The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

The lynching of Will Brown was witnessed by one fourteen-year-old who would grow up to become a leading Hollywood actor, portraying quiet, “quintessentially American heroes.” His movie roles included Young Mr. Lincoln, as well as the juror who saves a Latino man from an all-white jury’s death sentence in Twelve Angry Men. Henry Fonda

Wow, I did not know that. I bet this horrific experience inspired Henry Fonda to act in The Oxbow Incident, a film about another totally unjustified lynching.

A key mythology supporting this conclusion held that the “white race” was created some 6,600 years ago by a black scientist named Yacub, who anointed these Caucasians as a “race of devils.”

Another of his exotic teachings had a heavily armed “Mother Ship,” manned supposedly by Japanese, circling the earth constantly.

As the public face of the nation of Islam, Malcolm occasionally had to explain the handiwork of the Yacub myth and the voyaging of the Mother Ship. As an organizer, he much preferred to grapple with the “white devil” and turn his mind to the uplift of his Muslim converts and the Negro race by extension.

Many a potential Harlem recruit bolted as soon as they caught wind of the inarticulate Elijah Muhammad, to say nothing of the Yacub myth, the Mother Ship “nonsense,” and the straight-faced claims that Master Fard Muhammad was Allah, the flesh-and-blood God of the universe.

Having fled a bare-knuckled, violent racism in the South that was unimaginable in New England, blacks were brimming with the migrant’s sense of optimism in their adopted city, with its better-paying jobs and desegregated schools.

Our goal has always been the same. The approaches are different . . . it is anybody’s guess which of the “extremes” in approach to the black man’s problem might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first—nonviolent Dr. King or so-called violent me.

Malcolm had a way of disparaging whites in the vilest manner and yet not provoking individual reporters into taking it personally. He was effective at assuaging the feelings of white reporters in attendance—in fact, some journalists noted in their stories that the fire-breathing national spokesman for the Black Muslims had shown tolerance “of his white interviewers.”

as mentioned earlier, Malcolm’s preaching had trod lightly around such unorthodox NOI beliefs as the Mother Ship and Yacub. Now, with the help of Wallace Muhammad, he had freed himself from its central pillar—its contention that one man, Fard Muhammad, was Allah and another man, Elijah Muhammad, was his Messenger.

“Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it,” Malcolm wrote after his pilgrimage.

“I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”

This religion recognizes all men as brothers. It accepts all human beings as equals before God, and as equal members in the Human Family of Mankind.

Islam

“Now, I am well aware of what I’m setting in motion by what I’m saying up here tonight. I’m well aware. But I have never said or done anything in my life that I wasn’t prepared to suffer the consequences for.”

Malcolm, the former minister of the highly disciplined, quasimilitary NOI, was discovering, not unlike General Dwight D. Eisenhower upon entering politics, that his suggestions to the staff no longer constituted commands.

Betty broke down, weeping uncontrollably as her role as nurse lost out to wife, then wife to widow.

At its core, Malcolm’s message spoke to people of every rank: white people are not superior, and black people are not inferior.

From 1952 until 1963 over one million American Blacks have accepted Elijah’s distorted version of Islam.

Elijah Muhammad allowed himself to become insanely jealous of my own popularity which went even beyond his own followers and into the non-Muslim community, while his own prestige and influence was limited largely among his immediate followers. While I was still in the movement and blind to his faults by my own uncompromising faith in him,

How could a man of your spirit, intellect and worldwide outlook fail to see in Islam its main characteristic, from its earliest days, as a message that confirms beyond doubt the ethnological oneness and quality of all races, thus striking at the very root of the monstrosity of discrimination.

Where the women are encouraged to get education and play a more active role in the all-around affairs of the community and the country the entire people are more active, more enlightened and more progressive.

old African proverb states: “Educate a man and you educate an individual; educate a woman and you educate an entire family.”