I hope they
are better than the one I gave last Sunday,” he said. “Why?” I asked, “were
you suffering like so many of us from a touch of the flu?” “No,” he
repeated twice, “ I am just tired. Mentally tired.” This fatigue came from
the immense burdens Malcolm bore in launching a new revolutionary
organization with inadequate resources and forces, besieged by rich and
relentless foes who never ceased harassing him. He tried to surmount these
difficulties through a strong will and untiring exertions. He knew that he
was working as a marked man on limited time.
Unlike Toussaint L’Ouverture, Malcolm X was unable to
display all the qualities of generalship that he possessed. Nevertheless,
he towered so far above his contemporaries that his death leaves the
struggle for emancipation shorter by a head.
Figures like Martin Luther King, honored and backed up
by the Establishment, continue to hold the limelight in the civil rights
movement. But they are luminaries of the moment, representatives of a
passing phase in the march of black liberation in the United States.
Prophet Malcolm, whose memory they can patronize now
that he has been silenced, was the herald and authentic spokesman of its
future. His amazing ascent from the pit of degradation to the heights of
national and international leadership indicate what a treasure of talents
and creative capacities are hidden in the black ghettos which can be called
forth by the unfolding revolt. It indicated how fast the best of the
freedom-fighters can move in the heat of battle toward the most advanced
viewpoints and positions.
He progressed in a few years from depravity and
demoralization to the goal-directed enlightenment and energy of a mass
agitator and then from religious sectarianism to revolutionary social
action. He passed from hatred, fear and suspicion of all whites as an
understandable conclusion from humiliation and oppression to the view that
the actions and convictions of a person and group are more important than
the tint of their skin. He solicited the cooperation of all opponents of
Jim Crow so long as this involved no sacrifice or subordination of the welfare
of the black masses to the white majority. He looked forward to an alliance
of black men and women with white revolutionaries in anti-capitalist
struggles to bring equality and justice to all of our countrymen.
Warning
The capitalists and white supremacists would do well to
heed and remember Malcolm’s warning that the racial explosion arising from
the dissatisfaction of the black people can be more dangerous to them than
an atomic explosion. There are other potential Malcolms among the youth who
will be inspired by his life and death to carry forward his work. They will
help consummate his unfinished tasks by fusing the progressive black
nationalist aims of equality, dignity, jobs and justice with the goals of a
socialist America.
March 1, 1965
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