Posted on 02/26/2005 9:19:28 AM PST by Chi-townChief
Forty years ago today, Malcolm X was shot down in front of his family and an audience of followers at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. When he died, Malcolm X had been estranged from the Nation of Islam for about a year and had begun to call Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the cult, a liar, a fraud and a womanizer. Those were mighty hot words to direct at the Nation of Islam, which was feared throughout the black community as a known gathering place for violent criminals of all sorts who had been converted in prison, the way Malcolm himself had. Before his ascent in the cult world of homemade Islam, Malcolm Little had been known as "Big Red," a street hustler with a big mouth, a cocaine habit and a willingness to get rowdy and wild if the occasion called for it.
Sent to prison for a series of burglaries, Malcolm turned to Islam, or a version of it, promoted as the "black man's true religion" which held the secrets to liberation from white domination and black self-hatred. A convert, he began the liberation by replacing his "slave name" with an Islamic name or an X.
Malcolm X appeared on the national scene in 1959, presented by the media as the face of what white racism had done to black people. He was a minister of hate who used fiery rhetoric to teach that the white man was a devil invented 6,000 years ago by a mad black scientist. White audiences were appalled or darkly amused by this cartoon version of Islam, but more than a few black Americans were influenced by the Nation of Islam and by its dominant mouthpiece - light-skinned, freckle-faced, red-haired Malcolm X, the voice of black rage incarnate.
Some Negroes left the Christian church, others changed their names. A number stopped eating pork and demanded beef barbecue, and a good many eventually stopped frying their hair and became more nationalistic and hostile to whites, in their own rhetoric and in the rhetoric they liked to hear.
Malcolm X proved how vulnerable Negroes were to hearing another Negro put some hard talk on the white man. The long heritage of silence, both in slavery and the redneck South, was so strong that speech became a much more important act than many realized. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this, observing that many of those who went to hear Malcolm X were less impressed with his ideas than they were with the contemptuous way he spoke to white power.
Since his death, Malcolm X has been elevated from a heckler of the civil rights moment to a civil rights leader - which he never was - and many people now think that he was as important to his moment as King. He was not, and Malcolm X was well aware of this. But in our country, where liberal contempt for black people is boundless, we should not be surprised to see a minor figure lacquered with media "respect" and thrown in the lap of the black community, where he is passed off as a great hero.
You have to wonder if Malcolm, when he himself got capped about 15 months later, had the final thought of his own chickens coming home.
Stanley Crouch....better have his armor on.
Stanley has had a long running feud with the black muslims...
Muslims......intolerance.....murder.....the religion not of love and peace.
Of course, when Malcolm left the NOI, he started hanging out with Trotskyites, but that's another story.
Churchill's comments about the chickens roosting are what started me thinking about Malcolm. It's generally not too wise to engage in that kind of talk.
Most black heroes are unknown.
Most so-called black heroes are not heroes...certainly not X and not King either at least not to the diety level he's been elevated.
Why do we have to have "insert color-religion-ethnicity" heroes anyhow?
Doesn't it sound silly to talk about white heroes?
Washington and Churchill are my favorite white heroes...John Wayne too....yes I know he was fictional but what's the difference.
The cynical story at the time of Malcolm's so-called conversion and subsequent death was that he was starting to realize that things were about to take a nasty turn with Elijah and the brothers and that maybe The Man, this devil, was someone he could work with after all.
Didn't our friend Ward Churchill have something to say about chickens coming home to roost?
Well, Trotskyites have better table manners than Stalinists so there's always the bright side
Reminder to self: read entire thread before making comments.
Handout after handout ? Like enforcing and protecting the right to vote ? Like an end to casual white violence ?
Each had a vital role to play. Malcolm X is an exact parallel to Michael Collins. Both knew that freedom isn't just about words on pieces of paper. It is about taking a people bowed down by centuries of oppression and teaching them to fight back. Michael Collins in creating the IRA in 1919 made the Irishman disciplined, efficient, and competent, not the comical, drunken leprechaun. Both saw that it was about turning feckless slaves into fearless men.
It was a good guy, bad guy routine. Before Malcolm, white people saw MLK as the 'troublemaker'. After Malcolm they realized that the days of cringing black deference were over forever and protest was turning into rage. For the first time in 300 years a black person could express anger to a white person and live. Whites now had to face the fact that a lot of anger had been boiling up over those 300 years.
He may have hated whites, who could blame him? And his 'either by the ballot or the bullet' is worthy of memorializing. I can see a Founding Father issuing the same proclamation.
Whatever his sins, many are mitigated by the absolute extreme left-of-the-bellcurve mentality of the white power structure that helped plot the course of events of his life.
In 1962 his black brothers had already fought and bled for this Country, willingly though they could have justifiably refused. Their moral ascendancy was unassailable.
P.S. And, to the best of my knowledge, he wrote his own stuff, too.
The Nation of Islam is indeed laying low.
For my money,Malcolm X was a work in progress. Given more time, he probably would have become a moderate and perhaps positive force.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a very interesting book. There are a number of aspects of Malcolm X's life and character that are extremely admirable and impressive.
Malcolm was self-educated. I respect that greatly about him.
He occurred at precisely the historical moment when a black person could express anger to a white person without being shot or lynched or whipped on the spot. The federal government was moving strongly to end white racial terror in the South because it recognized that in the age of Third World nationalism, it was a terrible Cold War propaganda embarassment for the US. He was the first black leader since Marcus Garvey who was did not care about alliances with white liberals or even electoral politics at all for that matter.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.