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.
....and, oddly, so do I.
read later
WOW! Stanley Crouch hits another home run!
Do you have any examples of him looking for government handouts? I don't recall any.
Your failure lies in your assumption that before 1960 "other means existed".
The Cold War and the need to win hearts and minds in the Third World made American apartheid an overwhelming propaganda embarassment. A frequent argument at the time was the, "if we don't treat blacks better they'll turn communist". In the age of subversion, disaffected minorities had become a national security threat. It is true that after the Holocaust the cause of racism was thoroughly discredited among opinion makers. But that doesn't mean they meant to spend the political capital required to upend the traditional way of life of an entire culture. It is one thing to say racism is wrong. It is entirely another to be willing to send federal troops into Mississippi. Cold War geopolitical self-interest made it necessary. Absent that self-interest, a nonviolent campaign would have been crushed in blood as blacks were crushed between 1877 and 1890.
The British loved Gandhi because he allowed them to flatter themselves about their benevolence when the hard truth was.
1. Given how thinly the British were spread in the administration of the Raj, repression was a very chancy option that could backfire disastrously. Order Indian soldiers, who had mutinied once already, to fire on an Indian crowd, they just might not do it. Repression is expensive and postwar England flatly could not afford it.
2. Kill the Anglicized Indians of the Congress Party and who will replace them ? Fiery nationalists like Subhas Chandra Bose (just as MLK was replaced by the Panthers and the Black Power movement).
3. India did not have a large white settler population that British conservatives would have had to support like the Ulster Protestants. It did not have a large white settler population with no problem whatsoever with killing as many Indians as they have to to preserve their privileged status quo and not have to go back home penniless white trash.
I don't ask black people to do anything different than what white people would do. I don't think black people had to be pink plaster saints to deserve freedom (and that is an implication of nonviolence that I always despised). Just people. Just ordinary, fallible human beings who get mad when treated with deliberate evil, no differently than white people would. White people would never for one minute think they had to be pink plaster saints of "turn the other cheek" nonviolence to deserve freedom. To think that you have to be better than others to deserve the same rights they have is to put yourself on a lower plane, as if you somehow have to doubly compensate for the "inferiority" of your blackness by being a saint. It is deference.
One final reply and then I am done with your ignorant ravings.
If "kaffir" is not the equivalent of "nigger", why shouldn't it be used ? Is it not a white supremacist term of contempt for black people ? A white supremacism that was the core of Afrikaner culture ?
I understand the "some of my best friends are black", need of the white supremacist mentality to believe in its own goodness and virtue and react with fury when its essential evil is laid bare. The Afrikaners were like that too, certain that the Zulus loved them for their goodness and would reject the "outside agitators". They deluded themselves that the "kaffirs" would take their side. Like white Southerners who insisted that "our coloreds are happy. Just outside agitators riling them up." The same basic patterns.
There is no other minority in American history that had an entire ideology created to justify their oppression, an ideology as comprehensive as anti-semitism. There is no other minority that was the target of that level of concentrated evil. I know it offends you to look in the mirror and be told there is evil there but facing the truth is the only way to move forward.
"I'm a muslim brother, I dun been manifested by a miracle, I doun eat no swine, I doun drink no wine!"
Hoo boy. I was flamed royally around here for calling Martin Luther King a Commie. Hope you fare better!
Iron,I don't know if you want to take on this little racist or not,but have a go,if you so choose.
Why bother, I would not know where to start in this swamp of ignorance.
Looks like another episode of "The Simple Life, South Africa".
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.