As I fire up the text field and prepare to serve you yet another remaindered, highly constrained, tonally sculpted hunk of prose I wrote in the past for different purposes, it strikes me as an excellent insurance policy in terms of hitting five hundred posts this December. Kind of a twenty-five days of bullshit. Or! Or. A more ennobling term. Than that one.
Have a short biography of Malcolm X.
*
Few, if any, Americans have presented history with a starker set of contradictions in their lifetimes and legacies than the man born Malcolm Little on the nineteenth of May in 1925. Malcolm X, as he is most widely known, understood, and remembered, was both an agent of change and an ever-changing, ever-moving, ever-translating individual. Born in Omaha, Nebraska to parents active in the Universal Negro Improvement Association founded by Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey and his former wife Amy Ashwood Garvey, Malcolm and his siblings—he was the fourth of seven—would be raised to have pride in themselves, their heritage and people, and above all to respect themselves and demand that same respect from others. Earl and Louise Little were effective in this, fending for themselves economically and instilling in their children a philosophy of self-determination. They were deeply involved in community speaking and organizing; so much so that under threat from the Ku Klux Klan they had to relocate from their Omaha home to Lansing, Michigan. The troubles continued, however; the children’s pride in their race drew attention and caused problems at school, and local White Supremacist organization the Black Legion harassed Earl and his family. Earl would die under suspicious circumstances—crushed by a streetcar on his way to collect money from folks who had purchased poultry from him, but likely assaulted elsewhere and dragged onto the tracks, leaving Louisa Helen with seven children to care for on a meager income. This pressure, combined with the certainty that her husband had been murdered by racists, resulted in her eventual mental breakdown. The children were split up and sent into the foster care system.
Young Malcolm excelled in school—in everything he put his mind to. He is remembered by his sibling as an ever-smiling, always prankish little boy. Beneath the devil-may-care attitude and sparkle, along with the brilliance and the charm, came also a certain pessimism, and a deep sensitivity that life would usually drive him to hide. As he matured, discouragement from taking more advanced and interesting courses and casual racism from his White peers troubled him and agitated his resentment more than they had as a younger student. When he shared his dream of becoming a lawyer with one of his middle school English teachers in Mason, Michigan, they told him such a dream and such a profession were unfit for a member of his race—that he might consider carpentry. Confronted with this betrayal, he saw no point in continuing with his education, his behavior worsened, and he did not enroll in high school. Now fifteen years of age in 1940, he was sent to Boston to live with his aunt in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Roxbury.
She was not able to get him to return to school. He would hold a wide variety of jobs and commit a few petty larcenies for the next seven wayward years, but the most significant part of his time in Roxbury would be the music and the fashion, for these were the years of the zoot suits and the swing and jazz explosion, the concerts that would run all night with participants dancing from the moment they hit the floor at night to well past the crack of dawn. Malcolm worked jobs with no commitment, quitting often, and concentrated on women. This lack of direction, loss of positive role models, and general descent would continue until the start of the Second World War, when he would finally work hard to keep the job the advent of war secured for him for a while—because it put him on a Pullman car with regularity and allowed him to visit New York City, and especially, Harlem. To him, the legendary neighborhood was a revelation, and a doorway to even greater pleasures. He found jobs in Harlem and began to live there, entering the criminal underworld in earnest, diving into drug dependency and surviving on the usual ever-rotating temporary jobs, supplemented by grifts, hustles, short cons, robberies, connecting johns to working girls, and bootlegging; in New York, in Boston, even back in Lansing for a brief period in which he tried and failed to get back on the straight. He feigned a kind of insanity to get himself declared 4F when the draft called him up in 1943, a tactic which proved effective, and his lifestyle—affected by the tightening economy as the war progressed—continued on this dark and tightening course until he was arrested for robbery and charged with possession of a firearm back in Roxbury, having formed a crew and betrayed them to police officers who lied to him about being charged if he gave up their names. Further betrayed in court by another of its members, a married White woman he had long carried on a romantic relationship with, Malcolm was served with the maximum possible sentence for his crimes and sent in January 1946 to Charlestown State Penitentiary, at that time the oldest continuously functioning penitentiary in the world and a place of infamously hideous conditions.
The first part of Malcolm X’s prison life is without a doubt his lowest and darkest. His rage and alienation at the method of his arrest, the procedures of his trial, and the conditions in which he now found himself were enormous and poisonous to himself and everyone around him. His prison nicknames were “The Green-Eyed Monster” and “Satan”, for the venom he gave everyone around him and the vitriol and profanity he heaped on God and religion in general. His existential disconnection from the world he had been given to live in was complete, and the pain of this absolute. While jailed and on trial, he had gotten clean, but he returned to the use of drugs and tried to be high as much as possible. His relationship with his siblings and family, which he had always tried to maintain through letters and visits and the sending of money (when possible), deteriorated. All that changed when he met and began to have conversations with John Elton Bembry, a well-read fellow convict with a sparkling intellect and will to pass down some of what he had learned to the younger Malcolm, especially the value of discipline.
This meeting of the minds would inspire Malcolm begin to use his prison time constructively; most importantly of all, it put him on the path to an engagement with literature and reading that would reignite that old brilliance and completely transform his psychic life. He devoured nonfiction of astonishing breadth and variety: historical accounts of the U.S. slave trade and practices of chattel slavery—and slave rebellions like Nat Turner’s and Toussaint Louverture’s—the history of British and U.S. intervention in China, the Western philosophers like Herodotus, Kant, and Nietzsche, studies in spirituality, influential Black thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois. A prison debate club at his second and much more humane institution in Norfolk, to which he was transferred after his transformation, ignited his passions and increased his autodidactic fervor, causing him to sharpen a self-discipline that would become legendary. He loved the art of debate and took to it with a fierce joy, reveling in the sensation of his voice giving shape to his thoughts, developing his arguments and measuring his delivery with a percussive and melodic element influenced by his immersion in big band and bebop jazz. He read even more voraciously and brought his studies to the debate floor with scholarly precision and revolutionary interpretative fire. At this time, letters from his family and influence from members of the organization itself persuaded him slowly to declare himself a Black Muslim and a hopeful member of the Nation of Islam under the auspices of Elijah Muhammad, its spiritual leader. He began writing letters to prison officials to agitate and persuade for better conditions and more humane treatment of inmates, especially fellow Black Muslims. This was a double-edged sword, for it was seen as agitation, and it was this which both enabled him to leave prison early in 1952, and to enter the new life that had been prepared for him—and for which he had been preparing for.
Malcolm X’s time in the Nation of Islam is both exciting and troubling. The decade leading up to the revolutionary sixties was one of fomentation and fermentation, and Malcolm X was a leading agent in this catalysis, both for the organization he chose to dedicate his life to and on the national stage. Membership in the Nation skyrocketed, he was made responsible for temples all across the Midwest and Northeast which invariably grew and grew under his leadership, and he played a singular role in the development of the self-defense branch of the Nation, the Fruit of Islam. His oratory style and the content of his speeches and sermons, while always in line with Elijah Muhammad’s teachings as a “Prophet of God Incarnate”, had a flair and cohesion that was Malcolm’s alone, and people responded passionately. While it must be acknowledged that the content of his thought and speech, influenced by his tortured path and hardened by his indoctrination, contained much that was misogynistic, antisemitic, and confrontational, it must also be acknowledged that few Black men were coming forth with the courage, directness, and indefatigability of Malcolm X in advocating for the betterment and dignity of Black people in America, and in speaking the truth about the history of the U.S.A., the evils of White Supremacy, and how these were inextricable from the societal structures and social attitudes that led to and fed the oppression and destruction of Black people in America. Where others in the Civil Rights movement advocated for integration, Malcolm advocated for separation, for Black Nationalism and the forming of separate Black-only state. Where others preached nonviolence, he stressed the importance of self-defense, of Second Amendment rights, of achieving freedom from oppression by any means necessary; a phrase which is one of his great legacies. While others indulged in what Malcolm called “pie-in-the-sky idealism” regarding the ability of White folks to alter their own society and attitudes and sought to work with White liberals, Malcolm cynically denied this ability and urged Black folks to rely on themselves, to divorce themselves from this psychological and sociological dependence on the outlook of White folks and seek autonomy. He told his audiences that Blackness was beautiful, that to wait for liberation was to waste life. Later, Malcolm would characterize himself during these times as a zombie, marching in the direction he was told to march, and say he was glad the sickness and madness of those days was behind him—but this was the time when Malcolm X established himself as a voice for Black folks, a voice which spoke more urgently and eloquently, which more clearly and directly addressed the emotions, needs, and situations of urban and inner-city Black folk than the rural folk more attuned to the message of the Reverend Martin Luther King. His thought inspired young thinkers such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, who would popularize many of Malcolm’s ideas further after his death. Writing of this time years later, James Baldwin had this to say of Malcolm:
What made him unfamiliar and dangerous was not his hatred for white people but his love of blacks, his apprehension of the horror of the black condition, and the reasons for it, and his determination so to work on their hearts and minds that they would be enabled to see their condition and change it themselves.
(Baldwin 97)
Indeed, such a voice and such a mind could not be constrained by institutions like the Nation of Islam—whose higher echelons and major precepts essentially took the form a cult of personality revolving around Elijah Muhammad, and one which would turn on its favored son.
In the early sixties, strains developed between Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and the higher-ups in the Nation—around what he was saying, the attention he had garnered from the national media and the intellectual community, his interactions with men like Fidel Castro and Muhammad Ali. Ideas and opinions that began to emerge from Malcolm X almost in spite of himself that seemed to run counter to Elijah Muhammad’s party line or to his wishes; decisions made by the “Prophet”—some outright motivated out of envy for Malcolm—began to frustrate and baffle Malcolm to such a degree that he seemed unable to keep from expressing himself, even when it came to instances of Elijah Muhammad’s sexual misconduct. This culminated in a final break in 1964, followed quickly by his conversion to Sunni Islam, his delivery of his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, his Hajj to Mecca, and a tour of several African countries, and speaking engagements in France and the United Kingdom. It was in this final transformation of his life that he at last renounced the callousness and hatred that had marred his career and weighed down his spirit, embracing instead a new understanding of the world that had been revealed to him on his pilgrimage—that racism was responsible for bloodbaths and oppression all over the world and between all kinds of people, that to embrace all peoples as kin was the way to liberation. Seeing Muslims of every body type and skin color together on the Hajj in peace, community, and understanding had shown him a different path, and his experiences with leaders in the Pan-African movement led him to understand his struggles and those of Black Americans in a global framework. He began to discuss race in America not in terms of civil rights, but human rights; only in this way could international coalition-building become successful, and the United States be confronted with its racist structures and practices on the floor of the United Nations and therefore be held accountable before the world. It was this radical turn towards a more global revolution and a more global spirituality—one that may have resulted in his working more closely with the Reverend King, who was himself becoming gradually more radical and thus more likely to work with Malcolm—that became ultimately too threatening for the powers in place and for the enemies he had made in the Nation of Islam.
After returning to the United States, the threats and intimidation towards himself and his wife Betty and their children stepped up. He had funded two organizations of his own: the Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, to promote and practice Sunni Islam in the Black community and to advance the cause of Pan-Africanism, respectively. He worked tirelessly for these causes and spoke around the nation, especially at college campuses. At a speech in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom addressing the OAAU on February 19, 1965, he was shot and killed by three Nation of Islam assailants in one of the many assassinations that plagued the Civil Rights Movement during these years. Declassified FBI documents, including COINTELPRO papers, show categorically that both the FBI and the NYPD, both with undercover agents in place around Malcolm and around the event in question—one of whom, Ray Woodson, had categorically stated that he encouraged felonious actions under orders—knew about the timing and nature of the attack. Intent may be legally debatable, but it is undeniable that law enforcement encouraged the preconditions of the attack and then did nothing to protect him.
Malcolm X was buried days later, as el-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
Sources
Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. Dial Press, 1972.
Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Viking, 2011.
Jones LeRoi, Neal Larry, editors. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. William Morrow, 1968.
X Malcolm, Haley Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Random House, 1965.
*
My memory of this effort, undertaken for a U.S. History from Reconstruction to Present class, is of trying to shove and hold and tuck a massive tapestry, something that might cover a whole wall, into a little rolling suitcase. There was a word limit and a page limit; broke both by as much as I felt I could reasonably ask a person to endure, which wasn't by much. I mean, when you look at how much a teacher asks you to write as formatted above, with no margins and spaces, you see precisely how little is asked for--indeed, how limiting at the outset such word barriers can be. The constraint shows, when optimally, professionally, it should never--but you can tell some parts of it are more important to me than others, and that cannot be helped.
As with the last project, my process was to review my materials, all stuff I had on hand, have my thinks, and produce most of the above in one fell swoop. This one demanded time and rewrites, though, to fit its scope. I cut a few thousand words out, stretched and moved things, fretted and clucked. Is my work at all improved when I do this? You are the expert, dear reader. Anyway, just like last post, this is what I turned in, no rewrite, no reread. RAWDOGG FUXXX 4 CHEEP OR FREE
Guess if I thought I could have gotten away with it, if I thought more than one percent of people would know who I was talking about, I might have used Malik El-Shabbazz throughout and as an intro. Another issue though is that it would have made it longer. Anyhow Malcolm X retains primacy, as names go. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel about this, or what I do feel, really.
*
What wonders await us next time!?! Maybe a paper about water contamination? Could be anything. That sounds probable, though. Anything, though, anything is a possibility! It'll probably be the water thing. Hope your shit is tantalized because I am about to engorge your nether glands/engage canal lubrication.
With the paper about water quality. Yes.
--JL
