The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

a subsequent grand jury report stated: “Several reported assaults [reported in the Omaha Bee] on white women had actually been perpetrated by whites in blackface.” 39 The authorities all but specified that the reported attack on a white woman that sparked the ghastly lynching was probably staged by white men in blackface.

This Hollywood portrayal of the Klan as noble saviors of white America was so popular that President Wilson, a native Virginian with ingrained racist views, screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House; it was the first movie ever shown there and a political nod to Southern racist supporters.

if you’re throwing darts at a dartboard, there’s a satisfaction you get when you hit the target; when you miss it, you get another feeling. Well, she said, it’s the same way with white people when they’re throwing darts at you by things they say and do.

“When white people find out that you don’t have that inferiority complex, they deal with you at that level; it makes a difference.

Writer and professor Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, became the architect of this largely literary “spiritual awakening” when he edited the 1925 anthology The New Negro and enticed the publishing industry to explore this “exotic” new market.

Wright wrote in his autobiographical Black Boy, recalling his thoughts upon first reading A Book of Prefaces. “I pictured [Mencken] as a raging demon, slashing with his pen. . . . He was using words as weapons, could words be used as weapons?

Loom of Language.

Several white male supervisors, for example, were confronted directly for harassing female employees by patting their backsides. ‘“Suppose I was pulling this stuff with one of your women,’” Wilfred remembers asking the sexual predators. ‘“What would you think?’ And they would go and apologize.” In other cases, Wilfred noticed that when Negroes came due for raises or promotions, they, unlike whites, were targeted for intimidation that was staged by management, he concluded, to forestall their advancement. After observing yet another such worker, a delivery truck driver, being dressed down by management in the store, Wilfred levelheadedly confronted the white manager. ‘“Why don’t you leave this man alone?’ I said. ‘You know good and well that he deserves his raise. You’re trying to intimidate him so he won’t ask for it.’ So they went on and gave him the raise.”

Fard was cleared of serious charges but authorities permanently banned him from Detroit.

Try to get acquainted there and start a station there . . . and start arising the dead.”

the Black Muslims, Stone added, “the rational absurdity does not detract from the psychic therapy” designed to shake off the “feeling of nigger-ness [in order] to be fully emancipated.”

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,”

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.

“So my mind simply refused to accept anything so grotesque as adultery mentioned in the same breath with Mr. Muhammad’s name,” Malcolm would say years later in his Autobiography. “I totally and absolutely rejected my own intelligence.”

“Here was one of the white man’s most characteristic behavior patterns—where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion.”

‘no man is a hero to his valet,’”

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.

“Are you going to get us some robes?” Malcolm deadpanned in a manner that had Jeremiah chuckling heartily, but only internally for the moment. “Well, no, we can’t let no niggra wear a white robe,” the Klansman said, pondering alternatives as Malcolm leaned in over the tripod of his fingers. “I tell you what, Malcolm,” Fellows finally said, “we can get y’all some purple robes.” “Oh, no, no, no.” said Malcolm, unwilling to let the opposing leader slip the leash. “We want white robes.”

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.

Sly and provocative to the end, Malcolm, no stranger to numbers, assigned his Muslims the number 121 and, flashing his trademark warm smile with the steel teeth, coaxed the KKK into accepting as their code 666, the New Testament’s number of the beast.59

As King was the preacher gone bookish, Malcolm was the hustler turned rebel.

“I do not know a Negro so completely adjusted that some part of him did not respond to what Malcolm X was saying, just as I do not know a Negro so entirely alienated that some part of him does not respond to what Martin Luther King is saying.”

“In every Middle-East or African country I have visited, I noticed the country is as ‘advanced’ as its women are, or as backward as its women,”

Although they would deny any involvement in Malcolm X’s assassination, New York police officials disassociated themselves from Roberts’s attempt to save him. This cold-blooded fact—not previously reported—raises stronger questions about charges that the police could have prevented the attack had they heeded Roberts’s warning that an assassination attempt appeared to be imminent.

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.

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.

Wallace changed his name to Warith Deen Muhammad and assumed the traditional title of imam, rejecting the idea that Fard Muhammad was Allah and that his own father was a prophet. He disbanded the Fruit of Islam, invited whites to join the group, and honored Malcolm, another convert to Sunni Islam, by turning Temple No. 7 in Harlem into Malcolm Shabazz Mosque

Louis Farrakhan (Louis X), who had been Malcolm’s protégé before becoming his enemy, quit the group in 1977 and began resurrecting the old Nation of Islam, using the doctrines Elijah Muhammad had preached. Since then, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has continued to lead this reconstituted Nation of Islam.

I don’t believe my own personal problem is ever solved until the problem is solved for all 22 million of us.

In every Middle-East or African country I have visited, I noticed the country is as “advanced” as its women are, or as backward as its women. By this I mean, in areas where the women have been pushed into the back-ground and kept without education, the whole area or country is just as backward, uneducated and “underdeveloped.” 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.

“Educate a man and you educate an individual; educate a woman and you educate an entire family.”