Malcolm X: a Life of Reinvention
by Manning Marable, newstatesman.com
May 12th 2011
The man, the legend
In the spring of 1965, Martin Luther King led a series of marches across
Alabama to support black voting rights. His first attempt to complete the
planned itinerary from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, came to a halt
after police fired tear gas at the demonstrators and assaulted them with billy
clubs. Bombs were then discovered at a black church, a funeral parlour and a
prominent lawyer's home. Only at the third attempt did the marchers reach their
destination: the steps of the capitol, where Governor George Wallace had
declared in his inauguration speech, just two years earlier, "Segregation
today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
By the concluding rally on 28 March, the crowd had swollen to nearly 25,000 men
and women, young and old. As army helicopters hovered above, King stepped on to
the podium facing the square and described their journey as one of the greatest
marches in the history of America. Wallace refused to meet a delegation of
protesters' representatives, but King knew he had scored a profound victory -
the eyes of the world were upon them.
Their rough treatment at the hands of the state and racist groups including the
Ku Klux Klan had shattered what little remained of the fantasy of a happy,
patrician South populated by noble white people and submissive Uncle Toms.
Yet, for all the symbolic power that the march lent the struggle against racial
segregation in America, the aggressive reaction which those who took part
experienced on the road also helped fan the flames of a more militant rhetoric
that was sweeping through the black civil rights movement. It was a rhetoric
that promoted separation, not integration; it advocated armed self-defence over
non-violence. Looking back, King wrote: "The paths of Negro-white unity that
had been converging crossed at Selma and, like a giant X, began to diverge."
That X found its most potent expression in the person of a former petty
criminal who had embraced the Nation of Islam (NOI), then an obscure black
nationalist religious sect, while serving a prison sentence for burglary.
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on 19 May 1925 to parents
committed to Marcus Garvey's vision of pan-Africanism. During the Great
Depression, his father, Earl, had moved the family from town to town, in part
to escape persecution by white supremacist groups, but also to further the
cause of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Earl's sudden death
condemned the Littles to poverty; his once-proud wife Louise went insane as she
battled the social services to keep her children together. In 1939, she was
admitted to Kalamazoo State Hospital. Malcolm would look back on the
disintegration of his family with bitterness, reserving most scorn for the
judge who had handled their case: "A white man in charge of a black man's
children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery."
Much of this will be familiar to younger readers from Spike Lee's 1992 film
Malcolm X and its enduringly popular primary source, The Autobiography of
Malcolm X, which its co-writer Alex Haley completed after the subject's
assassination in 1965. By the end of the 1960s, Malcolm's disciples had
elevated him to what Manning Marable, in this weighty biography, calls "secular
sainthood"; in death, his image was quickly refashioned to "embody the very
ideal of blackness for an entire generation". Those who lived through the civil
rights crisis in America, however, will remember a far more complex figure who
was equally loathed and respected, admired and feared. His transfiguration into
an icon distorted the harsh realities of his life while ensuring his
immortality as myth.
That myth goes as follows: in the 1940s, Malcolm, then known as Detroit Red,
makes a name for himself as a flashy, zoot-suited hoodlum; he finds religion
and educates himself; by the early 1960s, he is a minister and chief recruiter
for the NOI, which views white people as "devils"; his popularity and
increasing influence in the field of black rights incite the envy of rivals
within the sect, who successfully press for his banishment after he celebrates
the death of John F Kennedy in a speech; he founds a more inclusive group
called the Organisation of Afro-American Unity and embraces Sunni Islam after
making the haj in 1964; he is murdered in front of his wife and children at a
time when his ideological agenda - now anti-racist and free from the dogma of
the NOI - is at its most fluid and uncertain.
This story, which suggests that Malcolm's trajectory eventually led him to the
kind of integrationism advocated by King, evades a difficult truth: his
politics always tended towards more reactionary and violent modes of dissent.
But Marable, who died shortly before the publication of A Life of Reinvention,
resists the temptation of hagiography and fills in the gaps left by previous
books. Where the autobiography, carefully organised by the NOI-sceptic Haley,
presents an idealised vision of a man's growth as a thinker, Marable gives us
Malcolm in all his self-contradiction and self-doubt. "No single identity ever
captured him fully," he writes. By refusing to pin him down, he offers glimpses
of the human being behind the legend. l
Yo Zushi works for the New Statesman
Malcolm X: a Life of Reinvention
Manning Marable
Allen Lane, 608pp, £30
Original Page:
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/05/malcolm-rights-black-white
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