The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

King offered racists the other cheek, Malcolm the back of his hand.

After the vigilantes rode away, the pregnant mother of three did not consider calling police to be a viable option because Negroes understood that city officials generally approved of such Klan activity.

Under this uniquely American cloud of racial dread, the Reverend Earl Little and his pregnant wife, Louise—the parents of daughter Hilda and sons Wilfred and Philbert—awaited the birth of their fourth child.

Having fought for democracy in Europe, where they were treated more equally, Negro soldiers pushed for their civil rights at home, thereby rocking the prewar status quo.

Grisly photographs of Brown’s body roasting on the pyre were sold as postcards at the time.

In 1915, however, the white knights were widely introduced to popular culture—and eventually reintroduced to real life—by director D. W. Griffith’s movie The Birth of a Nation.

The reborn Klan became one of the most effective groups at influencing postwar American policy, campaigning vigorously, for example, for Prohibition and against non-Anglo immigration from Europe.

just as abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass had argued for blacks to fight during the Civil War, Du Bois urged them to join the ranks of Wilson’s racially segregated army and drew sharp personal criticism for his support.

Functionally, the “bright skin” Negro class screened out darker members of the race from prime enrollment at historically black colleges and universities, banning them altogether from certain Greek fraternities and sororities, and, for the most part excluding non-mixed blacks from leadership roles in clubs and secret societies and even as pastors and ranking officials in “high-toned” black Protestant churches.

Unlike Du Bois, who considered himself a mulatto, Marcus Garvey was dark as a Senegalese and proud of it.

almost every Negro leader of consequence, some of them Garvey opponents, had been spied upon—and, in some cases, harassed openly by the federal government.

“Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.”

One Garvey group lesson stressed that Negroes, as axiomatic as it may sound today, had five fingers on their hands and a brain in their heads like everyone else, and that it was entirely up to each Negro personally to learn and achieve—despite the white obstacles society placed in their paths.

With slave ancestors arriving in chains in 1619, a year before the Mayflower, American-born Negroes, although disenfranchised in every way, felt fully vested—starting with some 250-plus years of uncompensated labor.

She didn’t accept the term ‘colored’; she said we are black people; she never allowed us to accept the term ‘Negro.’

“They would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, the same way people would talk freely in front of a pet canary. They would talk about me, or about ‘niggers,’ as though I wasn’t there, as if I wouldn’t understand what the word meant. A hundred times a day, they used the word ‘nigger.’ I suppose that in their own minds, they meant no harm, in fact, they probably meant well.”

“almost everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way to forget what they had to do to survive.

we were huddled in there, bonded together in seeking security and warmth, and comfort from each other, and we didn’t know it.

All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead black victims of the wh...

In contrast to American prisons today, about 85 percent of Charlestown inmates in the 1940s were white.

And thus the double apostate set to mixing and matching what he considered sound and unpracticed principles of Islam with those of Christianity in order to design a hybrid “religion of the black man” in America.

Marcus Garvey was cast as “John the Baptist,” paving the way for Prophet Drew Ali’s new, domestic brand of Islam.

And lifting from secret Masonic orders that had borrowed from Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, the prophet instructed his followers to drop their “slave” surnames and substitute “El” or “Bey.”

Other police records, including fingerprints, appear to confirm that the man with the aliases “W. D. Fard” and “Fard Muhammad,” was, in fact, a white New Zealander with a criminal record, a man who had served time in San Quentin for selling narcotics.

several sects have persisted well into the twenty-first century, chanting their scriptures on Manhattan streets and by light of the menorah on low-budget, local cable television broadcasts.

While the Black Muslim sects strike some outsiders as fanciful and irrational on the surface, their impact upon their supplicants and their broader racial group has been noteworthy.

Negroes encountering Black Muslims in the community were silently impressed by their discipline, their manliness, and their sober, dignified carriage, which contrasted with the gaudiness of the crackling ghetto streets around them.

So from early on, the self-respecting black Islamists were keen to display a tight-knit unity against white oppression, however minuscule their actual numbers.

Already, it was an inside secret that Elijah Muhammad played loose with his own strict code of conduct. Rumored occasionally to eat bacon for breakfast, the Messenger of Allah was reliably—although not openly—known to indulge in other forbidden pleasures of the flesh, activities that got ordinary members expelled.

federally subsidized housing generated equity wealth and spawned a new generation of white middle-class Americans.

The U.S. government essentially ran a two-tier program, encouraging a permanent Negro underclass of renters while operating the FHA-backed suburban home ownership program to stimulate a dramatic growth of the white middle class.

Malcolm was a frequenter of the nearby Lincoln Dairy, where he indulged his great passion for ice cream,

Malcolm emphasized furthermore that if a Muslim adhered strictly to the teachings and discipline of the sect, Allah would not allow anyone, or anything—not even a weapon—to harm the believer.

To be accepted as a member and be given X as a surname, an applicant had to submit an exactingly close handwritten copy of a headquarters form letter.

Despite being born in Georgia, as was Reverend King, Elijah Muhammad and his Chicago-based Muslims were considered creatures of the North.

Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregated schools had thrown the Muslims’ twenty-three-year-old demand for a separate state into disarray. The decision had placed the impossible dream of integration on the radar as achievable.

On election day, Negroes flocked to the polls and voted overwhelmingly for the junior senator from Massachusetts. In the previous presidential election, in 1956, about 60 percent of their vote had gone to the incumbent Republican, Dwight Eisenhower. This time, 70 percent of Negroes voted for Senator Kennedy—a decisive margin in five states—and helped provide him the slimmest popular vote margin of any president in the twentieth century: 118,000 votes out of more than 68 million cast, a winning margin of 0.17 percent.

Despite Malcolm’s aggressive nationwide promotion of “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad” as the enfant terrible of Negro liberation, it was Reverend King who caught the fancy of the Negro masses.

Unlike the civil rights movement, the Black Muslim doctrine was aimed not at whites, but at Negroes themselves.

The Klan of the Garvey era of the 1920s was indeed a mainstream, white Protestant organization, whose multimillion membership excluded Italians, Jews, Irish Catholics, and other new immigrants. Its ranks included elected officials, public and private power brokers, and law enforcement officers.

In the nearly four decades since Garvey’s sit-down with the assistant imperial wizard, the Klan had devolved into a much smaller racist, terror group on the margins of mainstream society.

The Messenger’s overture to the Klan began to tug at the cult leader’s hold over Malcolm, like a crowbar prying loose a nail driven deep. It would prove to be a major turning point in the relationship between the two strong men,

“The thing you have to understand about those of us in the Black Muslims movement was that all of us believed 100 percent in the divinity of Elijah Muhammad,” Malcolm would say in 1965. “We actually believed that God, in Detroit by the way, had taught him.”

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The Baptist minister presided at the head of a mass Negro movement that, despite its ragtag spontaneity, rolled through the South like a conventional army. His civil rights soldiers marched against the superstructure of racial segregation that rested on a foundation of white supremacy, three centuries old backed up by armed might and an entrenched Southern network of postslavery Jim Crow laws.

Segregation, Malcolm maintained, was not ordained by God but created by white men.

Under the reins of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm represented a vanguard religious sect that, instead of changing white folks’ minds, concentrated on changing Negroes’ minds foremost about themselves.

As the civil rights movement attracted national media attention in Southern cities, such as Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, and Albany, Georgia, the Muslims manned their solitary mosques in the dingy precincts of Harlem, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, and Watts.

King himself had emerged as a young minister during the Eisenhower years as a challenge to the old order. He was finally expelled from the prestigious National Baptist Convention in 1961 over the issue of civil disobedience.

The few Negro reporters in mainstream daily journalism, when allowing themselves a preference, tilted toward Reverend King. Almost to the man they considered the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X, an embarrassment to the race.

“The South to blacks means south of Canada.”