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At the height of its political power, the Klan flexed its muscle when some forty thousand white-robed men and women waved American flags and proudly paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital as onlookers cheered on August 8, 1925—a few months after local KKK vigilantes had terrorized Malcolm’s pregnant mother, Louise.
In due course, Klan officials would claim a statewide tally of forty-five thousand members of every age, gender, and social class, who regularly mounted street demonstrations, weekend parades, and cross-burning ceremonies in open fields.
Like Earl and Louise Little, their light-skinned son Malcolm had to contend with traces of this intragroup, skin-tone bias in dealing with key individuals and organizations throughout his life.
Mulattos or “mixed-race” types—save those secretly “passing” as Caucasians—were accorded the full range of racial suppression reserved for the Negro en masse. They were banned from jobs reserved for whites; segregated under federal, state, and local Jim Crow practices; restricted to inferior education, housing, and public accommodations; barred from major league sports; assigned to all-Negro military units—and more than a few were lynched without regard to their mixed-blood ancestry, straight hair, light-toned skin, or gray-green eyes.
Later on, Du Bois also would be betrayed by Negro leaders and subjected to relentless government pressure for his avowed Marxist beliefs. Stripped of his passport, the brilliant scholar would slip into self-exile during his final days and, at age ninety-five, would die and be buried in 1963 in Accra, as a naturalized citizen of Ghana, twenty-three years after Garvey’s death in 1940 in London.
As their children grew older, however, the European immigrants blended their accents, submerged distinct ethnic traits, and aimed more toward integrating into the social patterns of the domestic white majority. This distancing, which seemed a prerequisite for Americanization, did not go unnoticed by young Malcolm’s family.
“His conflicts with my mother [which often flared into physical violence] were because of her education. She knew grammar and she was emphatic about how she taught us. She didn’t accept the term ‘colored’; she said we are black people; she never allowed us to accept the term ‘Negro.’ My mother was serious, never jovial. She’d always get us to the facts of what we were talking about. She would sing to us: ‘one and one are two . . . two and two are four. . . .’ Then there were French songs she would teach us. My mother was the one who brought knowledge out of us.” 35
NO OTHER GATE ON EARTH SLAMS WITH THE FINALITY OF A prison gate.
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.
“Blacks at that time,” said Chris Alston, “needed something to lift us out of the caretaker mentality. We needed something to tell us that we were somebody important. And there had been a whole period we had been told differently. I saw my first black teacher in Detroit. The Moorish temple hired her.”
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.
This fiery organizer of Negroes, in Hoover’s mind, and increasingly those of local police departments, posed a high threat to stability on urban streets and continued white dominance across the board.
Changing the behavior of the “blue-eyed devils,” Malcolm observed, following his instructions from Elijah Muhammad, was a nonstarter. Instead, Negroes had first to change their minds about white folk altogether. But most important, Malcolm argued that blacks had to change their minds about one another and about themselves. They alone held the key to their upward mobility, he taught repeatedly.
“The dignity that I saw in Malcolm gave me confidence in myself. He instructed me to pray to Allah to remove all fear. His teachings totally removed the fear of the white man from me. For the first time I was proud of being black.” Such dramatic transformation was common among the male recruits.34
If you and I want Heaven, you have to listen to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and come together right now and start to do something for yourself. You’ve got to pool your academic know-how. You’ve got to pool your technical skills. You’ve got to pool your education. You’ve got to pool your finances, your wealth, get up and do something for yourself and your people right now. If you don’t, you’ll never know what Heaven is.2
As many as two thousand paid FBI informers were operating inside the Klan, it later would be revealed.4 This penetration allowed the Bureau to control or influence one of every ten members, or 10 percent of the Ku Klux Klan. This vast government network may well have instigated the Klan’s outreach to the Black Muslims for Hoover’s own ulterior motive, such as the desire to influence or get inside information about the NOI’s plans.
The Klan turned the Kennedy victory into a membership boon: by the time of JFK’s inauguration in January 1961, the KKK had doubled its sworn-in, dues-paying membership, to around twenty thousand, since March of the previous year.
And the Harlem minister strongly dismissed passivity by such civil rights leaders as Reverend King as pure cowardice, stealing every opportunity to rattle the Muslim saber as a Qur’an allowance for self-defense.
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. Thus, as the head of the “only exclusive Negro” organization, and the self-appointed, “Provisional President of Africa,” Garvey considered it fitting to meet with the mainstream Klan—as one head of state with another—at their headquarters in Georgia.
New York City contained a large, sensitive, and highly vocal Jewish population, somewhat entwined with the commerce and education of working-class blacks in Harlem, Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Thus, like politicians, activists, and writers, such as James Baldwin, Malcolm weighed in on the complex relation of Negroes with Jewish landlords, benefactors, shopkeepers, merchants, and schoolteachers. Such criticisms, often in generalized terms, earned him the label “anti-Semitic” in some Jewish quarters.
This stark distinction seemed to puzzle Fellows and the other Klansmen, who nodded quizzically to one another as Malcolm honed more finely the Messenger’s point. The Jim Crow segregation system the Klan was hell-bent on preserving, Malcolm deadpanned, had to date given Negroes the short end of the stick, and often no stick at all. In abandoning their pursuit of integration, Malcolm stated, blacks would need a nest egg so that they could strike out on their own with a separate but appropriate share of the wealth they had helped accumulate in America.
The Klansmen at the kitchen table were all working-class whites with no easy access to the amassed wealth of the South. Yet, they diddled with Elijah Muhammad’s division-of-the-wealth proposition like so many day laborers contemplating the breakup, say, of the United Kingdom. Such geopolitical-economic matters were clearly beyond the grasp of the scrawny, poorly educated Klansmen—as well as the working-class Muslim ministers.
The Klan request embarrassed Malcolm, according to Jeremiah and his wife, and it likely disheartened and shamed him as well. Also, it did not escape Malcolm’s notice that, in contrast to the Christian Reverend King, the Black Muslims drew not a jot of ire from the one white group in America that was universally despised as devils by all Negroes, including Malcolm himself. In fact, the Klan was regarding him and Jeremiah, two key ministers of Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslims, as potential allies. Muhammad had warned his negotiators about Klan skulduggery, but not even the Messenger had
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Despite consorting with the Klan, Jeremiah X developed personal friendships with some of the more independent civil rights leaders, such as Medgar Evers of the Mississippi NAACP. Still, under Muhammad’s orders, Jeremiah continued to cultivate commercial ties with Klan members, the White Citizens’ Councils, and other openly racist white businessmen. There were stormy conflicts in the balancing act. When Medgar Evers was shot and killed outside his Jackson, Mississippi home by a Klansman on June 12, 1963, Jeremiah X, who had met with his good friend Evers two weeks earlier, rushed to the house
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So, apparently, did Elijah Muhammad. He no longer trusted Malcolm to represent him in further negotiations with the white racist groups in the South. After praising Malcolm faintly for his handling of the Klan initiative, he damned him by abruptly banning him from the South altogether. All follow-up meetings were assigned to Jeremiah, who was instructed to break off communications with his old friend in order to execute the Black Muslims’ Southern strategy.
“I know for a fact that there is a conspiracy . . . between the Muslims and the [American] Nazis and also the Ku Klux Klan,” a newly bearded Malcolm stated publicly at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem only six days before his death in 1965.
Punctuated by slashing gestures and a wicked smile, the husky voice had all the range of a stage actor’s: it could roar and bellow, then suddenly flutter and coo. As orators, both ministers could bring an audience as quickly to its feet as they could rouse it to its senses. As King was the preacher gone bookish, Malcolm was the hustler turned rebel.
One intense white student in the audience, however, had indeed thought it all through. Brian Steinberg, a senior political science major at the University of Connecticut, was as serious a student of Marxist-Leninism as his land-grant, Yankee Conference college would allow. On a campus of racial insularity, where fewer than 1 percent of the students were Negroes, Steinberg dated a black coed from Oberlin College and played saxophone in his father’s racially mixed rock ’n’ roll band, the Deadbeats, known throughout New England. He had also trucked with left-wing radicals, having attended an
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An hour into Malcolm’s lecture, a restless Steinberg could not measure the bumpkin he expected. Malcolm’s disarming display of wit, intellect, and agitprop had persuaded Steinberg to reevaluate the spokesman, if not the Muslims themselves.
The white mainstream looked on, and the White House took note. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy undoubtedly had Malcolm X on his mind when he asked James Baldwin to assemble a group of Negro artists, entertainers, and intellectuals to discuss civil rights issues. The group that Baldwin gathered at Kennedy’s New York City apartment included singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and an assortment of members of Baldwin’s retinue. The attorney general brought along two aides from the Justice Department, Burke Marshall, who headed the
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Malcolm X, of course, was no stranger to the monotony of the prison tier. However, the scholarly purpose King made of his stint as a political prisoner had not been imaginable twenty years earlier when Malcolm began serving his six and a half years as a convicted burglar in a Massachusetts institution.
The struggle of black Americans for freedom and equality must be internationalized, Malcolm argued. Under a global light, racial oppression would no longer be seen as an internal U.S. issue of civil rights, but as the violation of international human rights it was.
In the final, transformative year of Malcolm’s life, when he spent months traveling in the Mideast and Africa, one of his main goals was to get at least one African nation to charge the United States with human rights violations in the United Nations.
“We pray that our African brothers have not freed themselves of European colonialism only to be overcome and held in check now by American dollarism,” he lamented. “Don’t let American racism be ‘legalized’ by American dollarism.’”
Nobody’s going to straighten out Harlem but us. Nobody cleans up your house for you. You can clean it up yourself. Harlem is our house; we’ll clean it up. But when we clean it up, we’ll also control it. We’ll control the politics. We’ll control the economy. We’ll control the school system and see that our people get a break.2
The prosecution of the case was itself a distraction from the truth about the murder of Malcolm X. It was a case study in covering the tracks of the police, the federal government, and the FBI—a whitewash.
At its core, Malcolm’s message spoke to people of every rank: white people are not superior, and black people are not inferior. While black people have been conditioned by generations of oppression to feel a false sense of inferiority, Malcolm’s core messaging provides tools to move from this self-loathing to self-acceptance with the hope of redirecting oppressed people’s energy toward self-determination and community success. He reframed the oppression of black Americans from a civil rights issue to a human rights issue.
With his appreciation of the power of words, Malcolm helped change the very names people called themselves, turning “black” from an insult among so-called American Negroes—fighting words, in many cases—to a proud affirmation.
Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz, widowed at thirty, with four young children and twins on the way, received support from friends and allies. Eventually she moved her family to Westchester County, just north of New York City. While raising her six girls, she earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and, in 1975, a doctorate in educational administration from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
It is certain that Malcolm’s name is misused today by those who quote him in support of a variety of causes. A man of tremendous energy and mental alertness, he left the “Black Muslims” toward the end of his vigorous life and accepted Islam. He no longer preached the doctrines of racial extremism and black nationalism. “This was about the point where Malcolm X had started calling for ‘human rights’ as against ‘civil rights’ and striving ‘to live the life of a true Sunni Muslim’” (Impact, London, 11–24 Feb. 1972).
This is only one of the many examples of the extremes to which the enemies of Islam will go to see that True Islam is never established on these shores. And they know that if I was so successful in helping to spread Elijah Muhammad’s distorted version of Islam, it is even easier for me to organise the spread of True Islam.
Muslim religious leaders of today need a more well-rounded type of education and then they will be able to stress the importance of education to the masses, but oftimes when these religious leaders themselves have very limited knowledge, education, and understanding sometimes they purposely keep their own people also ignorant in order to continue their own personal position of leadership.
Thus, in my opinion, the Muslim religious leaders of today must re-evaluate and spell out with clarity the Muslim position on education in general and education for women in particular. And then a vast program must be launched to elevate the standard of education in the Muslim World. An old African proverb states: “Educate a man and you educate an individual; educate a woman and you educate an entire family.”
