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.
Apologies for evil are never pretty reading.
But the books you cited earlier, of which I am well familiar, attest to 300 years of blacks desparately trying to find some shred of decency and humanity in white America. The Buffalo soldier thought that if he died for America it would be grateful. He was wrong. It was not uncommon for him to be lynched in his uniform.
I thought I was pretty much saying the same thing. If my style differs from yours, is that really a problem?
Just in degree. It's not right, imo, to sugar coat something as evil as a lynching.
very interesting
Calypso Louie was on cspan today. It's amazing the audience this man gets.
Malcolm was a street thug,a hood,who fell into the NOI and used it for his own purposes.The NOI is no different from the Nazis and in some ways,from the Mafia. And when Malcolm went off on his own,THEY killed him!
The BLACK PANTHERS were a natural descendant of this group.A group of violent street thugs dressed up as a religion,back to a bunch of street thugs,in a generation. Violence,intimidation,and criminality masquerading as redemption.
The only correlation between Michael Collins and the NOI/MalcolmX/The Black Panthers,is the violence and senseless murders.
Maybe the Muthaship came and got em and no one noticed!
I know, too much to hope for...damn.
I didn't think I was sugar coating it, and that certainly wasn't my intent. But I think you have a point about rekoning forthrightly with the baseness or evil of something.
You forgot,or don't know about Father Divine!
Very interesting man!
Your ignorance is, again, as total as it is deliberate.
Try familiarizing yourself with some history.
Are you a member of the NOI? Do you agree with the past and present positions of the Black Panthers? If the answer to those 2 questions is no,then why are you spouting their propaganda?
They were calling the Mike Medved show, defending Sharton's remarks,it took Mike about 4 callers to catch on and ask if they were waiting on the mothership.
More deliberate ignorance on your part.
Were you even an adult in 1965? How old are you ?
The entire USA wasn't some backwater,rural Southern town run by members of the KKK! B lacks were going to prestigious Northern colleges as fat back as the early years of the 20th century.They held important,well paying jobs,and when Jack Johnson has a series of white mistresses and wives,he wasn't lynched!
And Roy Campanella's father was WHITE.Nothing at all was done to him!
How ignorant you are !
Jack Johnson had to get out of the country or be prosecuted on the Mann Act. But white America didn't want him lynched. No. It wanted him broken and beaten and humiliated by a Great White Hope on the canvas. Murdering him would have been too easy. It wanted him broken.
Sure, there was a small black middle class in the North providing services that whites wouldn't. And elite colleges had their token black (living off campus generally). But you always had to tread very, very lightly even in the North because there was no meaningful police protection against white violence.
Yes but weren't his parents not living in the South? There's no way they would have been able to get married down there. It was against the law.
Yes,he was,but also a conartist! LOL
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