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.
A hate-monger is STILL a hate monger, and that is all that Malcolm ever was.
Ditto. One wonders what he might have become, had he not been assassinated.
I would be all for the self reliance message that Malcolm and the NOI preached. The problem is that the only way they seem to get their message out is by combining it with rabid Jew hatred and hatred of White people. It seems that there must be a way to preach self reliance without combining it with hate.
Hate is the inevitable outcome of 300 years of undiluted evil by whites towards blacks. For the first time in American history a black person could freely speak his mind to a white person without fearing for his life. What did you think would come out ? Love ? Why should it ?
The first step in building a better relationship between black and white people was what diplomats call a "frank exchange of views". That means direct, in-your-face venting. That means telling the other party how you really and truly feel instead of what they want to hear. And that is good because free people speak their minds. It is slaves who pretend.
True...and bears repeating. :)
Malcolm knew what was coming and why. Once he jumped off the hate whites plantation he had to go...by order of Calypso Louie. I believe that had he lived another decade X would have become great.
King never begged for government handouts or preferences, just asked for equality and justice. You obviously didn't do your homework.
X was clear about his change of heart. He went to Mecca and saw blond haired, blue eyed muslims who were born to it. That was the crack in the foundation of his racism. The dam burst when the allegations about Elijah started to bubble to the top. (how's that for mixingg metaphors?)
Yea, right! Making excuses for hate doesn't make it noble. Next you will refer to 9-11 terrorist as "freedom fighters"!
The "autobiography" of Malcolm X was written by Alex Hayley, and is probably as accurate as "Roots"
Good lord....where did you learn such nonesense? Do you really think every black person who expressed anger at whites suffered that fate? Incredible....btw....I was there as a lad. Were You? Malcolm X was a punk.
A conservative website where folks admire Malcolm X....incredible isn't it?
Was he Civil War and XIV amendment "undiluted evil"?
He saw that that racism is not implanted into white people at the cellular level. He had never in his life know a white person who had treated him with any decency so it astonished him to encounter white people who saw nothing odd about doing so. He saw directly that THEM are human beings too and there is nothing impossible about a colorblind society.
When you've been treated like dirt it's easy to hate THEM. But unless you recognize their humanity you will become just like them.
As a matter of fact, yes right.
Perhaps you should familiarize yourself to the slightest degree with African American history. It is not to the least degree a pretty story. Hate is a perfectly rational, human response to people who have treated you with deliberate evil. It does not need to be excused.
X told his story to Haley over a period of time, Haley wrote the finished book.
Good lord....where did you learn such nonesense? Do you really think every black person who expressed anger at whites suffered that fate?
Whistling at a white girl got Emmett Til lynched. Any deviation from shuffling deference was being "uppitty" and could at the discretion of the white person result in death. Habitual "uppityness" would result in a lynching. Terror requires a reputation for immediate punishment of "uppityness" and that was the basis of the black-white relationship before 1965.
So then how is it always "whities" fault? We didn't ask to be invented just like blacks didn't ask to come to America!
How long did Reconstruction last ? By 1890 all the political freedoms blacks had gained in 1865 were wiped out in a bloody wave of white terror. Perhaps you should bother to familiarize yourself with that historical record. It is not pretty reading.
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