Rescuing Malcolm X From His Calculated Myths
by Peniel E. Joseph, chronicle.com
May 1st 2011
Malcolm X bestrides the postwar age of decolonization alongside global icons
like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. If King and Gandhi evoked
nonviolence and disciplined civil disobedience as a shield to protect the world
from imperial wars, racism, and rampant materialism, Malcolm wielded the
specter of self-defense, violence, and revolution as a sword to permanently
alter power relations between the global North and South. In an epoch contoured
by revolutions that connected local political struggles to national and
international upheavals, he self-consciously brokered links among Africa, the
Middle East, and America, setting the stage for political, religious, and
cultural reverberations that would continue past his lifetime.
Almost a half-century after his death in 1965, Malcolm X continues to capture
the global political imagination. His denunciations of white racism to packed
Harlem crowds remain searing images that capture a specific style of black
radicalism while simultaneously serving as a template for political revolutions
that go beyond race and established the Third World as a bracingly independent
geopolitical force. His speeches, political activism, and religious beliefs
achieved mythic proportions after his death, spurred by the huge success of The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, written in collaboration with Alex Haley and
published posthumously. It remains a classic memoir of the once wayward youth's
transformation from juvenile delinquent and criminal into the Nation of Islam's
fiery national spokesman and, following a messy divorce from the group that
would ultimately lead to his death, a radical human-rights advocate and
Pan-Africanist who candidly admitted that some of his past views had been
politically shortsighted, even reckless.
Embraced by Black Power activists, hip-hop artists, socialists, and black
nationalists, Malcolm's iconography had been successfully rehabilitated enough
by the 1990s to merit a major motion picture, an official U.S. postage stamp,
and mainstream identification as King's angry but eloquent counterpart.
Recognition came at a high cost. Despite a plethora of popular and scholarly
works—on Malcolm's political and religious views, his life as hipster and
hustler, his embrace of Pan-African impulses, his break with the Nation of
Islam—a definitive scholarly biography illuminating his singular importance as
a dominant 20th-century historical figure remained absent. For personal,
financial, and political reasons, his widow and subsequently his estate
restricted access to important archival material until 2008. His former
associates were loath to give interviews, and the Nation of Islam remained
mostly silent about the circumstances surrounding his death. The FBI and the
New York City Police Department closed off thousands of pages of surveillance
and wiretapping records. Then too, the success of the Autobiography as a
literary memoir narrowed the opening for a scholarly biography.
Historical scholarship has focused on Malcolm's words of fire, depicting him
more as a brilliant speaker than a community organizer. His supple intellect,
burgeoning political ambitions, and organizing prowess have garnered far less
attention. As have details of his private life. And no single volume has
attempted to craft a cohesive portrait that stands outside the Autobiography's
considerable shadow. In that celebrated book, Malcolm X outlined his views on
the importance of producing an accurate history: "I've had enough of somebody
else's propaganda," he proclaimed.
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking), by Manning Marable, a historian at
Columbia University who died just days before publication of what is clearly
his life's work, achieves the rare feat of rescuing a man from his own
mythology with deep archival research and brilliant insight. Marable's untimely
death adds a layer of poignancy to a biography that will stand as the most
authoritative account of Malcolm's life that will be written for a long time.
Marable emerged as one of the leading scholars of black Marxism and radicalism
in the early 1980s. The founding director of Columbia's Institute for Research
in African American Studies and a prolific scholar, his work charted the
black-freedom movement's domestic and global reverberations. In books like
Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America,
1945-1990 (second edition, University Press of Mississippi, 1991), African and
Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to the Granada Revolution (Verso, 1987),
and The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in America (Basic Books,
2002), he deftly explored the way postwar black radicals helped transform
American democracy in the service of a human-rights movement that transcended
borders and boundaries.
His commitment to black political empowerment went beyond the confines of
academe, however, as he established an international network of contacts with
activists and scholars throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and the larger Third
World. Building enduring intellectual and institutional links between Harlem
and Columbia—a hard-fought achievement in an Ivy League institution that has at
times had a fraught relationship with the historically black neighborhood—he
was the rare public intellectual willing to speak truth to power while using
scholarship to transform society.
In Malcolm X, Marable found a perfect subject, one whose uncanny ability to
reinvent himself during his prematurely short life and truncated public career
touched upon themes of black political self-determination, economic justice,
internationalism, and radical democracy represented in the scholar's own
intellectual corpus.
Marable's subtitle, A Life of Reinvention, succinctly captures his book's
larger effort to recast the political and personal life of the Black Power icon
in both subtle and surprising ways. The Malcolm X revealed in these pages is at
once a larger-than-life figure and a scaled-down, even frail human being.
Marable refuses to shy away from Malcolm's flaws, candidly discussing his
sexism, errors in political and personal judgment, and occasional anti-Semitic
utterances. Suggestions, albeit based on circumstantial evidence, that Malcolm
may have engaged in homosexual encounters during his time as a hustler promise
to unleash renewed controversy about the identity of a man who adopted almost a
dozen different names.
For scholars, if not the general public, Marable's Malcolm X now joins the
Autobiography as an indispensable resource in comprehending Malcolm's
complicated life. It not only "illustrates that many elements of Detroit Red's
narrative are fictive," as Marable notes, referring to an early alias. More
important, the book also offers the first accurate and in-depth chronology of a
turbulent journey from criminal to icon. It shows us a man possessed of an
uncanny ability both to absorb and project the sights and sounds of his
surroundings, an aptitude that helped him convey a political and personal
sincerity that has made him, till this day, perhaps the single most authentic
leader that the black working class has produced.
Portions of the biography questioning Malcolm's sexuality and alleging an
extramarital affair by his wife have already elicited controversy, including at
least one critical review attacking Marable's research methods. Years in the
making, Malcolm X is a thoroughly researched biography, mining a rich archive
of primary sources (including many never accessed before) and collecting oral
histories from Malcolm's associates and Nation of Islam officials (most notably
Louis Farrakhan). Marable's discussion of Malcolm's at-times strained marriage
relies on such oral histories and on personal correspondence from Malcolm to
Elijah Muhammad, his mentor and the Nation's spiritual leader, which offer
substantive evidence of a troubled union. That's also the kind of material
undoubtedly painful for surviving family members. The even more controversial
assertion that Malcolm may have participated in a homosexual business
relationship with a white man who served as his sometimes benefactor rests on
more slender evidence, which the author himself describes as "circumstantial."
But such instances of interpretive overreach are scarce.
Racial politics formed part of Malcolm Little's birthright, an inheritance from
his parents, Earl and Louise Little, two politically courageous supporters of
Marcus Garvey—or, depending on your perspective, ill-fated pioneers of black
nationalism—in the distant outpost of Omaha, Neb., where Malcolm was born on
May 19, 1925. While Malcolm was still young, the family moved to Lansing, Mich.
His was a difficult childhood, plagued by bouts of domestic violence,
harassment from the local Klan, and Earl's gruesomely suspicious death (he was
cut nearly in two by what white authorities claimed was a streetcar accident
and Malcolm surmised was part of a lynching). Earl Little's death shattered his
surviving family, hurling them into an emotionally fatiguing battle with state
relief agencies that found the young Malcolm relying on foster care and
eventually triggered Louise's mental breakdown and institutionalization. By
1941, Malcolm had moved to Boston to live with his older half-sister Ella. It
was here that Malcolm Little first reinvented himself as a small-time hood
whose crimes were at least partially inspired by Ella's own extralegal
activities in pursuit of a middle-class lifestyle.
Marable deconstructs the the Legend of Detroit Red outlined in the
Autobiography, finding that Malcolm purposely exaggerated his criminal exploits
as a way of obscuring painful and embarrassing memories and of emphasizing the
importance of the Nation of Islam in his eventual transformation. Far from
being aligned with major gangsters, in this period Malcolm alternated between
part-time legal employment like selling food on railroads (where he was known
as Sandwich Red), dealing small amounts of marijuana to jazz musicians, and
engaging in largely amateurish holdups, at least one of which ended in an early
arrest. Successfully evading the draft by feigning mental illness, Malcolm
engaged in escalating drug abuse and petty crime that ended abruptly shortly
after World War II. Arrested in 1946 for a series of burglaries, fooled by
false promises of leniency, he turned in his whole crew. The interracial makeup
of the burglary ring, which included Malcolm's white girlfriend, inspired a
harsh sentence of eight to 10 years.
Within the walls of Norfolk Prison Colony, in Massachusetts, Malcolm Little
would reinvent himself again. Through letters from his brother Reginald, he was
first introduced to the Nation of Islam, a religious nationalist sect whose
emphasis on pride, self-respect, and discipline echoed his father's distant
Garveyite preaching. Newly energized and clean and sober, Malcolm dove into a
meticulous study of religion, history, and philosophy. Paroled in 1952, he
quickly became a full-time Nation of Islam minister. Whereas Garvey resurrected
ancient African kingdoms as proof of black nobility and self-respect, the
Nation of Islam touted religious prophesy through an imaginative blend of
Islam, black nationalism, and religious mythology that identified whites as
"devils" and predicted America's destruction even as it embraced a conservative
economic vision of black capitalism.
Reborn as Malcolm X, a surname that reflected black people's loss of identity
in America's racial wilderness, the former Detroit Red now embraced personal
self-discipline and an ascetic lifestyle. "The trickster disappeared," writes
Marable, "leaving the willful challenger to authority." The biography weaves in
new details to flesh out the narrative of Malcolm's becoming a minister and his
rise to power within the Nation of Islam. He was an indefatigable organizer,
whose remarkable ability to inspire new converts and recruits helped propel the
Nation's tiny infrastructure into a formidable group with global ambitions.
But tensions cropped up early. One of the new biography's greatest strengths is
in shaping a nuanced portrait of postwar Harlem as a city within a city,
teeming with competing political, religious, and labor groups, self-appointed
leaders, and deteriorating economic conditions, which helped the Nation of
Islam tout itself as a haven for black men and women. Malcolm's extraordinary
talent for "fishing" for new recruits outside of his fast-growing Harlem Temple
No. 7 and his ability to successfully establish new temples in the North,
South, and the West Coast between 1952 and 1962 marked him as Elijah Muhammad's
most indispensable minister. It also made him enemies within the organization,
especially among those connected by blood or marriage to Muhammad. Ultimately,
even Malcolm's handpicked protégés would side against him in the aftermath of
his split from the group, unexpected circumstances that he found bitterly
disappointing.
According to Marable, Malcolm's poor choice of political allies within the
Nation extended to his personal life and the fateful decision in 1958 to marry
Betty Sanders, later renamed Betty Shabazz. In contrast to the loving, dutiful
wife characterized in the Autobiography and 1992 film, Betty is depicted here
as a stubborn, willful spouse who challenged Malcolm's patriarchal views of
marriage and even engaged in an extramarital affair with one of his closest
lieutenants—revelations that have understandably upset the Shabazz family. The
couple endured rather than enjoyed each other's company over the course of a
seven-year marriage, and Malcolm went so far as complaining to Muhammad in
private correspondence of their sex life: "At a time when I was going all out
to keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that we were incompatible
sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction. From then on, try
as I may, I began to become very cool toward her."
That quote, taken from a March 1959 letter barely a year after their wedding,
powerfully illustrates that Malcolm's marriage to Betty was tense from almost
the beginning; tensions were exacerbated by periods of prolonged absence,
financial stress, and harassment from law enforcement and later the Nation of
Islam. Despite sustained analysis of his personal life, the complex
psychological reasons behind Malcolm's reticence toward emotional intimacy with
Betty remain elusive, buried, it seems, beneath a disciplined exterior that
Marable seems incapable of completely shattering. He makes an intriguing
suggestion that Malcolm's past sexual history with prostitutes and fast women
created a kind of emotional trauma that rendered him incapable of properly
addressing Betty's "emotional and sexual needs"; it's only a hint, and it
deserves more exploration.
All of the forces that had built Malcolm X seemed to speed up in the 1960s.
Joint surveillance from the New York Police Department's Bureau of Special
Services unit and the FBI added to Malcolm's increasingly complicated life, one
that by 1960 included extensive speeches on the college lecture circuit, a
popularity spurred by the previous year's documentary The Hate That Hate
Produced, narrated by Mike Wallace. The film was dedicated more to
sensationalism than journalism and characterized the Nation of Islam as akin to
the Ku Klux Klan, but it cast Malcolm into the public eye.
Politics increasingly animated Malcolm's public speeches and organizing
energies, a situation that created anxiety within the upper reaches of the
Nation. His national notoriety announced Black Muslims as a kind of ghoulish
counterpart to King and the Southern civil-rights movement's nonviolent
demonstrations—even though Muhammad strictly forbade his group from engaging in
secular political activity. Moreover, both Malcolm and Muhammad agreed that the
Nation should be part of a global community of Islam, but the Messenger, as
Muhammad was known, sought recognition from orthodox Muslims in the Middle East
to reinforce his standing at home, while Malcolm hoped that the entire group
might join in a secular civil-rights movement.
While Marable shows that the Nation's internal decision-making process,
including formalizing a nonaggression pact with the American Nazi Party and
George Lincoln Rockwell, pained Malcolm, his portrait does not shy away from
Malcolm's own culpability in constructing an elaborate and eventually deadly
cult of personality around the Messenger that brooked no internal criticism and
meted out violence to dissenters. By the early 1960s, the Fruit of Islam had
emerged as a powerful arbiter of physical violence within the Nation, a group
implicitly sanctioned by Malcolm that would emerge as a deadly adversary after
his break from the Nation.
Malcolm's circle was changing. Against the backdrop of the civil-rights
movement, his radical call for black political self-determination struck a
chord in urban black militants discontented with nonviolence yet skeptical of
Muhammad's claim to divinity. A diverse network of activists, entertainers, and
celebrities like Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee, and elected leaders
like Adam Clayton Powell Jr., formed alliances with Malcolm. His secular
ambitions found him balancing on an increasingly perilous tightrope: implicitly
sponsoring the kind of robust political activity Muhammad considered taboo
while maintaining a public, almost fawning fealty to a religious sect he was
intellectually outgrowing. Zesty debates with the nonviolent guru Bayard
Rustin, the writer James Baldwin, and the leader of the Congress of Racial
Equality, James L. Farmer Jr., quickly turned into more-intimate friendships, a
pattern replicated with journalists like Louis Lomax and Alex Haley.
Collectively, such people first challenged and then helped propel Malcolm into
a more activist posture. "He seemed more than ever of two minds" during the
early years of the Kennedy administration, Marable writes, "pulled both by his
loyalty to Muhammad and by a need to engage in the struggle."
In 1963, the year that civil-rights demonstrations in Birmingham and the March
on Washington captured the world's collective imagination—and the Nation of
Islam was quashing scandalous accusations regarding the Messenger's sexual
misconduct—Malcolm X became the Nation's national minister. On November 10, he
delivered his famous Message to the Grassroots, brandishing revolution as the
antidote to racial oppression to sympathetic militants in Detroit who imagined
him the leader of an as-yet-unnamed movement that would both parallel and
intersect the civil-rights struggle.
Throughout the year, Malcolm had blasted President Kennedy's reluctance to
defend black citizenship in the face of German shepherds and fire hoses in
Alabama, even as he recoiled at King's use of children in demonstrations that
erupted into violence. Unwisely, in December, he continued his blistering
criticism, in flagrant violation of Muhammad's explicit orders to remain
silent. Malcolm's "chickens coming home to roost" sound bite in response to a
reporter's question about Kennedy's death sought to illustrate the boomerang
effect of American violence, but quickly became engulfed in conjecture as to
whether the Nation rejoiced in the death of the president. Malcolm's enemies in
the Nation pounced, prodding Muhammad to discipline his wayward prodigy. What
began as a three-month suspension turned into an organizational rout and
whispers of assassination plots.
Banished from the Nation, Malcolm reinvented himself once again, this time as
an independent, radical political activist and religious apostate. Marable's
biography offers the most detailed examination yet of the final, exhilaratingly
frenetic year of Malcolm's life: one in which he founded two short-lived
religious and political organizations; spent 24 weeks in Africa; reimagined his
understanding of revolution; embraced orthodox Sunni Islam; and networked with
African and Middle-Eastern rulers in an effort to leverage revolutionary
political struggles back home.
Shortly after his departure from the Nation, Malcolm delivered his famous "The
Ballot or the Bullet" speech, in which he touted a vision of radical democracy.
But he remained an unapologetic political combatant, offering the ballot as a
rapprochement with politics, while reminding listeners that the bullet might
well remain the ultimate arbiter of America's historical racial divide. The
speech also emphasized his longstanding belief in racial solidarity and
united-front politics, sentiments often obscured by impassioned polemics,
Marable shows us.
Malcolm's hajj to the holy city of Mecca that April culminated in another
transformation: The sectarian religious warrior now embraced a universal vision
of Islam that transcended race, geography, and ideology in favor of what
Marable calls a new "role as a kind of evangelist," capable of fusing
revolutionary politics and religion as part of a global human-rights effort.
Malcolm's travel diaries, revealed for the first time in this biography,
reflect the contemplative thoughts of a man of war who had at last found peace.
"There is no greater serenity of mind," he wrote, "than when one can shut the
hectic noise and pace of the materialistic outside world, and seek inner peace
within oneself." Africa also offered festivities, including meetings with
Nigeria's Azikiwe and Ghana's Nkrumah, before returning home for a scarcely
two-month effort to put together the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a
secular attempt to expand support beyond disgruntled Muslims and loyalists who
formed Malcolm's relatively small political base.
By July he was off again for an extended stay in Africa, where he became
intimately acquainted with the strengths and limitations of Pan-African
politics, found small joys in sightseeing and drinking alcohol for the first
time in many years, and basked in the luxurious hospitality of being recognized
as an official guest of state in many countries. That summer and fall, he
experienced a sense of freedom, energy, and spiritual renewal that made this
period one of the happiest in his life. Collectively, Malcolm's three trips to
Africa and the Middle East represent a stunning level of international
engagement that Marable argues produced tangible religious and political
alliances that disturbed the State Department and outraged Nation of Islam
officials. Politically, these trips provided a blueprint for a subsequent
generation of radical activists, most notably Stokely Carmichael, who would
(sometimes consciously) retrace Malcolm's itinerary, en route to fashioning
their own global political identities.
Malcolm returned to the States under the threat of a death sentence by the
Nation. Marable painstakingly dissects Malcolm's February 21, 1965,
assassination, arguing that two of the three convicted assassins were absent
from the Audubon Ballroom at the time of the murder and making a compelling and
detailed case for the ways in which the New York police's botched investigation
allowed four guilty conspirators (including Malcolm's main shooter) to go free.
The person Marable names as the alleged assassin currently lives in Newark and
denies any involvement in Malcolm's death. Marable accessed thousands of new
FBI, CIA, and other surveillance and informant files under the Freedom of
Information Act, but the issue will remain open until all the relevant files
have been found and released.
Marable takes pains to illustrate that the iconography in Haley's Autobiography
at times presumptuously crafted an image of Malcolm in line with Haley's own
political views as a liberal Republican—and one apt to sell commercially. The
Autobiography sanitized Malcolm's radical politics by tacking on an
introduction by a New York Times writer and an epilogue by Haley himself, even
as it excised three chapters originally designed to showcase Malcolm's new
political philosophy.
A self-made political leader, Malcolm "keenly felt, and expressed, the varied
emotions and frustrations of the black poor and working class," Marable reminds
us. In that he became the avatar of not only a domestic movement for racial
justice, but a symbol of an international human-rights movement, one that
crossed religious and racial boundaries and transcended geographical and
ideological restrictions. Yet for all of his efforts at reinvention, Malcolm X
remained at his core "a black man, a person of African descent who happened to
be a United States citizen."
One of the many pleasures of Marable's Malcolm X is its ability to reveal the
sights and sounds of black America's postwar freedom surge, a time marked by
the exhilarating sounds of bebop, the internal migration of rural Southern
blacks to the urban North, and escalating racial protest against Jim Crow.
Tellingly, jazz musicians and entertainers were attracted to Malcolm and the
Nation of Islam. Malcolm's own powerful rhetoric contained jazz flourishes and
clipped, at times improvised, passages that attested to his time around
musicians as a young man.
More than 45 years after his death, we now have a historical portrait of
Malcolm X that goes beyond literary clichés and autobiographical fictions to
reveal an all-too human man beset by personal trials and political tribulations
that would have felled the less courageous. Stripped from the cocoon of his
posthumous aura of invincibility, Malcolm X emerges from these pages an
endlessly fascinating and protean figure whose shortcomings make his political
accomplishments all the more remarkable. Against the backdrop of private
disappointments and embarrassingly public betrayals, Marable reminds us that
Malcolm X still managed to transform "the discourse and politics of race
internationally," a final enduring reinvention that continues long after his
death.
Original Page:
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