Posted on 04/18/2011 1:48:20 PM PDT by presidio9
Ronald Reagan and the so-called Reagan Revolution have come under the critical hammer of scholars for some time now. But the black nationalist Malcolm X - now called a civil rights leader, though he never was one - is finally beginning to achieve such position under the scholarly microscope. The reason that this is only happening nearly 50 years after his assassination is simple: Those bullying and ruthlessly maudlin ideologues who for so long preferred posturing to thought began to die off and the people victimized by them and other kinds of hustlers for decades are now beginning to grow up - and speak up.
Any high-quality work that comes out of the world of ethnic studies, or is focused on ethnic concerns, is more often than not a condemnation of the entire field. The problem is not the interest itself, but the tendency to tilt more toward indoctrination than education, self-pitying myth rather than the facts and nuances of human life, which are never as simple as a placard. Whatever criticisms one might have of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, he has done serious battle over the years with the mumbo jumbo of "Afrocentrism," a hustler's lure if there ever was one.
In terms of serious work that makes a contribution to our understanding of important people and events, few have produced scholarship on the level of David Levering Lewis ("W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race" and "W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century"), Annette Gordon-Reed ("The Hemingses of Monticello") and Isabel Wilkerson ("The Warmth of Other Suns"). The first two deservedly won Pulitzer Prizes for their historical work while the third received the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Now, those interested in learning a substantial amount about the complexity of the world in which the vastly overrated Malcolm X actually lived may find much of interest in the final work of Manning Marable, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention." Marable died on April 1, just days before the explosive book's publication.
However much he is sympathetic to his subject, Marable accomplishes the difficult task of showing the bad boy of the civil rights era as an actual human being, quite ambitious but much smaller than the misleading myth he was made into after his death. Each page almost secretes the formidable research into hard facts. Marable lets the chips fall where they may because he is interested in the humanity of Malcolm X, as all true scholars should be. This will not be liked by those who prefer myth to truth, but that is nothing new.
Marable reveals the layers of great sadness, desperation, frustration and self-importance underneath all of the masks that Malcolm X fashioned for himself. He remained a maskmaker from his days as a hustler to the moment at which he was shot to death at the Audubon Ballroom, in New York on Feb. 21, 1965. Marable found out plenty about how such an audacious murder was brought off. And yes, he names names.
There is strong proof that the white people Malcolm X claimed would never protect black people from violence simply decided to step back and let the members of the racist cult with which he had fallen out do what they wanted. From that moment on, myth, not actual history, has dominated discussion of this complex man. Thanks to Marable, that may now be largely at an end.
Malcolm LITTLE was nothing but criminal filth.
” Those bullying and ruthlessly maudlin ideologues who for so long preferred posturing to thought “
Things must be getting really dicey in the Race Pandering Industry, if no less a ‘maudlin ideologue’ than Stanley Crouch is distancing himself...
He would probably be a Republican today.
An odd review. You begin it expecting that FINALLY there will be some revelations about Malcolm X.
Well, Crouch manages to write the entire review without saying anything at all.
Maybe Marable wasn’t afraid to speak the truth. Or maybe he was. We don’t really know, because Crouch never even begins to tell us what the book says.
He didn’t ‘hate Whitey’ towards the end either. Read his autobiography.
I doubt he would be a republican but he does appear to have recognized some serious problems with his chosen religion and black nationalism.
Are you familiar with a play called “El Hajj Malik” by N. R. Davidson, Jr.?
See it if it is ever presented in your area.
Does the book reveal how it was Calypso Louis that ordered him killed?
But what about his male prostitute days?
Ol' Mr. X was a whitey hating muslim, plain and simple. A muslim who died at the hands of other muslims
. . . . and a liar who led a double-life?
ping...
IN HIS OWN WORDS:
‘Jomo Kenyatta, Oginga Odinga, and the Mau Mau will go down as the greatest African patriots and freedom fighters that that continent ever knew, and they will be given credit for bringing about the independence of many of the existing independent states on that continent right now. There was a time when their image was negative, but today they’re looked upon with respect and their chief is the president and their next chief is the vice president.
‘I have to take time to mention that because, in my opinion, not only in Mississippi and Alabama, but right here in New York City, you and I can best learn how to get real freedom by studying how Kenyatta brought it to his people in Kenya, and how Odinga helped him, and the excellent job that was done by the Mau Mau freedom fighters. In fact, that’s what we need in Mississippi. In Mississippi we need a Mau Mau. In Alabama we need a Mau Mau. In Georgia we need a Mau Mau. Right here in Harlem, in New York City, we need a Mau Mau.’
FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 1965
Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred: “Your little babies will get polio!” he cried to the “white devils.” His creed was violence: “If ballots won’t work, bullets will.”
Yet even before his bullet-ripped body went to its grave, Malcolm X was being sanctified. Negro leaders called him “brilliant,” said he had recently “moderated” his views, blamed his assassination on “the white power structure” or, in the case of Martin Luther King, on a “society sick enough to express dissent with murder.” Malcolm’s death, they agreed, was a setback to the civil rights movement.
Alias John Doe. In fact, Malcolm X in life and in deathwas a disaster to the civil rights movement...
FIVE PAGES. NOTE THE DATE
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,839291,00.html
I only vaguely remember reading his autobiography so many years ago.
I do recall this: Malcolm X advocated violent revolution to secure the rights that blacks were denied.
The white establishment was horrified and bribed the movement. Welcome welfare for life and destruction of the black family.
In the big picture, X got it right. Blacks had earned a revolution. It is too bad they did not win it violently, for they would have received respect. Instead, they got more slavery in the form of welfare and decades of representation by the likes of Jesse Jackson.
hmmm...might be gold, but it's still a CHAIN and you are nothing but a servant.
LINK TO GETTY IMAGE - COPYRIGHT - CLICK HERE TO VIEW
It's obviously generational.
The date of March 5 1965 or another date?
I just clicked and read the first page.
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