The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

At the time, Payne was an editor at Newsday, a daily newspaper on Long Island. He had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 as part of a reporting team investigating the international flow of heroin from the poppy fields of Turkey, through the French connection, and into the veins of New York drug addicts. He was renowned for his investigative persistence and his skill in obtaining the truth from reluctant sources. As he often told his three children—Jamal, Haile, and myself—he could not abide the phrase “We may never know.”

“Our attitude made a difference in how they dealt with us compared to some of the others [Negroes],” said Wilfred. “When white people find out that you don’t have that inferiority complex, they deal with you at that level; it makes a difference. A lot of our problems we bring on ourselves by our own inferiority feelings sometimes. If you acted like you were inferior, that’s the way they related to you. If you didn’t act like you were inferior, then they would be forced to treat you as an equal. And this is the way we were.” 34

Down through the ages, anthropologists note among humankind of all continents what amounts to a spiritual appetite that is fed by nascent religions served up by a wide range of local idealists, zealots, and dreamers, more than a few of whom were considered quite bizarre in their day. These spiritualists, history instructs, usually proclaim an innate power to influence supernatural forces and thus promote themselves as sacerdotal rainmakers who can singularly petition the gods to relieve their besieged people of some earthly suffering, spare them dangers seen and unseen, and ultimately grant believers a purposeful life of joy and gladness. Along

Upon encountering Islam by whatever means, Drew was soundly impressed with the appeal of the religion, initially. This ancient Middle Eastern religion attracted the North Carolinian with not only its strict moral discipline but also the modest way its worshippers dressed and the proud and sober manner in which they carried themselves. After reportedly coming under the influence of Muslim teachers, Drew came to view Islam as “the only instrument for Negro unity and advancement.” 7 Lacking knowledge of the Arabic language as well as grounding in Muslim orthodoxy, he examined its dogma as best he could by probing the international faith with a keen eye out for remedies that would help Negroes relieve the sociopolitical pain and suffering they endured early in the twentieth century as an oppressed people in the United States. The young black supplicant found no such balm in orthodox Islam. Also, he reasoned that Arabic dogma would be a tough sell to a generation of Negroes just out of slavery and barely literate in English. Most troubling of all, the Arab Muslims in the Middle East had a long and barbaric history of enslaving sub-Saharan Africans—indeed, they dominated this ruthless human trade in Morocco and Egypt. Additionally, the Moors were known to widely practice color-caste discrimination among themselves.

Encouraged by his family, Malcolm wrote directly to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who responded with a letter welcoming him to “the true knowledge” and expanding on the information Malcolm’s family had sent. Every day, Malcolm wrote letters—to his siblings, to Elijah, and to government officials—but he soon became frustrated by what he could not express on the written page. “My reading had my mind like steam under pressure. Some way, I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face.” While continuing to write letters, he joined the prison’s weekly debate team and cultivated world-class polemical skills during face-offs in Norfolk prison with debating teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, and Harvard. These verbal calisthenics with Ivy League wordsmiths pumped up Malcolm’s dialectical prowess as a fierce and fearsome debater, a skill that would power his meteoric rise as a Muslim advocate in Harlem, New England, and the rest of the United States—and eventually the world—while also incurring envy within the Nation of Islam. “Debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been,” he later wrote.

During Malcolm’s own interview, which he gave as the NOI’s newly anointed national spokesman, agreeing with the “evil by nature” charge, he stated that there was no “historic example” of Caucasians ever doing anything other than evil toward blacks. This counterrejection of whites, he asserted, was also the Black Muslim method of reversing Negroes’ ingrained sense of racial inferiority and self-loathing.

“You’ve heard that saying, ‘no man is a hero to his valet,’” Malcolm wrote in the Autobiography. “Well, those Negroes who waited on wealthy whites hand and foot opened their eyes quicker than most Negroes . . . every Thursday I scheduled my teaching there.”

“Never give meat to a baby; always give them milk, and you’ll never lose them,” Malcolm had advised his brother Philbert on his method of recruiting Muslim followers. “That is the KEY in setting up new temples . . . one of the hindrances of the past in trying to propagate Islam, we over-taught the lost-found, giving them meat that they just could not digest, thereby making many rebellious and go back just because once we got them to open their mouths (minds) we started giving them too heavy a food that they could not digest (see) yet.” 9

As in most Northern cities fielding black migrants, housing remained a pernicious obstacle in the 1950s. Suburban tracts constructed on a vast scale for soldiers returning from World War II—and backed by Federal Housing Administration (FHA) grants—were generally closed to Negro veterans. “Restrictive covenants” limited ownership to whites only, including recent immigrants from Europe. In developments like the 17,000 tract houses of Levittown, built on Long Island between 1947 and 1951, federally subsidized housing generated equity wealth and spawned a new generation of white middle-class Americans. Shut out of Levittown—the prototype for postwar suburbia—and other such developments for decades, Negro veterans were belatedly granted lesser subsidies for scatter-site housing in generally depressed areas. Moreover, the government subsidized public housing for Negroes that were not owner-occupied—like the homes for whites in suburbia—but rented to low-income families in inner-city areas. These federally backed housing projects capped family earning for eligibility at little more than minimum wage. 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 had often proudly boasted that a sure sign of NOI conversion was a black man’s ability to look a white man dead in the eyes without flinching. He had tested the faith of acolytes in Harlem by challenging them to attempt it on the job. Many were surprised and ashamed by their reflexive diverting of their eyes in the presence of white supervisors. “The Messenger had told me if you trust in Allah, the devil can do nothing to you,” said Jeremiah. “He will take the fear [off] of you. I never was afraid of those crackers.” Long before encountering Elijah Muhammad—as a child, in fact—Malcolm had been conditioned by his parents with a fearless sense of racial pride, combined with an assured equanimity.

As always, Malcolm prepped for the opposition. As soon as nonfiction books on black topics were released, he would hit Michaux’s National Memorial Bookstore on 125th Street in Harlem. In addition to treatises on Africa, on Asia, and on religions, he read the works of such writers as James Baldwin, Lerone Bennett, Frantz Fanon, and Kenneth Clark; the historians E. Franklin Frazier and John Hope Franklin; and the autodidactic John Henrik Clarke, his Harlem friend, among others. Malcolm also studied the liberal white social critics who wrote with a practiced disinterestedness, and from a great distance. The emerging black scholars, he found, offered up books and essays seasoned with experience and rich with the passion of the insider.

“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.”