(This is part one of a review, the second part follows immediately.)
New York Review of Books, February 25, 2021 issue
Malcolm’s Ministry
Brandon M. Terry
Malcolm X’s dramatic life, and his insistence that the most
disadvantaged play a part in their own emancipation, exert a strong pull
on his many biographers.
Reviewed:
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Liveright, 612 pp., $35.00
At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp
of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his
conversion in prison from criminal predation to religious piety.
Although he rose to prominence preaching the bleak, racialist
metaphysics of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI), which
depicted whites as “devils by nature,” in March 1964 Malcolm defected
from the Nation and converted to Sunni Islam. Charging Muhammad with the
sexual exploitation of his teenage secretaries, and the NOI with
corruption, criminality, and idolatry, Malcolm pushed a dangerous feud
toward its deadly conclusion.
As assassins from the NOI closed in, the NYPD and FBI infiltrated both
Muhammad’s group and Malcolm’s nascent Organization of Afro-American
Unity (OAAU) with undercover police and paid informants, seeking to
exacerbate sectarian hostilities. Meanwhile, Malcolm traveled
frenetically around the globe, making the hajj to Mecca as part of his
conversion and conducting subversive diplomacy on behalf of oppressed
African-Americans, pleading for newly decolonized nations to bring
charges in the United Nations for the United States’ systemic abuse of
their human rights. While navigating the ire and surveillance of CIA
operatives, Malcolm tried, speech by speech, to cobble together a
political philosophy for Black militants out of revolutionary Black
nationalism, Pan-Africanism, anti-imperialism, and a populist critique
of Black elites. Manning Marable, whose Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
(2011) won the Pulitzer Prize for history, lamented that Malcolm’s
murder in February 1965 prevented his full evolution toward a “gentle
humanism and antiracism” that “could have become a platform for a new
kind of radical, global ethnic politics.”
This sense of the assassination as a collective tragedy, of an entire
culture haunted by a road not taken, was a vital spur to the Black Arts
and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For poets like
Margaret Walker, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and E. Ethelbert Miller,
writing elegies to Malcolm bordered on liturgical practice, granting the
martyred hero a blinding countercultural sheen that obscured his
suffocatingly conservative views on sex, gender roles, and personal
comportment.
For the proto-rap group the Last Poets, Malcolm’s death lamentably
exposed that his notoriety was due far more to the catharsis his
rhetoric occasioned, rather than any devotional fervor worthy of his
revolutionary example: “Niggers loved to hear Malcolm rap,” they chanted
in “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution” (1970), “but they did not love
Malcolm.”
Despite the reproach of the Last Poets, many of the most popular male
Black Power figures did indeed self-consciously fashion themselves in
reverential accord with Malcolm’s example, as they understood it. For
Stokely Carmichael, the controversial popularizer of the “Black Power”
slogan, “Malcolm was the only figure of that generation…who had the
natural authority, the style, language, and charisma, to lead and
discipline rank-and-file urban youth.” Huey P. Newton, the cofounder of
the Black Panther Party (BPP), celebrated Malcolm as one of the “two
Black men of the twentieth century”—the other being Marcus Garvey—“who
posed an implacable challenge to both the oppressor and the endorsed
spokesmen” of Black accommodation. Like their idol, however, these Black
Power radicals and their organizations were subjected to catastrophic
state repression, including feuds orchestrated by undercover agents,
unjust arrest and imprisonment, disparaging propaganda campaigns, and—as
in the horrific case of Chicago BPP members Fred Hampton and Mark
Clark—cold-blooded assassination. As these measures crippled Black
radicalism, Carmichael fled to Guinea in self-exile, while Newton’s
once-promising BPP leadership unraveled in a spiral of drug abuse,
paranoia, and violence before his murder on the streets of Oakland in 1989.
Stunningly, the tragedies that befell Malcolm’s political progeny did
not prevent him from enjoying a manic revival near the end of the
twentieth century. Against the backdrop of Reagan-era conservatism, he
reemerged as a cultural icon of the hip-hop generation, appearing
frequently on “X”-themed streetwear, folk art, and chart-topping rap
albums. By 1992, Malcolm received arguably the best fortune of any
Hollywood biopic subject, with Denzel Washington’s performance in Spike
Lee’s Malcolm X. And if one insists that all imitation entails flattery,
then no account of the Malcolm revival of the 1990s is complete without
a begrudging mention of Louis Farrakhan’s breakthrough popularity with
an oily imitation of his former NOI mentor.
Malcolm’s enduring popularity, even in its later waves, remains
unintelligible without reference to Martin Luther King Jr. By the late
twentieth century, King became, mainly through the movement to establish
a federal holiday in his honor, a symbol of multicultural inclusion and
the striving integrationism of a growing Black professional and
political class. The rough edges of King’s radicalism, reflected in his
widespread unpopularity at the end of his life, were sanded down for
safe handling. Liberals appropriated his image for antiracist symbolism
without acknowledging his critiques of capitalism and militarism;
conservatives usurped his talk of transcending color discrimination to
demonize reparative justice and eat away at the voting rights
protections so many died to win. The resulting civic mythology left
generations of youth with the impression that Malcolm, rather than King,
was the Black tradition’s leading exemplar of authentic radicalism.
Although much of the commentary around “Malcolm-mania” in the 1990s
focused on the rage, ambivalence, and disappointments of post–civil
rights integration, the most underappreciated force behind the Malcolm
revival was the new centrality of crime and incarceration in the lives
of Black families. While the list of arrested Black political leaders
and thinkers is long (Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones,
Bayard Rustin, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and, of course, King),
the state persecuted nearly all of them for expressly or conventionally
political actions. By contrast, Malcolm’s pre-NOI criminal
record—including charges for drug possession, larceny, and armed
robbery—was far more akin to those prevalent among the marginal men of
America’s ghettos.
For Black communities at the height of the overlapping crack cocaine,
street violence, and zero-tolerance-policing epidemics, therefore,
Malcolm’s story of overcoming drug addiction and nihilism through
revelation, self-exertion, and discipline was uniquely gripping. In the
most extreme uses of Malcolm’s biography, his example could seductively
and tragically suggest that such transformations might be achieved en
masse through Black soulcraft and self-organization alone.
In a 1987 interview, Clarence Thomas, who often identified Malcolm as
one of his heroes, proclaimed, “I don’t see how the civil-rights people
today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own. Where does he say black
people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs?” For Thomas,
Malcolm’s lesson was about self-discipline and self-sufficiency: “When
you have the economics, people do have a way of changing their attitudes
toward you.” Farrakhan, in his keynote address at the 1995 Million Man
March, echoed these sentiments, favorably comparing Asians and
Asian-Americans with a benighted Black America whose indulgence of
crime, sexual licentiousness, vulgarity, and dependency fed “the
degenerate mind of White supremacy” and undermined the ethical and
financial foundations for group flourishing.
Such exhortations, despite their strident moralism, profoundly
underestimated the gravitational pull of the ghetto’s controlled chaos.
How could such strivings find their footing amid the assault by market
fundamentalists on social protections, finance capital’s pressure on US
wages and collective bargaining rights, discriminatory patterns of
credit and real estate lending, and the repressive policing used to
contain the effects of economic hardship?
Yet Malcolm-mania, despite its analytical weaknesses, powerfully
affirmed love and hope for Black youth against politicians’ and social
scientists’ talk of a generation of “superpredators” unreachable by care
or reason. His story became a critical pillar of the hope that the young
man on a street corner or in prison could yet become “a black shining
prince,” to use Ossie Davis’s phrase from his legendary eulogy for
Malcolm. And often enough, people condemned to the margins of society
discovered, via his story, capabilities and self-regard they never
before imagined, including the higher purpose of striving for one’s own
emancipation. This is why, perhaps, Malcolm’s significance has always
been more tied to biography than philosophy.
Malcolm’s significance for Black dignity and self-respect is the driving
force of a major new biography, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of
Malcolm X by Les Payne, an investigative journalist who won a Pulitzer
Prize for his work on the global heroin trade. The book, which won the
National Book Award for nonfiction, is the result of a thirty-year labor
of love and was heroically completed by Payne’s daughter, Tamara, after
his death in 2018.
In Payne’s rendering, the most fundamental impact of oppression is how
it inculcates a sense of inferiority and “self-loathing” in its victims.
This view, which the historian Daryl Michael Scott has disparaged as
“damage imagery,” is the cornerstone of Payne’s analysis of the American
race problem. In a striking autobiographical essay called “The Night I
Stopped Being a Negro,” first published in 2008 and quoted by his
daughter in her introduction, Payne wrote:
I’d never met a white person, South or North, who did not feel
comfortably superior to every Negro, no matter the rank or station.
Conversely, no Negro I’d met or heard of had ever felt truly equal to
whites. For all their polemical posturing, not even Baldwin, Martin
Luther King, Jr., or the Great Richard Wright…had liberated themselves
from the poisoned weed of black self-loathing.
This stunning indictment of King and all the others caught up in the
American racial dilemma is rooted in Payne’s childhood in the 1940s. He
describes his youth as a training in the rituals of acquiescence.
“Inferiority,” he writes, was “inspired in us at the hearth, was
reinforced by every shred of evidence on public display: the Little
Black Sambo schoolbooks, the billboards, the Amos ’n’ Andy Radio Show,
the drinking fountains.” “Our parents…curbed all signs of rebellion,”
and “we were bent like saplings to the circumstance of a permanent
underclass.”
Payne’s essay tells of the night in 1963 he saw Malcolm speak in
Hartford, Connecticut, an experience that exercised a hold on his
imagination for decades. Malcolm’s outstanding achievement, Payne came
to believe, was that his thought and rhetoric were uniquely capable of
dissolving “the mark of the conditioned Negro, the most despised—and
self-despising—creature in America,” in an “acid bath of racial
counter-rejection, tough-love logic, and bottom-up primer on American
history.” It was the encounter with Malcolm, in Payne’s reminiscence,
that began to free him from the psychic bondage of racial self-loathing,
converting the future journalist from servile “Negro” to self-respecting
“black man.”
That Malcolm could occasion such transformations, Payne contends, was
due not just to his awesome rhetorical gifts, but to his ability to
“demonstrate with his life” (my emphasis) that Negroes could overcome
their shame and discover unimpeachable self-respect. That Payne could
treat Malcolm’s life as singularly ready-at-hand to demonstrate such a
point (as opposed to King’s or Wright’s, or Fannie Lou Hamer’s for that
matter) is a testament not only to the dramatic material of Malcolm’s
life story, but also to his uncanny talent for self-mythology and the
gravitational pull it tends to exert on his biographers.
Born to a family of Black nationalist proselytizers for Marcus Garvey’s
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Malcolm lived a
childhood wracked with tragedy. His parents’ encomiums to Black pride
caused them to be harassed and terrorized across the Midwest. In 1929
the family’s house in Lansing, Michigan, occupied in defiance of a
racially restrictive covenant, was burned to the ground. Less than two
years later, his father, Earl Little, died in a gruesome streetcar accident.
Malcolm often insisted—contrary to the police record, his older
brothers’ recollections, and Payne’s investigation—that his father died
at the hands of the Black Legion, a local white supremacist vigilante
group. His belief surely added an element of primordial vengeance to his
later life, but whatever the truth of the matter, the plausibility of
murder was terror enough. So too was the fact that Earl was accused of
being responsible for both the arson and his own death.
Denied a life insurance payout on the specious suicide allegation, the
Little family was overwhelmed by Depression-era poverty. As a teenager,
Malcolm began to skip school, commit petty crimes, and sell drugs.
Citing his delinquency and his family’s destitution, a swarm of
condescending social workers scattered the Little children across foster
homes before declaring their mother, Louisa, “mentally incompetent.” She
was committed to an asylum for nearly three decades.
Without either of his parents, Malcolm found himself in a lopsided
battle of mutual contempt with Lansing’s teachers, social workers, and
police officers. He was shuttled between a juvenile reformatory and
various foster placements, his precocious intellect and gregarious
personality unnourished by the nearly all-white environments he found
himself in. He famously described himself as a sort of “mascot” to his
fellow students. People talked around him, he recalled in The
Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), “the same way people would talk
freely in front of a pet canary. They would even talk about me, or about
‘niggers,’ as though I wasn’t there, as if I wouldn’t understand what
the word meant.”
Malcolm’s autobiography also confronts, with scornful honesty, taboos
around interracial sex and romance. Public norms, which left him
standing alone on the sidelines of school dances and mixers, insisted
that the “mascot” was not supposed to date or have sex with white girls.
Malcolm, however, claimed that some white friends secretly urged him to
sexually proposition white girls, in part because if the girls agreed,
those friends could later coerce them into sex by threatening to expose
their shameful transgression.
One of Malcolm’s long-standing criticisms of white supremacy was
precisely this sort of sexual fetishism and the hypocrisy of
“segregationist” logic in light of actual sexual practices. The Nation
of Islam’s replacement of its members’ given last names with an “X” to
mark their unknown heritage is often read as a reclamation of a
distinctively Black identity from the enduring humiliation of chattel
slavery. It also, however, expresses contempt for the way that the
Western convention of passing down patrilineal last names works to
obscure the mass rape and human trafficking through which African
America was, in part, produced. “It would be impossible for me today,”
Malcolm once remarked in a 1961 interview, “to carry the blood of a
rapist in me and not hate that blood.”
By 1964, such frank speech would make him one of America’s most
sought-after speakers on college campuses, but in Lansing, teachers
doused the young Malcolm’s ambitions. He recounted that, after making
the mistake of letting a teacher named Richard Kaminska know that he
wanted to grow up to be a lawyer, Kaminksa (called “Mr. Ostrowski” in
the Autobiography) replied:
You’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no
realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can
be. You’re good with your hands—making things…. Why don’t you plan on
carpentry?”
Eschewing the woodshop, fifteen-year-old Malcolm fled in 1941 from
Lansing to cosmopolitan Boston to live with his half-sister, Ella
Collins. In the historic Black neighborhood of Roxbury, Malcolm was
tossed into the escalating storm of Black America’s class divisions,
spurred by a booming wartime economy. While Ella, despite dabbling in
shoplifting and fencing stolen goods herself, had high hopes that her
brother’s complexion and charisma would gain them entry into Boston’s
light-skinned Black elite, Malcolm recoiled at the self-delusion of a
precariously privileged class. In his autobiography he says that while
they “looked down their noses at the Negroes of the black ghetto,”
eight out of ten of the Hill Negroes of Roxbury, despite the
impressive-sounding job titles they affected, actually worked as menials
and servants. “He’s in banking,” or “He’s in securities.” It sounded as
though they were discussing a Rockefeller or a Mellon—and not some
gray-headed, dignity-posturing bank janitor, or bond-house messenger….
It has never ceased to amaze me how so many Negroes, then and now, could
stand the indignity of that kind of self-delusion.
Instead of striving toward a respectability of dubious value, Malcolm
turned service work in jazz clubs and as a porter on the New Haven
railroad into a set of lucrative hustles that he plied from Harlem to
Roxbury. Dodging the World War II draft, he dealt drugs, ran numbers,
robbed, and steered clients to sex workers. Wearing zoot suits louder
than the swing bands he sold reefer to, Malcolm adopted the name “Red,”
in reference to his naturally red hair, which he flamboyantly wore
“conked,” or chemically straightened with lye.
In 1940s America, Malcolm’s bodily adornments signaled, if nothing else,
a rejection of mainstream norms of thrift, restraint, and modesty.
Later, as part of his conversion story, he effaced whatever value he
once saw in such self-expression, recasting beauty practices—especially
straightened hair—as exemplary of the depth of Black abjection under
white supremacy. Malcolm argued in his autobiography that his conking
was no innocuous form of youthful rebellion but “literally burning my
flesh to have [my hair] look like a white man’s hair.” Describing
chemical straightening as a mutilation of the God-gifted bodies of
African-descended people, Malcolm derisively declared straightened hair
as one’s “emblem of his shame that he is black.” In this he followed
Garvey, who implored Black people, “Don’t remove the kinks from your
hair! Remove them from your brain!”
Malcolm’s accusation represents an important entry in debates on race,
aesthetics, and the body. Some see such sweeping denunciation as too
dogmatic, placing undue suspicion on individual choice and
self-fashioning, or denying our power to playfully transform existing
strictures of race. Yet the celebration of choice cannot be so
fetishistic that it denies that it is exercised amid culturally powerful
attributions of value and beauty that reverberate through hiring and
promotion, dating and marriage, celebrity and prosperity. America
continues to produce a steady stream of workplace and school
discrimination cases concerning illegal attempts to ban kinky hair worn
in its natural state, as well as more legally permissible (if ethically
egregious) attempts to ban distinctively “Black” hairstyles like
cornrows and braids.
Long after the Black Power movement made the defiant celebration of
natural hair its most recognizable aesthetic legacy, the noxious
equation of kinky hair with “bad hair” and its effects remains a
reasonable preoccupation with figures as disparate as the singer Beyoncé
Knowles, the comedian Chris Rock, the children’s author Natasha Tarpley,
and the political theorist Shatema Threadcraft. In what may be the most
original (if aesthetically underwhelming) entry in the Black hair wars,
Justin Simien’s 2020 film Bad Hair riffs on NOI demonology and the
growing horror movement in Black film to depict a young Black woman
pushed by corporate pressure to receive a hair weave revealed to be
literally evil, murderous, and possessive.
Whatever one thinks of Malcolm’s hairstyle, it is clear that no
adornment delivered as much social status as the mutually parasitic
romance he began at sixteen with Beatrice Caragulian, a white woman from
the Boston suburbs who was three years older and continued their affair
through the early part of her marriage. Against the backdrop of
interracial taboos, his relationship with the striking Armenian-American
made “the big, important black hustlers…club managers, name gamblers,
numbers bankers, and others” take notice. As Malcolm learned, however,
such attention could have severe consequences.
Using Bea, her sister, and another white woman to help case houses in
the Boston suburbs, Malcolm organized a small burglary gang. When he
tried to pawn a stolen watch, he was arrested and swiftly gave up his
co-conspirators. As punishment, Malcolm was sentenced to Massachusetts
state prison for eight to ten years. This lengthy sentence was, in part,
cruel retribution from a judge disgusted by Red’s audacity in recruiting
white women to larceny and Bea to adulterous sex across the color line.
In contrast to leading accounts from the Black Power and Malcolm-mania
eras, Marable’s biography tended to downplay his subject’s own account
of his street exploits, deriding his “amateurish” crime career as
exaggerated for rhetorical effect. Departing from the slick hustler
depicted in Spike Lee’s film, Marable focused instead on more bumbling
exploits like Red’s being arrested for stealing his sister’s coat, the
careless, incriminating trip to the pawnshop, and snitching on his
fellow burglars.
Yet Marable’s fixation on the small scale of this criminality obscures
what is most significant about it. Payne’s account of Malcolm’s street
life has the virtue of recapturing the dispiriting way that injustice
can foster desperation, resentment, and, ultimately, callous predation.
In his autobiography and elsewhere, Malcolm’s aim was not to project
larger-than-life gangsterism. Instead, he struggled to underscore a more
visceral truth about crime at the margins of society, namely the banal
cruelty it visits on one’s most intimate relationships and the
deleterious effects it has on one’s self-regard.
Describing himself as having “become an animal, a vulture, in the
ghetto,” Malcolm strains to capture how a life of predatory crime turns
corrosive, burdening and profaning the web of social ties and close
bonds that constitute who we are as persons and the practices of care
that sustain them. Payne details, for instance, the teenage Malcolm
stealing money from his mentally ill mother to spend on white girls in
Lansing, while she was so destitute that she was boiling dandelion
greens for food. We see “Detroit Red” try to pimp out his brother’s
estranged wife in New York. And we see Malcolm abusing and manipulating
women for money, drowning whatever regrets he may have had about the
white ones in racial resentment and recrimination.
These vignettes, as hard as they are to read for those of us reared to
idolize Malcolm, restore, as it were, the challenge of his testimony
regarding his life of crime. As he intended, they show how the trauma of
structural injustice reverberates through desperation, vice, and
vulnerability, and they underscore Malcolm’s mature self-disgust at his
complicity with “the muck and mire of this rotting world.”
By restoring this drama to Malcolm’s conversion experiences, Payne
manages to glean the great tragedy of his subject’s life. While he was
in prison, Malcolm’s siblings slowly converted him to the Nation of
Islam and Elijah Muhammad’s blend of Islamic mysticism, Orientalist
mythology, and black nationalism. Discovering a new purpose through the
Black Muslim movement’s discipline and his own preternatural talent for
self-education, he rapidly became Muhammad’s greatest advocate.
Raised by Garveyites, Malcolm knew better than most that the NOI offered
little that was new in the way of black nationalist political
philosophy. Its paeans to race pride and an independent nation-state,
skepticism toward multiracial democracy, and conflation of bourgeois
enterprise with “self-sufficiency” were all familiar. The genius, and
limitation, of the NOI was its ability to inject the increasingly
implausible demands of classical black nationalism with spiritual fervor
through esoteric prophesy and rituals regulating diet, sex, exercise,
prayer, and sensual pleasures.
It was Malcolm, however, who deepened and best articulated what would
become the Nation’s and his own most profound political challenge to the
Black tradition, and arguably to America writ large: an unprecedented
insistence that the most disadvantaged—the incarcerated, those surviving
on illicit or semi-licit economies, the drug-addicted—could nonetheless
come to have a critical part in their own redemption and emancipation.
Malcolm raised Muhammad’s injunction to “go after the black man in the
mud” into an ethical maxim and, struggling against his mentor’s
quietism, a program of political organizing.
As Malcolm relayed in the Autobiography, “converts from society’s lowest
levels were a sizable part of the Nation’s broad base of membership.” He
preached with evangelical zeal that “no one can change more completely
than the man who has been at the bottom.” The moral and, at least for
Malcolm, political agency dormant in these benighted souls had been lost
to the systematic degradation of their self-image and the lack of
discipline necessary to navigate the traps that were contemptuously laid
for them by a hostile society. Thus, along with Malcolm’s excoriation of
white supremacy and exhortations to Islamic piety, he also pioneered
programs for paramilitary and martial arts training, drug and alcohol
rehabilitation, religious and historical study, and, as Payne details,
experiments in “semi-communal” cooperative living for young men.
Though he died before he could test these ideas outside the NOI, Malcolm
nonetheless offered a valuable rejoinder to a society whose practices of
punishment, policing, and the distribution of public goods passed
arrogant judgment on the meager horizons of African-Americans herded
into prisons and ghettos. Rhetorically, Malcolm sought to turn the
stigma of criminality back onto the basic structure of American society.
“You don’t have to go behind bars to be in jail in this country,”
Malcolm declared; “if you are born in this country with black skin you
are already in jail.” These dimensions of his ministry inspired a wave
of frenzied organizing in secular black politics, including the Black
Panther Party’s enthusiasm for the so-called lumpenproletariat, King’s
1966 attempts to convert the gangs of Chicago’s West Side to the gospel
of nonviolence, and the prison movements defended by Angela Davis.
Despite the profoundly humane and egalitarian vision behind Malcolm’s
commitments, however, Payne reveals how he fatally did not, and perhaps
could not, do enough to uproot a toxic alliance between street predation
and sectarian corruption that emerged within the NOI and gave it some of
its martial glamour. Building on the underappreciated work of the
historian Karl Evanzz, Payne shows how the discipline, entrepreneurial
success, and inspiring conversions of the NOI were backed, in some
mosques, by brutal beatings administered by the paramilitary “Fruit of
Islam” and the extraction of excessive tithes from its economically
precarious membership. He details the ways in which mosque leaders
subjected members to violence for violations like failing to meet sales
quotas for the NOI’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and how “goon squads”
in cities like Newark—whose mosque was infamous for prostitution, bank
robbery, and drug dealing—dispensed lethal violence on command from
higher-ups. Ironically, despite the NOI’s rhetoric of retaliatory
violence against whites, nearly all of this violence was directed at
blacks alone—including Malcolm.
Malcolm’s final break with Elijah Muhammad and the NOI in 1964 was long
in coming. Jealousy at his success with recruits and the media swelled
among Muhammad’s inner circle. Others worried that the aggressively
ascetic Malcolm would purge mosques of factions seen as too corrupt or
impious if he ever took power from the perpetually ill Muhammad.
Malcolm had long chafed against the NOI’s apolitical and superstitious
theology, but he seemed especially incensed at how its reactionary
separatism made the organization bedfellows with the pro-segregation
American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. In one of the most
heartbreaking parts of The Dead Are Arising, we read, for the first
time, testimony from one of Malcolm’s rivals, Jeremiah X, regarding the
infamous 1961 meeting where the two served as NOI emissaries to KKK
representatives. In that meeting, the Klan, assuming a mutual interest
in the defeat of racial integration, asked the NOI to assist in
murdering King. A stunned Malcolm coolly refused the request, but the
audacity of it, as well as the KKK–NOI nonaggression pact forged in the
meeting’s aftermath, revealed a mordant truth. The most dedicated
enemies of Malcolm’s people viewed the “natural religion for the black
man,” as his brother Philbert first described Muhammad’s creed, with
more cautious encouragement than conciliatory fear.
The growing rift between Malcolm and Muhammad’s inner circle was
exacerbated and enabled by security state machinations, including the
FBI’s rebuffed attempt to work with Malcolm against Muhammad in February
1964. Gene Roberts, an undercover police officer who infiltrated the
OAAU as Malcolm’s personal bodyguard, told Payne how he identified
preparations for the impending assassination but the NYPD refused to
intervene. FBI files detail similar failures to prevent Malcolm’s death.
Worse, interviews with both Roberts and an anonymous NOI source
explicitly suggest further government complicity in abetting the
assassination and its coverup.
The sad fact is that NOI top brass were willing to do their part. By
1964, an assassination order was issued from Muhammad’s inner circle,
with hit squads from several mosques assigned the grisly task. Among
them was Jeremiah Shabazz’s infamous Philadelphia mosque. (Known as the
city’s “Black Mafia,” its members were later implicated in the horrific
1973 Hanafi Muslim massacre, in which seven people—including five
children, two of whom were forcibly drowned in front of their
mother—were slaughtered in Washington, D.C.) On Valentine’s Day, 1965,
Malcolm’s home was firebombed while he, his wife, Betty Shabazz, then
pregnant with twins, and their four daughters were at home. In a
deathbed interview with Payne, Malcolm’s onetime protégé “Captain”
Joseph (née Gravitt), a formerly homeless World War II veteran who was
then head of the Harlem mosque’s paramilitary unit, admitted to ordering
the arson.
Payne’s intensive focus on the mechanics of murder and commitment to the
legend of Malcolm’s courageous defiance prevents him from assessing the
crushing toll of his subject’s public persona on Malcolm’s family and
the man himself. Just hours after the attempt to murder his family,
Malcolm left them behind to fly to Detroit and deliver a speech that
began with an apology for not wearing a tie. While Payne avoids the
gossipy speculation that plagued Marable’s account of Malcolm and
Betty’s relationship, his reticence to say much of anything about their
personal life (or hardly anything about Betty at all) is a glaring
omission. As the historians Ula Taylor and Garrett Felber have
demonstrated, Betty and other Muslim women were able to call upon
organized self-defense to deter the violence and humiliation regularly
visited on other black women, but at the cost of enduring surveillance,
subjection, and sanction within the sect. Arguably no one in the NOI
paid a greater “price of protection” (to use Farah Jasmine Griffin’s
classic phrase) than Betty Shabazz, who bore the weight of Malcolm’s
projection of indomitability in life and death, and who struggled
through the intergenerational trauma of her husband’s murder as an
oft-reluctant symbol of Black nationalist endurance.
On February 21, one week after the firebombing, a team of assassins from
the Newark mosque killed Malcolm at the Audubon Ballroom in Upper
Manhattan, with Betty and their daughters watching. According to Payne’s
riveting investigation, two innocent men were convicted for the crime
and all but one of Malcolm’s murderers escaped prosecution. Elijah
Muhammad, rather than seeking forgiveness for sexually exploiting his
followers or conceding that the NOI could do more for black political
freedom, condoned the murder of his most devoted follower. Payne also
reminds us that Farrakhan—who publicly denounced Malcolm as “worthy of
death” before his assassination—was in Newark that day, and among the
first informed that the hit was successful.
The callousness of Malcolm’s assassination makes it easier to evade the
difficult questions it raises, but the fury of his rivals is not hard to
understand. His public condemnation of the NOI could easily be seen by
insiders as hypocrisy. After all, well before his public apostasy,
Malcolm was aware of NOI beatings of defectors, “sinners,” and enemies.
He knew, at least by his first trip to the Middle East in 1959, that
Elijah’s Islam was profoundly unorthodox. Malcolm, himself a proponent
of patriarchy, must have anticipated the vengeance and paranoia that
would follow from his decision to recruit Muhammad’s favored son,
Wallace, to join in the investigation of his father’s sexual misconduct.
Had Malcolm decided to remain in Africa indefinitely in 1965, he might
have survived—like W.E.B. Du Bois before him, or Stokely Carmichael
after him—as a moralist and gadfly offering prophetic critique from
exile. But if Payne’s account is right, once he decided to return home
from his trip abroad following his split with the NOI, Malcolm simply
had no plan or ability to elude the state violence or sweeping vengeance
his apostasy and activism had unleashed.
In a speech given just days before his death, Malcolm lamented his
“having played a major role in developing a criminal organization” out
of what once was an organization with “the power, the spiritual power,
to reform the criminal.” One of the great contributions of Payne’s work
is that it may spur us, as we debate the principles and prospects for
police and prison “abolition,” to take seriously the sociological
underpinnings of the NOI’s fall. The state is not the only organized
executor of violence, and illegitimate claims on the right to kill or
punish would not disappear with prisons or the police. Though
abolitionists have convincingly argued that self-professed “liberals”
have permitted the cruelty of mass incarceration to become normalized, a
reimagined model of public safety must take account of the ways in which
the organizations best disposed to seize the powers of “community
control” have been responsible for other forms of violence and abuse.
Hoping to quiet Malcolm’s inimitable voice, his enemies inadvertently
consolidated his immortality. He dramatized, perhaps more than any other
African-American of the twentieth century, the fact that our society’s
contemptuous practices toward the poor, and especially the ghetto poor,
have poisoned vast reservoirs of human potential and silenced truths we
remain in desperate need of hearing. Malcolm never found a vehicle
worthy of his great insights about the political and moral agency of the
most marginalized. But the great inheritors of his legacy today, like
the more than fifty organizations that make up the Formerly Incarcerated
Convicted People and Families Movement, are experimenting with policy
campaigns, protest actions, lobbying efforts, and civic education led by
formerly incarcerated people. In doing so, they will test the political
efficacy and transformative power of institutions far less reliant than
the NOI on charismatic leadership, authoritarian discipline, and racial
or religious dogmatism.
One need not, with Payne, tar African America with the broad brush of
self-loathing to concede that Malcolm’s story—now filled in with
unprecedented detail—still has the virtue of piercing through the
arrogant indifference that numbs most Americans to the scale of our
catastrophic treatment of the truly disadvantaged. The staggering weight
of the millions who languish in the largest prison population in the
history of the world or who face down untimely deaths, fast or slow, in
America’s dark ghettos is an indelible stain on this nation. Yet the
avalanche of statistics and sordid histories that our recent summer of
protest brought to the forefront of American discourse cannot alone
produce the righteous indignation that such circumstances should compel.
This outrage and the action it might engender seem ultimately tied to
the recognition that, as Sonia Sanchez wrote in her beautiful elegy to
Malcolm,
what might have been
is not for him/or me
but what could have been
floods the womb until I drown.
—This is the first of a two-part article.
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